Sunday 30 June 2013

Glenn Greenwald’s Great Speech to the Socialism Conference: the Transcript]

This is the transcript. It's a Must Read! 

Those who want to listen to the talk can go the website . Link  also at the end of the  text. 


Glenn Greenwald’s Speech to the Socialism Conference [with Transcript]

By:  Saturday June 29, 2013 9:47 am


At the annual Socialism Conference in Chicago last night, The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald delivered a speech where he talked about connecting and meeting National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden for the first time. He spoke about being surprised by how he was young and how his resolve and conviction about revealing the inner workings of the NSA inspired him to be courageous and go out and report on documents he was given over the next three to four months. 

Greenwald addressed how the NSA revelations have not only exposed the surveillance state of the United States but also the corruption and moral rot of American establishment journalism. He also left the audience with a message about not being afraid of the “climate of fear” the US government wishes to impose on those who would dare to challenge their power.

Below is a transcript of the part of the speech after he gave an introduction and warm-up, where he praised journalist Jeremy Scahill, who introduced him, and mentioned some of the things he thought about before deciding to sit in a chair at a desk for the speech. 
***

…I would be remiss before I began if I didn’t acknowledge an extremely prestigious award that we at The Guardian received yesterday for the journalism that we’ve been doing in publishing the NSA stories. A lot of journalists and editors and the like have debates about what the most prestigious journalism award is—Is it a Polk Award? Or a Peabody? Or a Pulitzer? Those are definitely all prestigious awards, but I actually think the one we got yesterday is a significant level above them all. And I am very humbled and honored to have received this award.

The US Army announced yesterday that it was blocking access at all Army facilities across the world to the Guardian website in response to the NSA stories. And apparently the soldiers in the Army are old enough and mature enough to risk their lives to fight in wars but not mature enough to read news articles that the rest of the world is reading. But the reason I say that that’s flattering and I mean it. That is very flattering—is because I’ve long looked at journalism through this prism that defines the two polar opposites of what I consider journalism to be.

One of those polar opposites has long been defined for me by this speech that the great war correspondent David Halberstam gave in 2005 to students of Columbia Journalism School and he was asked by the speech organizers to speak about his proudest moment in his journalism career. And what he said was his proudest moment in his journalism career was when he was stationed in Vietnam in 1963 and 1964 as a very young war reporter he would go out into the field and see what was actually happening. So when he went to the press conferences of the US generals that afternoon and they made all sorts of claims he knew that they were lies and instead of disseminating those lies as truths he was standing up at these press conferences in the middle of Vietnam and war zone and very aggressively challenging these generals and saying to their face that he knew what they were saying was false to the point where those generals went to the editors of the New York Times and demanded that he be removed from his position of covering the war. That was his proudest moment in journalism, when he so angered the government officials that he was covering.

That episode stands in stark contrast to what I consider to be the other polar opposite, which was this interview Bill Keller gave, who was the executive of the New York Times throughout the Bush Administration, in which he was talking about the newspaper’s publication of some of the materials that they received from WikiLeaks. He was giving a BBC interview and he was very eager to distinguish between what the New York Times did and from what WikiLeaks does, which makes sense on one level since I don’t recall WikiLeaks ever publishing a bunch of false articles that led the nation to the war. That wasn’t actually that Bill Keller was referring to.
Bill Keller was trying to say that the New York Times is radically different than what WikiLeaks does because unlike WikiLeaks, which simply publishes whatever it wants, the New York Times under Bill Keller went to the Obama administration ahead of time and said these are the things that we think we ought to publish, do you think we should? And if the US government said you shouldn’t publish this and you shouldn’t publish that and you shuldn’t publish this other thing because to do so will endanger national security Bill Keller proudly said the New York Times didn’t publish it. He was beaming like a third grader who just got a gold star from his teacher. He said in this BBC interview the Obama administration has continuously said we have been very responsible in how we published.

The reason to me that seems like polar opposites is because David Halberstam viewed the measurement of good journalism as defined by how much you anger the people in power that you’re covering whereas Bill Keller defines good journalism—and I think most modern establishment journalists define it this way as well—by how much you please the people in power that you’re covering. And for me if you are pleasing the people in power with the things that you are disclosing, you may be very good at your job but your job is not journalism.
So, I’m going to print out this article that talked about what the Army did and I am going to have it laminated and framed and hung very prominently on my office wall very proudly.

The last thing I want to say before I begin with the substance is I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the brave patriotic men and women of the National Security Agency because they spend a great deal of time watching over me, making sure I am okay. And I do really appreciate it. You know, they’re a little shy. They don’t like to be seen. If you turn the lights on and shine the lights at them, they sort of scamper under the kitchen cabinets. [INAUDIBLE] I think I speak for everyone when I say I feel them here in my heart. And look they’re people. They have feelings so at the beginning of almost every conversation I do insist that whoever I am speaking with say hello to them, even though I am quite certain that this is not the first Socialism Conference that they’ve attended…

…It was many months ago that I was first contacted by Edward Snowden. He contacted by email. He was anonymous. I had no idea who he was. He didn’t say much. He simply said he had what he thought would be some documents I would be interested in looking at, which turned out to be the world’s largest understatement of the decade.

But he didn’t tell me much about himself and several months went by because we talked about creating an encryption system and other things and it wasn’t really until he was in Hong Kong with the documents that we really began to have substantive conversations about who he was and what he was doing and what kind of documents he had. And I spent many hours with him talking online when he was in Hong Kong but I didn’t know his name. I didn’t know anything biographical about him – his age, where even he worked. And he was trying to get me to come to Hong Kong to speak with him and before I would do that—fly halfway across the world—I wanted some assurance that it was really worthwhile, that there was substance behind what he was saying.
So he sent me a little appetizer, sort of like if you have a dog you kind of put the biscuit in front of the dog’s nose to get to where you want it go. That’s what he was doing to lure me to Hong Kong. These documents even though it was just a little sampling were the most extraordinary things I had ever seen. I remember after I had read the first two pages literally being dizzy, dizzy with ecstasy and elation, over what it is that he had.
And like most of us do when we’re interacting with someone exclusively online, I began to form a mental impression of who he was. I was pretty certain that he was older, even like in his sixties. That he was probably like a senior bureaucrat within one of these national security state agencies, kind of grizzled and nearing the end of his career. And the reason I thought that is he had obviously such penetrating access to such top secret documents. He also had incredibly sophisticated and well thought-through insight into the nature of the national security apparatus and his own relationship to it that I thought must mean he had been thinking about these things and interacting with them for decades. But the real reason I thought he was that age—sixties, nearing retirement, nearing even the end of his life—was because he was very emphatic from the being when I first began talking to him that he absolutely knew what he was doing would essentially unravel and probably destroy his life. That the chances he would probably end up in prison for the rest of his lfie, if not worse, were very high, probably close to inevitable. Or, at the the very least he would be on the run from world’s powerful state for the rest of his life. I just didn’t consciously think about it, but I think I tacitly assumed that anybody who was willin to make a sacrifice in their life that extreme was probably somebody who had just endured so much and was near the end of their life anyway that they had worked up the bravery to do that.

When I got to Hong Kong and I met him for the first time, I was more disoriented and just completely confused than I think I had ever been in my life. Not only wasn’t he sixty-five. He was twenty-nine, but he looked much younger. And so, when we went back to his hotel room and began questioning him—it was Laura Poitras, the filmmaker, and I, who went back to his hotel room—what I really wanted to understand more than anything else was what it is that led him to make this extraordinary choice in part because I didn’t want to be part of an event that would destroy somebody’s life if they weren’t completely open-eyed and rational about the decision they were making but also in part because I really wanted to understand, just for my own sense of curiosity, what would lead somebody with their entire live in front of him, who had a perfectly desirable life living with his long-time girlfriend in Hawaii with career stability, a reasonable well-paying job—What would lead somebody to throw all that away and become an instant fugitive and somebody who would probably spend the rest of their life in a cage.

The more I spoke with him about it, the more I understood, and the more overwhelmed I became and the more of a formative experience it had for me and will have for the rest of my life because what he told me over and over in different ways—and it was so pure and passionate that I never doubted its authenticity for a moment—is that there is more to life than material comfort or career stability or trying to simply prolong your life as long possible. What he continuously told me is he judged his life not by the things he thought about himself but by the actions he took in pursuit of those beliefs.

When I asked him how he got himself to the point where he was willing to take the risk that he knew he was taking, he told me that he for a long time had been looking for a leader, somebody who would come and fix these problems. And then one day he realized there’s no point in waiting or a leader, that leadership is about going first and setting and example for others. What he ultimately said was he simply didn’t want to live in a world where the United States government was permitted to engage in these extraordinary invasions, to build a system that had as its goal the destruction of all individual privacy, that he didn’t want to live in a world like that and that he could not in good conscience standby and allow that to happen knowing that he had the power to help stop it.
The thing that was most striking to me about this was I was with him for eleven straight days. I was with him when he was unknown because we hadn’t yet divulged who his identity was and I watched him watch the debates unfold on CNN and NBC and MSNBC and every other channel around the world that he had really hoped to provoke with the actions he had taken. And I also watched him once he had been revealed that he had become the most wanted man in the world, that official Washington was calling him a traitor, was calling for his head. What was truly staggering and continues to be staggering to me was there was never an iota, never any remorse or regret or fear in any way. This was an individual completely at peace with the choice that he had made because the choice that he made was so incredibly powerful.

I was incredibly inspired myself by being in proximity to somebody to somebody who had reached a state of such tranquility because they were so convicted that what they had done was right and his courage and that passion infected me to the point where I had vowed that no matter what I did in my life with this story and beyond that I would devote myself to doing justice to the incredible act of self-sacrifice that Edward Snowden had made.
And that energy I watched then infected everyone at The Guardian, which is a very large media organization, and I’m the last person that would ever praise any media organization, even one I work for—probably especially one that I work for. Yet I’ve watched over the last four weeks, the editors of The Guardian, the top editors that have run The Guardian and have for many years—engage in incredibly intrepid and fearless journalism as they have day after day dismissed the fearmongering and threats of the US government by saying we’re going to continue to publish whatever it is that we think should be published in the public good.

If you talk to Edward Snowden and you ask him as I did what it is that inspired him, he talks about other individuals who engaged in similarly courageous behavior like Bradley Manning or the Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire and spawned one of the greatest democratic revolutions of the last four or five centuries.

What I actually started to realize about all this is two things. Number one, courage is contagious. If you take a courageous step as an individual, you will literally change the world because you will affect all sorts of people in your immediate vicinity, who will then affect others and then affect others. You should never doubt your ability to change the world. The other thing that I realized is it doesn’t matter who you are as an individual or how formidable or powerful the institutions that you want to challenge are. Mr. Snowden is a high school dropout. His parents work for the federal government. He grew up in a lower middle class environment in a military community in Virginia. He ended up enlisting in the United States Army because he thought the Iraq War at first was noble. He then did the same with the NSA and the CIA because he thought those institutions were noble. He’s a person who has zero privilege, zero power, zero position and zero prestige and yet he by himself has literally changed the world and therefore [INAUDIBLE].

One of the things I realized I early on that not only he but any of us who were involved in reporting these stories were going to be attacked and demonized in the way that Jeremy was just referencing. You see all sorts of attacks on him that are completely absurd and contrary to the facts. You hear claims from these sudden armchair psychologists that he’s narcissistic. I don’t even think they know what that means, but it’s just become the script that they all read from. That’s somebody who could have sold these documents to intelligence services for millions of dollars and spent the rest of his life secretly enriched beyond his wildest dreams and did none of that. He instead stepped forward and made himself a target for the good of all of us.

Or they try and impugn his motives and say he’s just a fame monger or a fame whore is the phrase of choice at the moment. I have spent the last three weeks being harassed by telephone by the most ridiculous media stars in the United States who are completely desperate to interview Edward Snowden and put him on their show every day. He could have been one of the most famous people in the world. He is far more a recluse than a fame whore. He has refused every one of those interviews because his real motive in doing what he did is exactly what he said, which is not to make himself famous, but to make the people of the United States and the world of what is being done to them by the United States government in secret.]

The reason why it’s always so common for people like Edward Snowden to be demonized, the reason it’s so important to attribute psychological illness—the way they did with Bradley Manning, the way they try to do with all whistleblowers, the way they tried to do with Daniel Ellsberg—is because they precisely know what I said, which is that courage is contagious. And that he will set an example for other people to similarly come forward and blow the whistle on the corrupt and illegal and deceitful things that they’re doing in the dark. They need to make a negative example so that doesn’t happen and that’s the reason why people like Edward Snowden are so demonized and attacked and it’s why it’s up to all of us to defend him and hold him up as the noble example that he is so he [does get proper recognition].

That was the eye-opening effect that all of this has had on me personally and I am sure that I probably haven’t even thought through all the implications and I will continue to do so as the months go by. But I do know that this experience will form me and shape me and millions of people from around the world in all sorts of ways.
So, I just want to spend a little bit of time talking about the substance of the revelations and what it is that we know about the US surveillance state. And I’m somebody that has written about the surveillance state for years now. That was actually the topic of the speech that I gave to this conference last year and I keep trying to work through today how it is that I feel having watched all of these documents be revealed and have all of these secrets spilled that prove that this surveillance state really is as menacing and ubiquitous as many of us have long been saying and I keep coming back to this scene, this sort of iconic scene in the Woody Allen film, Annie Hall, where Woody Allen is waiting in a movie theater line and he sort of has this fantasy that we all wish would happen but ever does. There’s this pompous pontificating pseudo-intellect standing behind him in line who’s bombastically talking about the media theories of Marshall McLuhan and Woody Allen turns around and says you don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve got Marshall McCluhan all wrong and this pseudo-intellect says, no, you don’t know what you’re talking about. And Woody Allen says well I just happen to have Marshall McCluhan nearby and he goes behind this tree and pulls him out. And Marshall McCluhan says I’m Marshall McCluhan and he turns around to the guy and says you don’t know what you’re talking about. Woody Allen is absolutely right about my theories and he’s vindicated in the best possible way.

The reason why I feel a little bit like that is I’ve been engaged in so many debates over the last several years. I’ve written endlessly about the fact that the goal of the US surveillance state—the National Security Agency and the entire national security apparatus on which it’s based—is to make sure that there is no such thing as actual human privacy, not just in the United States but in the world. And I have repeatedly been told that this is absurd hyperbole, that this is conspiratorial thinking, that the NSA is constrained by all of these wonderful frameworks, and I feel a little bit like being able to say well you know what I just happen to have a huge stack of top secret NSA documents right here.]

These issues involving surveillance and the surveillance system that they’re building are complex. They’re legally complex. They’re technologically complex. It is difficult to simplify them in a way that is digestible for the news cycle so I just want to spend a little bit of time talking about not just the stories but just some of the facts that have been revealed already by us—and it’s a small fraction of what is coming—but I think the picture already is quite clear.

Two days ago, we published a document by one small part of the National Security Agency called the Secret Source Operations, one of the most secretive units of the NSA. And there was an internal document in this SSO unit dated December 12, 2012, so the end of last year. What this document did was it was celebrating a milestone the way other people celebrate their birthdays. What said it was congratulations to us, this unit of the SSO. We have just collected our one trillionth piece of email, internet metadata. That’s one trillion with a “t.” What that means is every single day they are collecting hundreds of millions of our email records and the email records around the world to find out who is emailing us, to whom we are sending emails, what our IP address is when we’re sending and opening the emails when we read them, which means what our physical location is, and then being able to piece together what our network is—who our associations are, what our life patterns are, what it is that we do on the internet, what our interests are, what animates us—a whole variety of information that they are sucking up and vacuuming, not about individuals who they think are  guilty of terrorism but about human beings indiscriminately.

Another document that I probably shouldn’t share since it’s not published but I am going to share it with you anyway—and this one’s coming soon but you’re getting a little preview—It talks about how a brand new technology enables the National Security Agency to redirect into its repositories one billion cell phone calls every single day, one billion cell phone calls every single day.

What we are really talking about here is a globalized system that prevents any form of electronic communication from taking place without its being stored and monitored by the National Security Agency. It doesn’t mean they’re listening to every call. It means they’re storing every call and have the capability to listen to them at any time and it does mean that they’re collecting millions upon million upon millions of our phone and email records. It is a globalized system designed to destroy all privacy and what’s incredibly menacing about it is it is all taking place in the dark, with no accountability and virtually no safeguards and the purpose of our story and the purpose of Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing is not singularly or unilaterally to destroy those systems. The purpose is to say that if you the United States government and the governments around the world want to create a globalized surveillance system in which we no longer have any privacy in our individual lives or on the internet you at least ought to have us know about it, have you do it in the sunlight so that we can decide democratically whether that’s the kind of system and the kind of world which we want to live.

So the last point I want to make is that one of the things I set out to do and I think that Mr. Snowden set out to do and that I know the people at The Guardian set out to do was not simply to publish some stories about the NSA. It was to really shake up the foundations of the corrupted and rotted roots of America’s political and media culture. And the reason I say that is that there is an economist Dean Baker, who yesterday on Twitter wrote that he thinks the stories that we’re doing are shining as much light on the corruption of American journalism as they are on the corruption of the National Security Agency.

I think that is true for several different reasons. Number one is if you look at the “debate” over—the charming, very endearing debate over whether or not I should be arrested, prosecuted and then imprisoned under Espionage Act statutes for doing journalism—What you find is that debate is being led by other people who are TV actors who play the role of journalists on TV. They’re ones who are actually leading the debate and the reason they are doing that is they purport to be adversaries of political power or watchdogs of political power but what they really are servants to political power. They’re appendages to political power.

What you find is they always lead the way in attacking whoever challenges the political system in Washington because that is the system in which they are a part. That is the system that props them up and gives them oxygen and provides them with all of their privilege, wealth and access. And I think their true role, which is not to serve as adversaries of people in government power or protect what they’re doing but to protect and shield what they are doing and amplify their message, has become more vividly exposed in the last four weeks than it has in quite a long time.

The thing that really amazes me is if you look at how whistleblowers are treated, whether it be Bradley Manning or WikiLeaks or Thomas Drake of the NSA or Edward Snowden—I can understand why Americans in general, just ordinary Americans, have ambivalence about those whistleblowers. Some people think security is more important or secrecy is something that should be decided by democratically elected representatives, not whistleblowers. That I all get, but what I don’t understand and can never believe is anybody who at any point thought of themselves as somebody who had a journalistic ethos would look at people who are shining on the world’s most powerful factions and do anything but applaud them and express gratitude for them since that’s supposed to be the function that they, the journalists, themselves are serving. And yet what you find is the exact opposite.

What you really find is if you look at who hates Bradley Manning or who has expressed the most contempt about WikiLeaks or who has led the chorus in demonizing Edward Snowden, it is those very people in the media who pretend to want transparency because transparency against political power is exactly what they don’t want because those are their masters and the stronger they stay and the stronger that system stays, the more rewarded they will be.

What is really amazing, most of all, about it, is while they purport to hate leaks they themselves are the most prolific users of leaks. I was on “Meet the Press” last week—the first time I ever ventured into the belly of the imperial beast—It got a lot of attention because David Gregory all but called for my prosecution during the interview and there were a lot of reasons why that was pretty amazing but one of the extraordinary things about it was that ninety-seconds or so before he actually called for my prosecution because I committed the crime of doing journalism, of showing the public what the government is doing in the dark he and I had an argument about a FISA court opinion that had been issued in 2011 that found many of the things that the National Security Agency was doing to be unconstitutional and illegal. And I had described this opinion based on the documents I have in my possession that talks about them. And he objected and he said, oh no, the way you’ve described this opinion is not accurate. I’ve had government officials tell me that what’s actually in this opinion was not the finding that the government did anything wrong or unconstitutional or illegal. Perish the thought. This was nothing more than the government going to the court saying can we please have permission to do this spying that we would like to do in the future but haven’t yet done and the court said no you’re allowed to do this and this and this but not this and this and this and then the government went and obeyed the court.

Now, David Gregory’s claims about what that court opinion were were completely false, as I well know because I’ve actually seen documents talking about them as opposed to having government officials whisper in my ear what it says. What was really amazing about it was ninety seconds later he was calling for my prosecution for having disclosed classified information and yet he ninety seconds earlier had just gotten done saying that somebody in the government had come to him and described this top secret court document, which he then discussed to the public and the world by telling me what he thought it said.

The same exact thing happened on CNN when Barbara Starr, who is the Pentagon spokeswoman who works for CNN as the Pentagon reporter—She went on the air and said government officials have informed me that the revelations from Edward Snowden published in The Guardian have helped the terrorists by enabling to evade our systems and change the way they communicate. It is—It’s hilarious, because apparently there are terrorists in the world who don’t know and haven’t heard that the US government is trying to eavesdrop on their telephone calls and read their emails. These same terrorists are going to be sophisticated enough to detonate very powerful bombs on US soil but leave that aside—What Barbara Starr did is she had government officials come and leak classified information to her, which she then went on the air and spilled to the world things that the intelligence agency learned the terrorists were doing and yet nobody called for Barbara Starr’s prosecution or dug into her past. And nobody did that to David Gregory including David Gregory because what they do in their minds is the only kind of leaks that are bad are leaks that the government doesn’t want disclosed to the public.
The only crime that you commit is when you do reporting that the government doesn’t want you to do, when you expose things to your readers and to your viewers that embarrass political officials. The only thing that is journalism is to them is when they carry forward the message that has been implanted in their brains by the political officials whom they serve and I think this behavior highlights the true purpose of establishment journalism more powerfully than anything I or anything else have ever written.

Very last point I want to make, the last thing I want to leave you with, the thing that I am trying to get myself to be to left with as the thing that is defining how I look at everything from this point forward is that one of the things that has been most disturbing over the past three to four years has been this climate of fear that has emerged in exactly the circles that are supposed to challenge the government. It has emerged among investigative journalists, including the ones at the most protected outlets like The New York Times and others. The real investigative journalists who are at these outlets who do real reporting are petrified of the US government now. Their sources are beyond petrified. The investigative journalist Jane Mayer, who did so much excellent work uncovering the torture regime in the Bush years, has said that the Obama war on whistleblowing and journalism that Jeremy described, investigative journalism in the United States to a “standstill.”

If you talk to anybody in journalism or in the government, they are petrified of even moving. It has been impossible to get anyone inside the government to call us back with regard to any story because people are so scared that if anything on their phone record shows that they’ve called more or called The Guardian they will be held in extreme suspicion as leakers.

And it’s not just journalists but also dissident groups that have been infiltrated and Muslim communities that have monitored in all sorts of ways. There’s a climate of fear in exactly those factions that are most intended to put a check on those in power and that has been by design. And one of the things I set out to do as one of my principal priorities in how I’ve done this story and how I’ve gone about that is to show that you actually don’t need to be afraid. You can stand up to the United States government and be defiant when they deserve it and exercise your constitutional rights without them.

That is the message that I hope more than anything is conveyed on a visceral level. The revelations that we learn about the NSA is important. Things that we learn about journalism is important. But, ultimately, the thing that matters most is that the rights that we know we have as human beings are rights that we ought to exercise and that nobody can take away from us and the only way those rights can ever be taken away is if we give in to the fear that is being deliberately imposed. So that, I hope, is the message of Edward Snowden and the message of the reporting we’re doing, which is you not only shouldn’t be afraid but do not be afraid.


Attacks from America: NSA Spied on European Union Offices

Nothing is sacrosanct. Nothing is safe!  

Who exactly are the super spies protecting? Against whom are they protecting them?


Attacks from America: NSA Spied on European Union Offices



By Laura Poitras, Marcel Rosenbach, Fidelius Schmid and Holger Stark

America's NSA intelligence service allegedly targeted the European Union with its
 spying activities. According to SPIEGEL information, the US placed bugs in the EU 
representation in Washington and infiltrated its computer network. Cyber attacks
 were also perpetrated against Brussels in New York and Washington.
Information obtained by SPIEGEL shows that America's National Security Agency (NSA) not only conducted online surveillance of European citizens, but also appears to have specifically targeted buildings housing European Union institutions. The information appears in secret documents obtained by whistleblower Edward Snowden that SPIEGEL has in part seen. A "top secret" 2010 document describes how the secret service attacked the EU's diplomatic representation in Washington.

The document suggests that in addition to installing bugs in the building in downtown Washington, DC, the EU representation's computer network was also infiltrated. In this way, the Americans were able to access discussions in EU rooms as well as emails and internal documents on computers.

The attacks on EU institutions show yet another level in the broad scope of the NSA's spying activities. For weeks now, new details about Prism and other surveillance programs have been emerging that had been compiled by whistleblower Snowden. Details have also emerged that the British intelligence service GCHQ operates a similar program under the name Tempora with which global telephone and Internet connections are monitored.

The documents SPIEGEL has seen indicate that the EU representation to the United Nations was attacked in a manner similar to the way surveillance was conducted against its offices in Washington. An NSU document dated September 2010 explicitly names the Europeans as a "location target"

The documents also indicate the US intelligence service was responsible for an electronic eavesdropping operation in Brussels. A little over five years ago, EU security experts noticed several telephone calls that were apparently targeting the remote maintenance system in the Justus Lipsius Building where the EU Council of Ministers and the European Council is located. The calls were made to numbers that were very close to the one used for the remote administration of the building's telephone system.

Security officials managed to track the calls to NATO headquarters in the Brussels suburb of Evere. A precise analysis showed that the attacks on the telecommunications system had originated from a building complex separated from the rest of the NATO headquarters that is used by NSA experts.

A review of the remote maintenance system showed that it had been called and reached several times from precisely that NATO complex. Every EU member state has rooms in the Justus Lipsius Building that can be used by EU ministers. They also have telephone and Internet connections at their disposal.
Article...


http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/nsa-spied-on-european-union-offices-a-908590.html

Standing on the right side of History in Syria

How many  more brutal beheadings will it take before the Bloody West wakes up to its own brutal history and it's hand in the mass killings in Syria. All for the pottage of Pipelines it wants to control.

Syria: the Art of Standing on the Right Side of History

By ORIENTAL REVIEW

Syria: the Art of Standing on the Right Side of History
The ongoing Syrian crisis will be certainly viewed by future generations as a classic example of how a completely false reality, as presented by the dominant Western political class and corporate media, has inscrutably resulted in the moral and political reinforcement of the opposing party, which was desperately defending the principles of law and justice under unprecedented pressure from a transnational party of war.
Despite the undisguised skepticism voiced on the eve of the summit in Lough-Erne by some of the G8 leaders toward the Russian stance on the Syrian crisis, the talks turned to be a diplomatic victory of Putin. He stood firm in his position on Syria, while the Western leaders had to accept the obvious: there is no way to oust President Assad from his post by legal means. The G8 summit in Lough-Erne failed to put political pressure on Bashar al-Assad for his alleged use of chemical weapons against the rebels, nor was it able to obtain Russia’s consent to additional UN Security Council actions in favor of the Syrian opposition.
The tough Russian position on Syria is increasingly in step with the approaches of some sober-minded politicians in the West. Zbignew Brzezinski, a well-known US political analyst and statesman of Polish descent, who can hardly be suspected of supporting Russian policies elsewhere, literally said in an interview with MSNBC right on the eve of the G8 summit:
The West is absolutely engaging in mass propaganda by portraying the Syrian conflict as a fight for democracy when many of the rebels want anything but. They pledge allegiance to Al-Qaeda, explicitly call for Sharia law, kill thousands of Christians, use terrorist tactics yet our corrupt media and political class pretend arming them will produce democracy.
It’s no wonder that Putin’s commitment to bringing all parties of the conflict to the negotiating table in Geneva without any preliminary conditions as well as his straightforward replies during a memorable press-conference with the British PM David Cameron, got a positive response from a wide spectrum of Western civil society. Boris Johnson, a British Conservative and the incumbent major of London, specifically stated in an article for the Telegraph:
This is the moment for a total ceasefire, an end to the madness. It is time for the US, Russia, the EU, Turkey, Iran, Saudi and all the players to convene an intergovernmental conference to try to halt the carnage. We can’t use Syria as an arena for geopolitical point-scoring or muscle-flexing, and we won’t get a ceasefire by pressing weapons into the hands of maniacs.
His viewpoint is shared by a large number of British parliamentarians, both Conservatives and Labourites, who urge Cameron not to initiate any arm deliveries to the Syrian opposition without approval from parliament.
Gerald Warner from the Scotsman wrote last Sunday that Putin is increasingly admired in the West for his firm attitude in defense of the principles of international law in general and on the Syrian issue in particular:
The new-found admiration for Putin is rooted in an appreciation of the contrast he presents to the politically correct wimps running the European Union and the United States. Last week’s G8 photographs said it all. The posturing “statesmen” who had been ordered by PR advisers to take off their ties in a pathetic effort to appear “relevant” – a bunch of dads dancing at the school disco – invited the mockery and contempt they duly received. Putin went along with the charade; but when it came to the substance – the demand for his endorsement of the Obama/Cameron/Hollande ambition to arm al-Qaeda in Syria – the response was an uncompromising, Molotov-style “Nyet!”
Repeated references in the Western mainstream press that Al-Qaeda-linked networks are dominating anti-Assad insurgency have been further substantiated in recent weeks. For instance, a few days ago Hans-Georg Maassen, the head of the German counter-intelligence bureau, told the Rheinische Post about 20 suspected jihadists who had recently returned to Germany from Syria. He said it was worrying that in the past eight months more than 60 self-proclaimed “holy warriors” had left Germany to take part in jihad in Syria. “When they return, they are celebrated as heroes by their circle. In a worst-case scenario, they come back with a direct combat mission,” – stressed the chief of the BFF.
A group of Chechen "holy warrirors" in Syria.
A group of Chechen “holy warrirors” in Syria.
A number of jihadist web-sites including Kavkaz Centre, which is operated from Finland, have recently praised two Chechen “syahids”liquidated by Syrian governmental forces near Aleppo several day ago. Those interested in understanding the real motivation of the “pro-democratic forces” in Syria can read the English translation of their “martyrology”, which is far from the aims proclaimed by the West.
The number of atrocities and cruelties against the Syrian civil population committed by such “holy warriors” is unprecedented. YouTube is full of video footage of these crimes, with evidence enough to convene a special international tribunal for the investigation and prosecution of the perpetrators. But instead the self-proclaimed “Friends of Syria” are engaged in a political cover-up of the FSA and are channelling weapons to jihadists. Obama’s administration is obviously hoping to retain control over the “moderate” FSA command of Salem Idris, but the futility of such expectations was proved as far back as the war in Vietnam (e.g. Ngo Dinh Diem scandal). They stepped on the same rake in Afghanistan.
The White House is placing stakes on a renegade who has no tangible support of any notable group in the Syrian society. Persisting in blind ambition for regime change in Syria, the US administration will yield no result but another war-torn area with the US Marines protecting a stooge in Damascus.
The echo of the Syrian conflict is already fuelling religious tensions in Lebanon and other countries in the region. The prolonged sectarian showdown in Iraq has gained new momentum. It is very likely that a new Sunni-Shia war has been designed by the global elites who triggered the conflict in Syria more than two years ago. The impact it would have in Europe and the United States itself was no doubt foreseen and will be used to further tighten the grip of electronic surveillance on these societies.
The public reaction in the West on Putin’s performance at the G8 suggests that there exists a conscious or perhaps unconscious awareness of this here. Putin has successfully adopted the trend to reformat the matrix imposed on the minds in the West. Western politicians are so entangled in their web of lies, particularly on the Syrian issue, that a reasonable and straightforward speech by the Russian leader based on irrefutable facts and common sense could leave them dumb, curious, and stunned. And the people are able to sense who is standing on the right side of history.

The Surveillance stories - Greenwald talk.

Speaking on NSA stories, Snowden and journalism

Discussing the implications of the last four week's of articles, revelations and debates
Last night, I gave my first speech on the NSA stories, Edward Snowden and related issues of journalism, delivered to the Socialism 2013 Conference in Chicago. Because it was my first speech since the episode began, it was the first time I was able to pause a moment and reflect on everything that has taken place and what the ramifications are. I was originally scheduled to speak live but was unable to travel there and thus spoke via an (incredibly crisp) Skype video connection. I was introduced by Jeremy Scahill, whose own speech is well worth watching. Those interested can view the entire speech in this recorder; below it are a few articles worth reading:
Several related items worth reading:
(1) The New York Times has an Op-Ed from Thursday by law professors Jennifer Stisa Granick and Christopher Jon Sprigman entitled "The Criminal NSA". It argues, citing recent revelations, that "it's time to call the NSA's mass surveillance programs what they are: criminal."
(2) The New York Times' excellent public editor, Margaret Sullivan,examines recent debates over who is and is not a "journalist" and provides one of the best working definitions yet. Matt Taibbi addresses the same question here. Meanwhile, former New York Times columnist Frank Rich argues that whatever "journalist" means, David Gregory doesn't qualify.
(3) Edward Snowden isn't the first NSA whistleblower of this decade. He was preceded by senior official Thomas Drake, who was unsuccessfully prosecuted by the Obama DOJ under espionage statutes and previously wrote that he saw the same things at the NSA that Snowden says prompted him to come forward. Another was William Binney, the long-time NSA mathematician who resigned in the wake of 9/11 over the NSA's domestic spying; as this article notes, the last set of documents we published regarding bulk collection of email metadata vindicates many of Binney's central warnings.
(4) A bipartisan group of 26 Senators just wrote a letter to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper demanding answers to some fairly probing questions about the administration's collection of bulk communication records on Americans, the "secret law" on which they relied, and their clearly misleading claims to Congress.
(5) It's well worth finding 9 minutes to watch this Chris Hayes discussion of how establishment journalists love leaks that serve the interests of political officials, but hate leaks that disclose what those officials want to keep suppressed. This is the heart and soul of establishment journalism - its true purpose - revealed:

Secret European deals to hand over private data to America

update: the article at the original site  has been changed  and then removed.  follow the changes   at http://www.newssniffer.co.uk/articles/658994/diff/0/1


Letting secret services secretly dictate government policy is never a good idea. 

Yet this is the reality in today's world. A reality that has to be changed if real Democracy is to mean anything. Or even survive.

Revealed: secret European deals to hand over private data to America

Germany 'among countries offering intelligence' according to new claims by former US defence analyst
 The Observer
At least six European Union countries in addition to Britain have been colluding with the US over the mass harvesting of personal communications data, according to a former contractor to America's National Security Agency, who said the public should not be "kept in the dark".
Wayne Madsen, a former US navy lieutenant who first worked for theNSA in 1985 and over the next 12 years held several sensitive positions within the agency, names Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain and Italy as having secret deals with the US.
Madsen said the countries had "formal second and third party status" under signal intelligence (sigint) agreements that compels them to hand over data, including mobile phone and internet information to the NSA if requested.
Under international intelligence agreements, confirmed by declassified documents, nations are categorised by the US according to their trust level. The US is first party while the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand enjoy second party relationships. Germany and France have third party relationships.
In an interview published last night on the PrivacySurgeon.org blog, Madsen, who has been attacked for holding controversial views on espionage issues, said he had decided to speak out after becoming concerned about the "half story" told by EU politicians regarding the extent of the NSA's activities in Europe.
He said that under the agreements, which were drawn up after the second world war, the "NSA gets the lion's share" of the sigint "take". In return, the third parties to the NSA agreements received "highly sanitised intelligence".
Madsen said he was alarmed at the "sanctimonious outcry" of political leaders who were "feigning shock" about the spying operations while staying silent about their own arrangements with the US, and was particularly concerned that senior German politicians had accused the UK of spying when their country had a similar third-party deal with the NSA.
Although the level of co-operation provided by other European countries to the NSA is not on the same scale as that provided by the UK, the allegations are potentially embarrassing.
"I can't understand how Angela Merkel can keep a straight face, demanding assurances from [Barack] Obama and the UK while Germany has entered into those exact relationships," Madsen said.
The Liberal Democrat MEP Baroness Ludford, a senior member of the European parliament's civil liberties, justice and home affairs committee, said Madsen's allegations confirmed that the entire system for monitoring data interception was a mess, because the EU was unable to intervene in intelligence matters, which remained the exclusive concern of national governments.
"The intelligence agencies are exploiting these contradictions and no one is really holding them to account," Ludford said. "It's terribly undermining to liberal democracy."

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"A lot of this information isn't secret, nor is it new," Madsen said. "It's just that governments have chosen to keep the public in the dark about it. The days when they could get away with a conspiracy of silence are over."
This month another former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, revealed to the Guardian previously undisclosed US programmes to monitor telephone and internet traffic. The NSA is alleged to have shared some of its data, gathered using a specialist tool called Prism, with Britain's GCHQ.

Saturday 29 June 2013

Africa: the new Wild West

Commercial Colonization of Africa

The New Wild West

by GRAHAM PEEBLES
Dancing to the tune of their corporate benefactors, governments of the ruling G8 countries are enacting complex agriculture agreements delivering large tracts of prime cut African soil into the portfolios of their multinational bedmates.
Desperate for foreign investment, countries throughout Africa are at the mercy of their new colonial masters – national and international agrochemical corporations, fighting for land, water and control of the world’s food supplies. Driven overwhelmingly by self-interest and profit, the current crop of ‘investors’ differ little from their colonial ancestors. The means may have changed, but the aim – to rape and pillage, no matter the sincere sounding rhetoric – remains more or less the same.
Regarded by her northern guides as agriculturally underperforming, Sub-Saharan Africa is seen, The African Centre for Bio-diversity (ACB) relate, as a “new frontier”, a place to “make profits, with an eye on land, food and biofuels in particular”. Africa, then, is the new Wild West; smallholder farmers and indigenous people are the natives Indians, the multi nationals and their democratically elected representatives – or salesmen – the settlers.
Various initiatives offering what is, indisputably much needed ‘support and investment’ are flowing north to south. Key amongst these is The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in Africa (NAFSNA), designed by the governments of the eight richest economies, for some of the poorest countries in the world. The New Alliance was born out of the G8 summit in May 2012 at Camp David and, according to, WoW, “has been modelled on the ‘new vision’ of private investment in agriculture developed by management consultants McKinsey in conjunction with the ABCD group of leading grain traders (ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus) and other multinational agribusiness companies.”(Ibid) It has been written in honourable terms to sit comfortably within the Africa Union’s Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP), bestowing an aura of international credibility.

The New Alliance… in land and seed appropriation
At first glance, The New Alliance, with its altruistically-gilded aims, appears to be a worthy development. Who amongst us could argue with the intention, as reported by the United Nations (UN), to “achieve sustained and inclusive agricultural growth and raise 50 million people out of poverty over the next 10 years”. The means to achieving this noble quest however, are skewed, ignoring the rights and needs of small-holder farmers and the wishes of local people – who are not consulted during the heady negotiations with government officials local and national, and the multi zillion $ corporations who are swarming to buy their ancestral land. Alliance contracts and deals-done favour wealthy investors, revealing the underlying, unjust G8 initiatives objective, to “open up African agriculture to multinational agribusiness companies by means of national ‘cooperation frameworks’ between African governments, donors and private sector investors”, WoW report.
Poverty reduction (the principle stated aim of the Alliance), will be achieved we are told, not by rational methods of sharing and re-distribution, but USAID 18/05/2012 reveal, by “aligning the commitments of Africa’s leadership to drive effective country plans and policies for food security”. ‘Plans and policies’, drafted no doubt in the hallowed meeting rooms of those driving the ‘New Alliance’: the G8 governments and their cohorts including The World Bank and, pulling the policy strings, the agriculture companies sitting behind them, nestling alongside the pharmaceutical giants and the arms industry magnates. With African governments anxious to eat at the head table, or at least be invited into the cocktail chamber they have little choice but to sign up to such unbalanced ‘plans and policies’.
To date, nine African countries (from a continent of 54 nation states), have committed to The New Alliance. First to sign up were, Tanzania, Ghana and the West’s favoured ally in the region Ethiopia – where wide ranging human rights violations, including forced displacement and rapes have reportedly accompanied land sales, and where over 250,000 people in Gambella have been forced into the Orwellian sounding ‘Villagization Programmes’. Then came Burkina Faso, Mozambique and Cote d’Ivoire, followed by Benin, Malawi, and Nigeria. It is an agreement dripping with strings that promise to entangle the innocent and uninformed. After “wide-ranging consultations on land and farming”, with officials from potential partner countries, the results of which were “ignored in the agreements with the G8”, deals “between African governments and private companies were facilitated by the World Economic Forum”, behind, The Guardian report, firmly closed doors.
Conditional to investment promised by The New Alliance, African leaders, USAID tell us are ‘committed’ – forced may be a better word – “to refine [government] policies in order to improve investment opportunities”. In plain English, African countries are required to, change their trade and agriculture laws to include ending the free distribution of seeds, relax the tax system and national export controls and open the doors wide for profit repatriation (allowing the money as well as the crops to be exported). In Mozambique, as elsewhere across the continent, local farmers have been evicted from their land under land sales agreements, and The Guardian 10/06/2013 report, “is now obliged to write new laws promoting what its agreement calls “partnerships” of this kind”. A polluted term, disguising the real relationship between African governments and the multi-national ‘investors’, which is closer to master and maid than equal collaborators.
The Alliance offers a combination of public and private money to African countries willing to take the G8 plunge into international political-economic duplicity, with, ACB relate “the large multinational seed, fertiliser and agrochemical companies setting the agenda … and philanthropic institutions (like AGRA and others) establishing the institutional and infrastructural mechanisms to realise this agenda”. Britain has pledged £395 million of foreign aid whilst, according to the UN “over 45 local and multinational companies have expressed their intent to invest over $3 billion across the agricultural value chain in Grow Africa countries [a Programme of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) established by the African Union in 2003.].” In order to get their hands on some of the corporations billions however, African nations are required to “change their seed laws, trade laws and land ownership in order to prioritise corporate profits over local food needs”, Mozambique e.g. is contracted, The Guardian tell us to “systematically cease distribution of free and unimproved seeds”, and is drawing up new laws granting intellectual property rights (IPR) of seeds, that will “promote private sector investment”.
In other words, laws are being written that allow foreign companies – ‘investors’ (a word used to mislead and bestow legitimacy) – to grab the land of their African ‘partners’, patent their seeds and monopolise their food markets. In Ghana, Tanzania and Ivory Coast, similar regulations sit on the table waiting to be rubber-stamped.
The re-writing of seed laws, along with the fact that these unbalanced deals allow “big multinational seed, fertiliser and agrochemical companies such as Yara, Monsanto, Syngenta and Cargill to set the agenda”, is a major concern expressed by environmental NGO’s and campaigners, Reuters 20/06/2013 report. These are concerns that the initiating G8 governments, were they at all troubled by the impact of their meddling, should share.
The wide ownership, by a small number of huge agro-chemical companies of the rights to seeds and fertilisers, is creating, the UN in their report on the Right to Food, state: “monopoly privileges to plant breeders and patent-holders through the tools of intellectual property”. This growing trend, facilitated through the support of the G8 governments is placing more and more control of the worldwide food supply in their hands, and is causing, “the poorest farmers [to] become increasingly dependent on expensive inputs, creating the risk of indebtedness in the face of unstable incomes.” India is a case in question where farmers strangled by debt are committing suicide at a rate of two per hour.
Share the seeds the land and the water
African farmers, and civil society along with 25 British campaign groups including War on Want, Friends of the Earth, The Gaia Foundation and the World Development Movement, have declared their objections to the New Alliance and asked that the government withhold the £395 million so generously pledged by Prime Minister Cameron. The African civil society see clearly that “opening markets and creating space for multinationals to secure profits lie at the heart of the G8 intervention”, they “recognise the New Alliance is a poisoned chalice, and they are right to reject it”, asserts Kirtana Chandrasekaran of Friends of the Earth (FoE).
Having made a continental mess of their own countries’ economies, not to mention the environmental mayhem caused by their policies, It is with unabashed colonial arrogance that the G8 governments deem to tell African countries what to do with their land and how best to do it. Not only do they have no genuine interest in Africa, save what can be gained from it, but they have “no legitimacy to intervene in matters of food, hunger and land tenure in Africa or any other part of the world”, WoW make clear. The New Alliance, according to David Cameron, is “a great combination of promoting good governance and helping Africa to feed its people”. He and the rest of the G8 sitting comfortably club, are, FoE state, “pretending to be tackling hunger and land grabbing in Africa while backing a scheme that will ruin the lives of hundreds of thousands of small farmers”, the New Alliance is “a pro-corporate assault on African nations”. The ‘investment and support‘ opportunities are laid at the door of investors, to further expand their corporate assets and with the support of participating governments, obliged to provide a selection box of state incentives.
The ending of hunger in sub-Saharan Africa, India and elsewhere, will not be brought about by allowing large tracts of land to be bought up by corporations whose only interest is in maximizing return on investment and, as ACB report these governments believe. The Alliance, far from providing investment and support for the people of Africa, is a mask for exploitation and profiteering: True investment built on relationships, is investment in the people of Africa; the smallholder farmers, the women and children, the communities across the continent. It involves working collectively, consulting, encouraging participation, cooperating instead of competing, and crucially sharing.
Sharing of knowledge, experience and technology, sharing the natural resources – the land, food and water, the minerals and other resources equitably amongst the people of Africa and the wider world. Such radical, commonsense ideas would go a long way to creating not only food security but harmony, trust and social justice which just might bring about peace – the ultimate security.
Graham Peebles is director of the Create Trust. He can be reached at: graham@thecreatetrust.org






http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/27/the-new-wild-west/