Category: Terra Terra Terra!

Bill Maher is never wrong

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

164617813DB020_Bill_Maher_P

So I know he won’t apologize for this Sometimes Bill Maher says some smart, insightful things, but he’s frequently dead wrong on politics. He loves to pontificate, but he won’t work hard enough to get it right. (In other words, he’s no John Oliver.)

He’s a guy who ridicules religious extremism but sounds like the most extreme neocon nutjobs when it comes to Israel, because 9/11, etc. and all Muslims are evil and violent.

Plus, he’s just gotta be an asshole. He can’t help it. He thinks it makes him “edgy”, I guess. So he says crap like this:

The backlash was immediate:


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You are not in a police state

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Of course not! This is just…. caution.

I was talking to a high-end geek friend some months ago after the Snowden stories came out, and he told me bluntly: “If you use Tor or anything like that, you will bring yourself to the NSA’s attention.” And of course, he was right!

The NSA marks and considers potential “extremists” all users of the internet anonymizer service Tor, German media reports. Among those are hundreds of thousands of privacy concerned people like journalists, lawyers and rights activists.

Searching for encryption software like the Linux-based operating system Tails also places you on the NSA grid, says a report by German broadcasters NDR and WDR. The report is based on analysis of the source code of the software used by NSA’s electronic surveillance program XKeyscore.

Tor is a system of servers, which routes user requests through a layer of secured connections to make it impossible to identify a user’s IP from the addresses of the websites he/she visits. The network of some 5,000 is operated by enthusiasts and used by hundreds of thousands of privacy-concerned people worldwide. Some of them live in countries with oppressive regimes, which punish citizens for visiting websites they deem inappropriate.

But merely visiting Tor project’s website puts you on the NSA’s red list, the report says. But more importantly it monitors connections to so-called Directory Authorities, the eight servers, which act as gateways for the entire system.

New FBI records on 9/11 terror activities in Florida

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

saudihouse

Dan Christensen and Anthony Summers of BrowardBulldog.org have been literal bulldogs in pushing the U.S. for information about the activities of 9/11 hijackers in Florida — and how much the U.S. knew. For years, the FBI has been denying they even investigated Florida connections. Fascinating:

Freshly released, but heavily-censored FBI documents include tantalizing new information about events connected to the Sarasota Saudis who moved suddenly out of their home, leaving behind clothing, jewelry and cars, about two weeks before the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The documents were released to BrowardBulldog.org Monday amid ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation. The news organization sued in 2012 after being denied access to the Bureau’s file on a once secret investigation focusing on Abdulaziz al-Hijji, his wife, Anoud and her father Esam Ghazzawi, an advisor to a Saudi prince.
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The point of war is to keep it going

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

AFTER SEVERAL MONTHS' BREAK - US DRONE STRIKE ON NORTHERN WAZIRISTAN KILLS TWO TO THE DISMAY OF MANY PAKISTAN PEOPLE

Drones are perfect for that. No muss, no fuss, no need for silly Congressional resolutions!

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s embrace of targeted killings using armed drones risks putting the United States on a “slippery slope” into perpetual war and sets a dangerous precedent for lethal operations that other countries might adopt in the future, according to a report by a bipartisan panel that includes several former senior intelligence and military officials.

The group found that more than a decade into the era of armed drones, the American government has yet to carry out a thorough analysis of whether the costs of routine secret killing operations outweigh the benefits. The report urges the administration to conduct such an analysis and to give a public accounting of both militants and civilians killed in drone strikes.

The findings amount to a sort of report card — one that delivers middling grades — a year after President Obama gave a speech promising new guidelines for drone strikes and greater transparency about the killing operations. The report is especially critical of the secrecy that continues to envelop drone operations and questions whether they might be creating terrorists even as they are killing them.

“There is no indication that a U.S. strategy to destroy Al Qaeda has curbed the rise of Sunni Islamic extremism, deterred the establishment of Shia Islamic extremist groups or advanced long-term U.S. security interests,” the report concludes.

Judge: No-fly list violates rights

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

U.S. No-Fly List Violates Constitution 0
About damn time!

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — A federal judge has ruled that the U.S. government violated the rights of 13 people on its no-fly list by depriving them of their constitutional right to travel, and gave them no adequate way to challenge their placement on the list.

It’s the nation’s first ruling to label the no-fly list redress procedures unconstitutional.

U.S. District Court Judge Anna Brown’s decision handed down Tuesday says the procedure offered to people to remove themselves from the list fails to give travelers a meaningful mechanism to challenge their placement.

Thirteen people challenged their placement on the list in 2010, including four military veterans.

The former Yugoslavia

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

Trebinje, Bosnia and Herzegovina

I was thinking about this today. I was actually involved in organizing people to call the White House and get them to intervene in Yugoslavia. Boy, was I naive. Everything I’ve read since them tells me the war had much more to do with neoliberal economic interests, and not humanitarian intervention. In fact, there’s reason to believe the “ethnic cleansing” was a manufactured rational for the bombings and subsequent NATO control.

The older I get, the more I see there really is no such thing as a “good war.”

Score one for our civil liberties

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Surveillance...

I imagine this ruling will also apply to the license-plate camera data being retained “indefinitely” by local police departments:

No doubt, other law enforcement agencies would love having that kind of capability with all the information they gather up in their ongoing activities. But as of yesterday, that may just be just a police-state fantasy, as a federal court ruled that such a “collect it all” and “store it forever” ideology is unconstitutional.

In that little-noticed but potentially significant ruling (coming in a tax case), the Second Circuit declared that defendant Stavros Ganias’s Fourth Amendment rights were violated when law enforcement held copies of his entire hard drives for nearly three years and then accessed documents from those drives that were not covered by the original search warrant. The court’s ruling declared that the Constitution does not permit “officials executing a warrant for the seizure of particular data on a computer to seize and indefinitely retain every file on that computer for use in future criminal investigations.”  The ruling goes on to note (emphasis added):

If the 2003 warrant authorized the Government to retain all the data on Ganias’s computers on the off-chance the information would become relevant to a subsequent criminal investigation, it would be the equivalent of a general warrant. The Government’s retention of copies of Ganias’s personal computer records for two-and-a-half years deprived him of exclusive control over those files for an unreasonable amount of time. This combination of circumstances enabled the Government to possess indefinitely personal records of Ganias that were beyond the scope of the warrant while it looked for other evidence to give it probable cause to search the files. This was a meaningful interference with Ganias’s possessory rights in those files and constituted a seizure within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment…

The Government had no warrant authorizing the seizure of Ganias’s personal records in 2003. By December 2004, these documents had been separated from those relevant to the investigation of American Boiler and IPM. Nevertheless, the Government continued to retain them for another year-and-a-half until it finally developed probable cause to search and seize them in 2006. Without some independent basis for its retention of those documents in the interim, the Government clearly violated Ganias’s Fourth Amendment rights by retaining the files for a prolonged period of time and then using them in a future criminal investigation. 

Of course, upon developing probable cause in the expanded investigation, the government could have gone back to the defendant with the second warrant and re-copied his hard drive. But the court notes that because “Ganias had altered the original files shortly after the (original) 2003 warrant, the evidence obtained in (second warrant) would not have existed but for the Government’s retention of those images.” That indefinite NSA-esque retention of all information – even stuff not covered by the original warrant – is what is the court says is unconstitutional.

The Rude Pundit tells us how he’d interview Iraq war hawks

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Paul Wolfowitz

The Rude Pundit:

If the Rude Pundit were the host of the great and mighty Meet the Press, the wheezing old man of the Sunday morning gabfests that pretend to serious talk about political shit that actually matters to the actual lives of actual people, and he had as a guest the former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the man who pushed and pushed for the U.S. to invade Iraq back in the day, he might ask, as host David Gregory did, “[W]hat do you do then, as a policy matter now to stop this?”

“This” is the expanding civil war between the Shi’ites and Sunnis, with an insouciant flavor of Kurd peeking through. You know, that thing that was going to happen the moment the U.S. military left Iraq, no matter how long.. That thing that all of us were predicting.

So he might ask the question, but Wolfowitz would immediately get punched in the nuts by the Rude Pundit because that’s what you do. It’d be a pattern for pretty much every talk show. Weekly Standard editor and man who is wrong about everything, William Kristol, might be able to say, as he did on Morning Starbucks with Joe this morning, “Is this an acceptable outcome for the 4,500 Americans soldiers who died in Iraq or the 2,000 who died in Afghanistan?” But then he’d get punched in the nuts.

Richard Perle, who, with Wolfowitz, helped push the Bush administration into war, was on the public radio show The Takeaway this morning, blathering about how he was right about toppling Saddam Hussein and then everyone else fucked the whole thing up. Host John Hockenberry engaged Perle in a conversation when, frankly, he should have been punched in the nuts. All of ’em. Every singe goddamned one.

Paul Bremer. Just pound the shit out of their nutsacks so that every time they even think of commenting on the sectarian violence in Iraq, they get a pain that makes them need to shit themselves instead of the pain. It’s the only way to guarantee that they’ll shut the fuck up about the need to go back to Iraq.

Kucinich: Stop calling the war a ‘mistake’

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Dennis Kuchinich

I think I’m gonna go with what Dennis Kucinich said:

As Iraq descends into chaos again, more than a decade after “Mission Accomplished,” media commentators and politicians have mostly agreed upon calling the war a “mistake.” But the “mistake” rhetoric is the language of denial, not contrition: it minimizes the Iraq War’s disastrous consequences, removes blame, and deprives Americans of any chance to learn from our generation’s foreign policy disaster.

The Iraq War was not a “mistake” — it resulted from calculated deception. The painful, unvarnished fact is that we were lied to. Now is the time to have the willingness to say that.

In fact, the truth about Iraq was widely available, but it was ignored. There were no WMD. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. The war wasn’t about liberating the Iraqi people. I said this in Congress in 2002. Millions of people who marched in America in protest of the war knew the truth, but were maligned by members of both parties for opposing the president in a time of war — and even leveled with the spurious charge of “not supporting the troops.”

I’ve written and spoken widely about this topic, so today I offer two ways we can begin to address our role:

1) President Obama must tell us the truth about Iraq and the false scenario that caused us to go to war.

When Obama took office in 2008, he announced that his administration would not investigate or prosecute the architects of the Iraq War. Essentially, he suspended public debate about the war. That may have felt good in the short term for those who wanted to move on, but when you’re talking about a war initiated through lies, bygones can’t be bygones.

The unwillingness to confront the truth about the Iraq War has induced a form of amnesia which is hazardous to our nation’s health. Willful forgetting doesn’t heal, it opens the door to more lying. As today’s debate ensues about new potential military “solutions” to stem violence in Iraq, let’s remember how and why we intervened in Iraq in 2003.

2) Journalists and media commentators should stop giving inordinate air and print time to people who were either utterly wrong in their support of the war or willful in their calculations to make war.

By and large, our Fourth Estate accepted uncritically the imperative for war described by top administration officials and congressional leaders. The media fanned the flames of war by not giving adequate coverage to the arguments against military intervention.