Mark Glenn

What was that thing you said, Abe Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League? You know, that really dramatic thing you said in the speech you made in Palm Beach, where you blamed the internet for the recent rise in ‘anti-Semitism’ around the world, and how you couldn’t remember ever being so ‘seriously concerned about the safety and security’ of your grandson because of it?

Well, what do you know, Abe…miracles do exist. There is actually something upon which you and I can agree. You see, I too have never been so afraid for the future of my progeny, and the source of my worry also stems from the recent rise in anti-Semitism. —No, Abe, I am not Jewish, thank God, for if I were then chances are better than not that I would find myself in the clutches of evil, conspiring men (such as you) who are always drumming up new ways of enriching and empowering themselves by getting their own people into trouble.

You see, the reason that I am alarmed at the recent rise in ‘anti-Semitism’ is because I am a real, living, flesh-and-blood-Semite Abe, unlike you and those for whom you presume to speak. As such, my children are also Semitic and–if I am so blessed–my grandchildren will be as well.

Do not let my non-Semitic-sounding name fool you. There is more ‘Semitism’ in one of my eyelashes than what you and your people could possibly dream of possessing in your wildest, most uninhibited fantasies. My relatives came from the Middle East, unlike yours which came from the ghettos of either Europe or Russia. My relatives are the ancient Filasteens and Phoenicians whereas yours (and those of 95% of the world’s Jewish people) came from the ancient kingdom of Khazaria in southern Russia. My skin is dark and my eyes are dark and almond-shaped, unlike your features which are fair and white in appearance. I grew up hearing dialects of the Aramaic language that was spoken by Jesus and his apostles and I ate the food that has been part of that region for thousands of years.

Stephen Lendman

Out-of-control spying reflects America's true face. At stake are fundamental rights too important to lose. They're gravely eroded already. They're headed toward disappearing altogether. They may not survive much longer.

Everybody spies on everyone else. America likely does it best of all. It spies on friends and foes alike. In "Animal Farm," Orwell said "All animals are equal but some are more equal than others." As the world's sole superpower, America is most of all.

Expect no policy change. A previous article discussed Senate legislation legitimizing lawless surveillance. Obama wants it and then some.

On November 2, The New York Times headlined "No Morsel Too Minuscule for All-Consuming NSA."

"Mr. Obama and top intelligence officials have defended the agency's role in preventing terrorist attacks. But as the documents make clear, the focus on counterterrorism is a misleadingly narrow sales pitch for an agency with an almost unlimited agenda. Its scale and aggressiveness are breathtaking." No amount spent is too much if "it adds to the agency's global phone book."

"The agency, using a combination of jawboning, stealth and legal force, has turned the nation's Internet and telecommunications companies into collection partners, installing filters in their facilities, serving them with court orders, building back doors into their software and acquiring keys to break their encryption."

NSA wants nothing escaping scrutiny. Privacy no longer exists. Rule of law principles don't matter. Anything goes is policy. Everything transmitted electronically is fair game for intrusion.

Glen Ford

When presidents fail, it is a public spectacle. In his rush into unprovoked war against Syria, President Obama overplayed his hand. Shortly before he appeared on television on Tuesday, “Obama’s handlers advised him that his political position was, for the time being, untenable.” But he’ll soon be back on the warpath, meaner and more aggressive than ever.

It was a strange speech, in which the real news was left for last, popping out like a Jack-in-the-Box after 11 minutes of growls and snarls and Obama’s bizarre whining about how unfair it is to be restrained from making war on people who have done you no harm. The president abruptly switched from absurd, lie-based justifications for war to his surprise announcement that, no, Syria’s turn to endure Shock and Awe had been postponed. The reader suddenly realizes that the diplomatic developments had been hastily cut and pasted into the speech, probably only hours before. Obama had intended to build the case for smashing Assad to an imperial peroration – a laying down of the law from on high. But his handlers threw in the towel, for reasons both foreign and domestic. Temporarily defeated, Obama will be back on the Syria warpath as soon as the proper false flag operations can be arranged.

James Bamford

In mid-May, Edward Snowden, an American in his late twenties, walked through the onyx entrance of the Mira Hotel on Nathan Road in Hong Kong and checked in. He was pulling a small black travel bag and had a number of laptop cases draped over his shoulders. Inside those cases were four computers packed with some of his country’s most closely held secrets.

Within days of Snowden’s documents appearing in The Guardian and The Washington Post, revealing several of the National Security Agency’s extensive domestic surveillance programs, bookstores reported a sudden spike in the sales of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984. On Amazon.com, the book made the “Movers & Shakers” list and skyrocketed 6,021 percent in a single day. Written sixty-five years ago, it described a fictitious totalitarian society where a shadowy leader known as “Big Brother” controls his population through invasive surveillance. “The telescreens,” Orwell wrote, “have hidden microphones and cameras. These devices, alongside informers, permit the Thought Police to spy upon everyone….”

Today, as the Snowden documents make clear, it is the NSA that keeps track of phone calls, monitors communications, and analyzes people’s thoughts through data mining of Google searches and other online activity. “Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,” Orwell wrote about his protagonist, Winston Smith.

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

David Bromwich

The crux of the NSA story in one phrase: 'collect it all'.
~ Glenn Greenwald

Most Americans who know anything about the National Security Agency probably got their mental picture of it from a 1998 thriller called Enemy of the State. A lawyer (Will Smith), swept up by mistake into the system of total surveillance, suddenly finds his life turned upside down, his family watched and harassed, his livelihood taken from him and the records of his conduct altered and criminalised. He is saved by a retired NSA analyst (Gene Hackman) who knows the organisation from innards to brains and hates every cog and gear that drives it. This ally is a loner. He has pulled back his way of life and associations to a minimum, and lives now in a desolate building called The Jar, which he has proofed against spying and tricked out with anti-listening armour, decoy-signal devices and advanced encryption-ware. From his one-man fortress, he leads the hero to turn the tables on the agency and to expose one of its larger malignant operations.

Michael Hayden, who became the director of the NSA in 1999, saw the movie and told his workers they had an image problem: the agency had to change its ways and inspire the trust of citizens. But in 2001 Hayden, like many other Americans, underwent a galvanic change of consciousness and broke through to the other side. In the new era, in order to fight a new enemy, he saw that the United States must be equipped with a secret police as inquisitive and capable as the police of a totalitarian state, though of course more scrupulous.

Gripped by the same fever and an appetite for power all his own, Dick Cheney floated the idea of Total Information Awareness (soliciting Americans to spy on their neighbours to fight terrorism), but found the country not yet ready for it. So he took the project underground and executed it in secret. Cheney issued the orders, his lawyer David Addington drew up the rationale, and Hayden at NSA made the practical arrangements. Eventually Cheney would appoint Hayden director of the CIA.

Stephen Lendman

It's long past time America was held accountable.

Give credit when deserved. It happens all too seldom. The Guardian is an establishment publication. It's been around since 1821. It's credentials are well-known. It published other notable scoops. It was out in front on Rupert Murdoch's News International phone hacking scandal. It caused an uproar in parliament. Related police corruption was revealed. So did information about Murdoch's son James, as well as other News Corp executives and editors having private meetings with Prime Minister David Cameron never disclosed.

Guardian contributors told readers what they need to know. They told enough to matter. They're reporting responsibly on Snowden. They're doing what journalists are supposed to do - their job. They broke news about Snowden's revelations. Follow-up reports explained more. Expect others ahead.

A previous article discussed Guardian editorial opinion on Snowden. It bears repeating. It headlined "Edward Snowden: in defence of whistleblowers," saying: He's no traitor. America's First Amendment matters. It "prevents prior restraint and affords a considerable measure of protection to free speech."

Obama violates its letter and spirit. He's done so by

"show(ing) a dismaying aggression in not only criminalising leaking and whistleblowing, but also recently placing reporters under surveillance - tracking them and pulling their phone and email logs in order to monitor their sources for stories that were patently of public importance."

Whistleblower Thomas Drake revealed

"a vast, systemic institutionalized, industrial-scale Leviathan surveillance state that has clearly gone far beyond the original mandate to deal with terrorism."

John W. Whitehead

"One of the hallmarks of an authoritarian government is its fixation on hiding everything it does behind a wall of secrecy while simultaneously monitoring, invading and collecting files on everything its citizenry does." ~ Glenn Greenwald

President Obama’s declaration that “America is at a crossroads” in the fight against terror, a fight that is increasingly turning inwards, setting its sights on homegrown extremists, should give every American pause.

We have indeed reached a crossroads. History may show that from this point forward, we will have left behind any semblance of constitutional government and entered into a militaristic state where all citizens are suspects and security trumps freedom. Certainly, this is a time when government officials operate off their own inscrutable, self-serving playbook with little in the way of checks and balances, while American citizens are subjected to all manner of indignities and violations with little hope of defending themselves. We have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age, let’s call it the age of authoritarianism.

Even with its constantly shifting terrain, this topsy-turvy travesty of law and government has become America’s new normal. Don’t believe me? Let me take you on a brief guided tour, but prepare yourself: the landscape is particularly disheartening to anyone who remembers what America used to be.

Chris Floyd

The truth-telling of the imprisoned Bradley Manning continues to bear rich fruit, even as he faces a lifetime in prison for acting on principle to save innocent lives and prevent his country from staining itself further with war crimes. This week, the Guardian released a special investigation into the hideous regime of torture that the United States imposed and empowered during its years-long rape of Iraq.

The Guardian report draws on the trove of documents that Manning gave to Wikileaks (and the now diplomatically "sequestered" Julian Assange) to provide new details on the direct links of America's highest officials -- including the bipartisanly adored and now much mourned retired apparatchik David Petraeus -- to the torture of tens of thousands of Iraqis.

In many ways, of course, it's hardly a revelation that American forces were deeply involved in torture during the "extraordinary achievement" (B. Obama) in Iraq.

Stephen Lendman

Throughout his tenure, Obama governed lawlessly for the monied interests that own him. He's waged no-holds-barred war on humanity. Strategy includes homeland tyranny, fear-mongering, saber rattling, hot wars, proxy ones, drone ones, domestic political ones, geopolitical ones, financial ones, anti-populist ones, sanctions, subversion, sabotage, targeted assassinations, mass murder, cyberwar, and more.

In May 2009, Obama prioritized cybersecurity. He called cyber-threats "one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation." "America's economic prosperity in the 21st century will depend on cybersecurity." He ordered a top-to-bottom review. A Cyberspace Policy Review report followed. He waged cyberwar on Iran. He did so cooperatively with Israel.

Glen Ford

It’s not a sudden madness, but a long history of mass murder come full circle.

As a native-born American, I grew up watching cowboy and Indian shoot-em-ups in which the highlight of the movie was when the white guys in the circled wagon train shot the Indians off their horses until all the red men were dead, and very silent. Indians didn’t do a lot of screaming in pain when they were shot; they just expired. Same thing with buck-toothed Japanese, line after line of them, charging into U.S. machine guns, falling instantly silent and dead. It was somehow quite clean, almost antiseptic, these cinematic rituals of death, all staged for the broadest popular consumption to demonstrate the inevitability – and cosmic justice – of ultimate white victory over the darker races.

This was mother’s milk to the white American nation – which is why Richard Pryor and kids like me rooted for the Indians. Mass murder is at the core of the American national religion, which is a celebration of a genocidal march across a continent filled with other, doomed human beings. America’s contribution to European culture was to invite “all the nations of Europe” to come to these shores and become fellow “white” citizens, whose status was defined by the enforced inferiority of Blacks and the remnants of the Indians. Ritual burnings of Blacks were organized as great public festivals, attended by thousands, staged in order to affirm whites’ collective right to commit murder. This monopoly on violence was what made them white Americans.