I’m reading a biography of Bobby Kennedy (another one).
And, like all the recent biographies of JFK’s younger brother, it tells the story (as told by Kennedy to a top aide) that on November 22, 1963, he demanded to see the head of the CIA. He then asked him, point blank, if the CIA killed the president.
The story is longer than that. Kennedy grilled both the CIA director and various deputies before he was satisfied with the answer. However, til the end of his life, Bobby kept trying to figure out if the CIA, FBI or Secret Service was involved.
Imagine: the president’s #2 man who knew more about the workings of our government than anyone (he was the Attorney General and the president’s brother) considered the possibility that our own government bumped off the president.
The implications are horrifying. Kennedy putting that question to the head of the CIA is like Colin Powell asking Dick Cheney if he was behind 9/11. Having to ask the question suggests that Kennedy knew that the US government is not run by the people we think are running it. He intended to investigate JFK’s assassination after he became president but, no surprise here, was murdered when it appeared he would win the 1968 election.
What this all means is this: anyone who trust the things “our” government puts out is naive. The same government that lied about Iran, Vietnam, Guatemala, and Iraq cannot be trusted on Syria, or much of anything else. Obama is no JFK. He challenges nothing the CIA, Pentagon, Wall Street or any part of the establishment wants.
But after what happened to the Kennedys, who can blame him?
Category: The Regime
Operation Ballsack, Part 2
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I first wrote about this the other day. From The Hill:
A U.S. official briefed on the military options being considered by President Obama told the Los Angeles Times that the White House is seeking a strike on Syria “just muscular enough not to get mocked.”
“They are looking at what is just enough to mean something, just enough to be more than symbolic,” the official told the paper, giving credence to similar reports describing a limited military strike in the aftermath of last week’s alleged chemical weapons attack.
NBC News reported earlier this week that the administration would launch three days of missile strikes, while CNN cited a senior administration official saying that the White House wanted to conclude any action before the president departs for the G-20 summit next week.
And today we have President Obama asking for Congress to vote on those Syria strikes (even though his staffers were eager to leak this afternoon that he would probably go ahead and bomb them anyway if they vote against it. A symbolic vote for a symbolic war!)
“We are the United States of America. We cannot, and must not, turn a blind eye to what happened in Damascus.”
Here, let me finish that for you:
“But we do, and must, turn a blind eye to anything that happens in Gaza.”
I honestly don’t see any compelling reason for Obama to bomb Syria, except for his ballsack. And that would be an amoral reason, indeed.
Especially since we knew the attack was coming, and didn’t warn them. You’d almost think there was some other agenda at work, huh?
Five Broken Cameras
A discussion with Israeli teenagers after they attended a screening of the Oscar-winning documentary:
Teach-in on Syria
At noon today, held by MoveOn and Win Without War. Watch here.
http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCACPD-enl_BL_wUO6ixCAPg?v=7oGbKr6IxZs
One round for the flying public
This is a glimmer of sanity:
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — A federal judge ruled that people placed on the U.S. government’s no-fly list have a constitutionally protected interest in traveling by air, and the right to due process when it’s denied.
U.S. District Judge Anna J. Brown of Portland, in an opinion released late Wednesday, rejected the government’s assertion that people on the no-fly list can travel by other means, and that being on the list does not deprive them of their liberty. She said it ignores “the realities of our modern world.”
The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit on behalf of 13 people on the no-fly list. The plaintiffs want to be removed from the list or told why their names appear.
“This decision is a critically important step towards vindicating the due process rights of Americans on the no-fly list,” said Nusrat Choudhury, the ACLU lawyer representing the plaintiffs. “For the first time, a federal court has recognized that when the government bans Americans from flying and smears them as suspected terrorists, it deprives them of constitutionally protected liberties, and they must have a fair process to clear their names.”
Brown’s decision, however, is only a partial one. She asked the government for more information about its redress procedure to help her determine whether it satisfied due process requirements for the plaintiffs.
WTF?
B at Moon Over Alabama:
Alexei Pushkov, chair of the Russian Federation State Duma’s international affairs committee, saying what I think:
“To us, it looks as though [George W.] Bush, [Dick] Cheney and [Donald] Rumsfeld never left the White House. […] It’s basically the same policy, as if US leaders had learned nothing and forgotten nothing in the past decade. They want to topple foreign leaders they regard as adversaries, without even making the most basic calculations of the consequences. An intervention in Syria will only enlarge the area of instability in the Middle East and expand the scope of terrorist activity. I am at a complete loss to understand what the US thinks it is doing.“
Feature, not a bug
Of course they’re passing along information to the DEA and everyone else. The question is, can we get more than a handful of politicians to stand up to oppose it?
(Reuters) – Eight Democratic senators and congressmen have asked Attorney General Eric Holder to answer questions about a Reuters report that the National Security Agency supplies the Drug Enforcement Administration with intelligence information used to make non-terrorism cases against American citizens.
The August report revealed that a secretive DEA unit passes the NSA information to agents in the field, including those from the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI and Homeland Security, with instructions to never disclose the original source, even in court. In most cases, the NSA tips involve drugs, money laundering and organized crime, not terrorism.
Five Democrats in the Senate and three senior Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee submitted questions to Holder about the NSA-DEA relationship, joining two prominent Republicans who have expressed concerns. The matter will be discussed during classified briefings scheduled for September, Republican and Democratic aides said.
“These allegations raise serious concerns that gaps in the policy and law are allowing overreach by the federal government’s intelligence gathering apparatus,” wrote the senators – Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Ron Wyden of Oregon, Tom Udall of New Mexico, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Sherrod Brown of Ohio.
Surveillance
Apparently it affects your health and breeds conformity!
Well, you see, it’s a little bigger than that
So in two weeks, we go from the NSA spying on two percent of internet traffic to 75 percent? Will anyone bet on 100?
And, here we go again. This time, it’s the WSJ journal with the scoop on NSA surveillance, and how the defenders of the NSA have been lying to us. Despite claims that the NSA was really only focused on foreign communications, the WSJ is reporting that it actually covers 75% of US internet traffic:
The National Security Agency—which possesses only limited legal authority to spy on U.S. citizens—has built a surveillance network that covers more Americans’ Internet communications than officials have publicly disclosed, current and former officials say.
The system has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic in the hunt for foreign intelligence, including a wide array of communications by foreigners and Americans. In some cases, it retains the written content of emails sent between citizens within the U.S. and also filters domestic phone calls made with Internet technology, these people say.
Basically, they’re just revealing more details about the things that whistleblower Mark Klein revealed years ago: that the NSA has deals with the major telcos which scoop up a huge amount of internet traffic.
The programs, code-named Blarney, Fairview, Oakstar, Lithium and Stormbrew, among others, filter and gather information at major telecommunications companies. Blarney, for instance, was established with AT&T Inc., former officials say. AT&T declined to comment.
This filtering takes place at more than a dozen locations at major Internet junctions in the U.S., officials say.
The WSJ report is wrong on one account, though. It claims that people believed that the NSA’s filtering actually happened “where undersea or other foreign cables enter the country” but that’s not true. Mark Klein made it clear that the NSA had machines directly on AT&T’s property.
And, of course, it will come as no surprise that these programs that work directly with telcos to tap into full internet traffic aren’t just about metadata:
…this set of programs shows the NSA has the capability to track almost anything that happens online, so long as it is covered by a broad court order.
[….] Inevitably, officials say, some U.S. Internet communications are scanned and intercepted, including both “metadata” about communications, such as the “to” and “from” lines in an email, and the contents of the communications themselves.
This also shouldn’t be a surprise. For all the talk of “metadata” it was always clear that the surveillance defenders were talking about this program only, which was the Patriot Act Section 215 “business records” program. But other programs, such as these listed above, were clearly about actual content as well.
Perspective
From Ted Rall:
