Iraq Redux: Guardian Buys US Syrian WMD Claims

'A Political Ploy'? The Guardian Editors Swallow US Claims on Syrian WMD

by David Edwards - Media Lens

Last week, we reviewed the questions and doubts surrounding claims that the chemical weapon sarin has been used in Syria.

The Obama administration has since claimed that its 'red line' has indeed been crossed – it now has firm evidence that Syrian government forces have used chemical weapons. As a result, the US will begin supplying Syrian insurgents with small arms and ammunition. White House foreign policy adviser Benjamin Rhodes gave dates and locations for alleged sarin attacks but no details of the fighting or numbers of people killed.

In a subsequent article for McClatchy Washington Bureau, Matthew Schofield noted that chemical weapons experts remain 'skeptical of U.S. claim that Syria used sarin'. Jean Pascal Zanders, a leading expert on chemical weapons, until recently a senior research fellow at the European Union's Institute for Security Studies, commented:

'It's not just that we can't prove a sarin attack; it's that we're not seeing what we would expect to see from a sarin attack. In a world where even the secret execution of Saddam Hussein was taped by someone, it doesn't make sense that we don't see videos, that we don't see photos, showing bodies of the dead, and the reddened faces and the bluish extremities of the affected.'

Greg Thielmann, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Arms Control Association, said that 'my guess is they [US officials] have it right'. But Thielmann noted that the White House statement on the crossing of the 'red line' in Syria was 'carefully and prudentially worded' and acknowledged the lack of a 'continuous chain of custody for the physiological samples from those exposed to sarin'.

As we discussed last month, a secure chain of custody is vital for ensuring samples have not been contaminated. Alastair Hay, a toxicologist at the University of Leeds, commented:

'To make a legal case - whether it's against the Syrian government or opposition group - you need an ironclad chain of custody.'

Philip Coyle, a senior scientist at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, said that the lack of hard, public evidence made it difficult for experts to assess the validity of the administration's claims. What happened 'doesn't look like a series of sarin attacks to him', Schofield reports of Coyle, who also commented: 'Without blood samples, it's hard to know. It does not eliminate all doubt in my mind.'

Anthony Cordesman, a security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, argues that 'the "discovery" that Syria used chemical weapons might be a political ploy... The real reasons [for US intervention] are the broader humanitarian issues involved and far more urgent U.S. strategic interests'.

Yuri Ushakov, Vladimir Putin's top foreign policy adviser, said:

'What was presented to us by the Americans does not look convincing. It would be hard to even call them facts.'

The Independent's Robert Fisk again poured scorn on the claims:

'Washington's excuse for its new Middle East adventure - that it must arm Assad's enemies because the Damascus regime has used sarin gas against them - convinces no-one in the Middle East. Final proof of the use of gas by either side in Syria remains almost as nebulous as President George W. Bush's claim that Saddam's Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.'

Despite all of this, a Guardian editorial offered a strikingly different judgement. Noting that Obama had decided to authorise military aid on the basis 'that Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons against the opposition', the editors commented:

'That use is an outrage and is against international agreements. It adds to the charge sheet against the Assad regime.'

These are among the most shocking comments we have ever seen in the Guardian. Despite the indisputable fraudulence of US-UK claims regarding Iraqi WMD, an equally staggering litany of lies on Libya, and despite the existence of gaps and doubts so reminiscent of Iraq 2002-2003, the Guardian is willing to quietly endorse the latest claims on Syria – 'Assad' clearly has used chemical weapons and that use should be added to the charge sheet against him.

Once again, when it really matters, the Guardian editors are on-message, on-side and boosting war propaganda.

Unfortunately, the Guardian has form. On January 24, 2003, at a crucial time, leading Guardian reporter Martin Woollacott wrote of Saddam Hussein:

'Among those knowledgeable about Iraq there are few, if any, who believe he is not hiding such weapons. It is a given.' (Woollacott, 'This drive to war is one of the mysteries of our time - We know Saddam is hiding weapons. That isn't the argument,' The Guardian, January 24, 2003)

In fact, this was not only false, it was a near-exact reversal of the truth. Hans Blix, former head of UNMOVIC arms inspections in Iraq (November 2002-March 2003), said in June 2003:

'If anyone had cared... to study what UNSCOM [UN arms inspection team in Iraq, 1991-1998] was saying for quite a number of years, and what we were saying, they should not have assumed that they would stumble on weapons.' (Miles Pomper and Paul Kerr, 'An Interview With Hans Blix,' Arms Control Today, June 16, 2003)

Ironically, in a leading article on the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq disaster, the Guardian later observed:

'What is already clear from the first week alone is that the decisions, secret or otherwise, that led to war were the product of systemic failure. Intelligence analysts, diplomats, in fact the entire machinery of the British government, proved supine against Washington's will. Under that pressure, almost everyone buckled.' (Leading Article: 'Iraq inquiry: Dancing to American drums,' The Guardian, November 28, 2009)

The press included!

Supposedly at the other end of the media 'spectrum', a leading article in The Times echoed the Guardian's view:

'Assad's chemical attacks are a barbarous form of warfare intended to spread terror. Arming the rebels is a temperate response to try to force a political settlement.' (Leading article, 'Syria's Red Line,' The Times, June 15, 2013)

The French Government 'Believes' - An Exchange With The BBC's Jonathan Marcus

On June 13, the BBC's diplomatic correspondent, Jonathan Marcus, responded to last week's media alert:

David,

Far be it from me to puncture your corporate conspiracy view [sic] of the Journalistic world but having ones own thoughts quoted against one is a little annoying.

In your piece on Syria and Sarin you mention the BBC article's scepticism regarding the French claims and then you castigate me for a subsequent piece where I suggest that if Sarin really has been used and the French have proof then this would be a "potential game-changer" - note the use of the word "potential".

The earlier scepticism in the BBC article was based on my preceding piece which appeared on the same BBC web site, text below:

"Laurent Fabius is certain of one thing; that the chemical weapon sarin has been used in Syria.

"But beyond this he seems to have few facts. He cannot say - or does not choose to say - exactly where the sarin was used (except that it was employed on several occasions) or by whom.

"The Syrian government has the chemical agent in its arsenal, although it is always possible that some stocks could have fallen into the hands of rebel forces.

"This is not yet the sort of game-changer that might provoke some dramatic shift in US or Western policy. For now it looks like a renewed effort by the French to maintain the diplomatic pressure on President Bashar al-Assad as efforts continue to convene a peace conference in Geneva."

I think this injects a sufficient note of scepticism and is clearly what the reference in the BBC article is drawn from. I don't think either I or the BBC have swallowed any stories about CW - as us "militaristic hacks tend to call it" (irony there). My judgement is that we have not seen anything yet in the publicly available material from Syria which suggests without any doubt the use of sarin - no Halabja style footage for example.

I think we have been suitably cautious and continue to be so. We do I think have a responsibility also to report what key actors say while also highlighting, as we do - that there is little evidence so far for their assertions. Try to be reassured.

JM

We responded the same day:

Hi Jonathan

Thanks for taking the trouble to email, we appreciate it. You write that 'having ones own thoughts quoted against one is a little annoying'. It certainly is and we apologise for any irritation caused. We're trying to open up debate rather than offend individual journalists.

By the way, for what it's worth, we've said many times that we don't at all believe that media performance can be explained by any kind of conspiracy theory.

I am of course aware that you used the word 'potential' when you commented that the French sarin claims were a 'potential game-changer', but I was making a different point. I noted that you had written:

'The French government now believes not only that the nerve agent sarin has been used in Syria, but that it was deployed by "the regime and its accomplices".'

You've reinforced that in your reply: 'Laurent Fabius is certain of one thing; that the chemical weapon sarin has been used in Syria.'

I'm sure you recall how in 2002 and 2003 journalists like Andrew Rawnsley of the Observer were forever making this kind of claim:

'The intelligence material that the Prime Minister sees makes him genuinely disturbed - it would not be going too far to say petrified - about Saddam Hussein's potential ability to use weapons of mass destruction.' (Andrew Rawnsley, 'How to deal with the American goliath,' The Observer, February 24, 2002)

Our question to Rawnsley and others, then, was: 'How on earth can a journalist know what Blair really believes?'

After all, despite their earlier impassioned claims, it is now really incontrovertible that US-UK leaders did not at all believe that Iraq was a threat to the West in 2002-2003. Ray McGovern, a former high-ranking CIA analyst, commented:

'It was 95 per cent charade. And they all knew it: Bush, Blair, Howard.' (Quoted, John Pilger, 'Blair's Mass Deception,' Daily Mirror, February 3, 2004)

That's the point I was making when I suggested you take a leaf out of the Greenwald book of journalism. You claim the French government 'believes' and is 'certain' that the Syrian government has used sarin. But doesn't the example of Iraq suggest that this may not in fact be the case?

In your reply you comment:

'My judgement is that we have not seen anything yet in the publicly available material from Syria which suggests without any doubt the use of sarin - no Halabja style footage for example.'

Agreed. Do you then agree that the BBC's headline, ''World "must act" Over Syria Weapons', was irresponsible?

Thanks again for writing.

Best wishes

David Edwards

Marcus wrote again on June 13:

As with newspapers the author of the piece does not write the headlines.

I only wrote to correct your error not to get drawn into a lengthy exchange.

My belief is that your view of much of the media world is wrong - though like everything it is not without is faults - and I think it does boil down to a rather simplistic conspiracy theory when all is said and done.
JM

We replied:

Thanks. Yes, I totally understand you don't want a lengthy exchange. But do you not agree that you in fact don't know what the French government really 'believes'? Shouldn't that uncertainty be reflected in your journalism?
Best
DE

Marcus responded briefly:

I think I probably don't really know what you believe - though I think I have a pretty good idea !

An interesting light was thrown on this discussion the following day, when Marcus wrote on the BBC website:

'Thus the US response to President Assad's apparent crossing of a "red line" seems tentative at best.'

Just one day earlier, Marcus had written to us:

'My judgement is that we have not seen anything yet in the publicly available material from Syria which suggests without any doubt the use of sarin - no Halabja style footage for example.' (Marcus, Email to Media Lens, June 13, 2013)

We quoted these comments to Marcus, asking: 'What happened to change your view over the last 24 hours?'

Marcus replied:

Again I don't understand you - what does the word apparent mean in this context? The piece - if you can take in more than a sentence at a time, raises all sorts of questions about the evidence - at least I think it does.

You were plain wrong again in the last criticism of me - but clearly you are not going to admit this.

Look David - it was fun while it lasted but I am changing my policy and no longer replying to e-mails coming from you or your supporters. You are not accurate or precise in your criticisms. Far from it. I can only marvel at your application - is Medialens your part-time time hobby or a job. Do you have private means ? Oh my goodness that was a question - but please don't answer. Or as you would put it " don't you agree that this is all becoming a pain in the proverbial........"

I have been contacted in the past by a number of fellow journos far more eminent than me who marvel at my willingness to engage with you. They think I am nuts.

I am coming to the conclusion they may have been right

Au revoir

JM

We replied:

Hi Jonathan

The comment, 'Assad's apparent crossing of a "red line",' asserts that Assad does indeed appear to have drossed a 'red line', that it seems to be the case. Yesterday you said there was no firm evidential basis for the claim. You could have said 'alleged crossing of a "red line"', or 'claimed'.

Why do fellow journalists think you're nuts for responding to polite, rational challenges? Isn't that what democracy is all about?

Best

DE

Once again, commentators are nodding sagely at the 'limited but persuasive' intelligence and sincere convictions of well-intentioned Western politicians. Our Dear Leaders are 'certain', 'they are convinced', they 'believe' that sarin has been used. And why on earth would we not also 'believe'?


Suggested Action

The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.

Alan Rusbridger, Guardian editor
Email: alan.rusbridger@guardian.co.uk

Chris Elliott, Guardian readers' editor
Email: reader@guardian.co.uk

Jonathan Marcus, BBC diplomatic editor
Email: jonathan.marcus@bbc.co.uk

Whose Spoons Stir Syria's Roiling Pot?

Israel Stirs the Pot in Syria

by Jonathan Cook - CounterPunch

Nazareth - For much of the past two years Israel stood sphinx-like on the sidelines of Syria’s civil war. Did it want Bashar al-Assad’s regime toppled? Did it favour military intervention to help opposition forces? And what did it think of the increasing visibility of Islamist groups in Syria? It was difficult to guess.

In recent weeks, however, Israel has moved from relative inaction to a deepening involvement in Syrian affairs. It launched two air strikes on Syrian positions last month, and at the same time fomented claims that Damascus had used chemical weapons, in what looked suspiciously like an attempt to corner Washington into direct intervention.

Last week, based on renewed accusations of the use of the nerve agent sarin by Syria, the US said it would start giving military aid directly to the opposition.

With suspicions of Israeli meddling growing, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was finally forced last week to deny as ”nonsense” evidence that Israeli forces are operating secretly over the border.

Nonetheless, the aura of inscrutability has hardly lifted, stoked by a series of leaks from Israeli officials. Their statements have tacked wildly between threats to oust Assad one moment and denials that Israel has any interest in his departure the next.

Is Israel sending out contradictory signals to sow confusion, or is it simply confused itself?

The answer can be deduced in the unappealing outcomes before Israel whoever emerges triumphant. Israel stands to lose strategically if either Assad or the opposition wins decisively.

Assad, and before him his father, Hafez, ensured that for decades the so-called separation of forces line between Syria and Israel, after the latter occupied the Golan Heights in 1967, remained the quietest of all Israel’s borders.

A taste of what might happen should the Syrian regime fall was provided in 2011 when more than 1,000 Palestinians massed in the no man’s land next to the Golan, while Assad’s attention was directed to repressing popular demonstrations elsewhere. At least 100 Palestinians crossed into the Heights, with one even reaching Tel Aviv.

Last week, following intensified fighting between the rebels and the Syrian army over Quneitra, a town next to the only crossing between Israel and Syria, UN peacekeepers from Austria started pulling out because of the dangers.

Briefly the opposition forces captured Quneitra, offering a reminder that any void there would likely suck in Palestinian militants and jihadists keen to settle scores with Israel. That point was underlined by one Israeli official, who told the Times of London: “Better the devil we know than the demons we can only imagine if Syria falls into chaos, and the extremists from across the Arab world gain a foothold there.”

For that reason, the Israeli military is reported to considering two responses familiar from Lebanon: invading to establish a security zone on the other side of the demarcation line, or covertly training and arming Syrian proxies inside the same area.

Neither approach turned out well for Israel in Lebanon, but there are indications – despite Netanyahu’s denial – that Israel is already pursuing the second track.

According to the New York Times, Israel is working with Syrian villagers not allied to Assad or the opposition and offering “humanitarian aid” and “maintaining intense intelligence activity”. In an interview with the Argentinian media last month, Assad accused Israel of having gone further, “directly supporting” opposition groups inside Syria with “logistical support”, intelligence on potential targets and plans for attacking them.

If the future looks bleak for Israel with Assad gone, it looks no brighter if he entrenches his rule.

A strong Assad means Syria will continue to play a pivotal role in maintaining a military front opposed to Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. That in turn means a strong Iran and a strong Hizbullah, the Shia militia in Lebanon.

Hizbullah’s formidable record in guerrilla warfare is the main reason Israel no longer occupies south Lebanon. Similarly, Hizbullah’s arsenal of rockets is a genuine restraint on greater Israeli aggression towards not only Lebanon but Syria and Iran too.

Israel’s air strikes in early May appear to have targeted shipments through Syria of more sophisticated weaponry for Hizbullah, probably supplied by Iran. Longer range missiles and anti-aircraft systems are seen as “game-changing” by Israel precisely because they would further limit its room for offensive manoeuvres.

Israel will be equally stymied if Assad stays in power and upgrades his anti-aircraft defences with the S-300 system promised by Russia.

Either way, Israel’s much vaunted ambition to engineer an attack on Iran to prevent what it claims is Tehran’s goal of developing a nuclear bomb – joining Israel in the club of Middle Eastern nuclear-armed states – would probably come at too high a price to be feasible.

So what does Israel consider in its interests if neither Assad’s survival nor his removal is appealing?

According to some well-placed Israeli commentators, the best Israel can hope for is that Assad holds on but only just. That would keep the regime in place, or boxed into its heartland, but sapped of the energy to concern itself with anything other than immediate matters of survival. It would be unable to offer help to Hizbullah, isolating the militia in Lebanon and cutting off its supply line to Iran.

In closed-door discussions, analyst Ben Caspit has noted, the Israeli army has put forward as its “optimal scenario” Syria breaking up into three separate states, with Assad confined to an Alawite canton in Damascus and along the coast.

A long war of attrition between Assad and the opposition has additional benefits for Israel following the decision by Hizbullah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, to draft thousands of fighters to assist the Syrian army. Protacted losses could deplete Hizbullah’s ranks and morale, while fighting is likely to spill over from Syria into Lebanon, tying up the militia on multiple fronts.

But there is a risk here too. If Hizbullah performs well, as it did in defeating the rebels this month at the town of Qusayr, its position in Lebanon could be strengthened rather than weakened. And in that situation Assad’s debt to Hizbullah would only deepen.

Such calculations are doubtless exercising Israeli military minds.

The greatest danger of all is that yet more parties get drawn in, turning the conflict into a regional one. That would be the likely outcome if Israel chooses to increase its interference, or if the US comes good with its recent threats to increase military aid to the opposition or impose a no-fly zone over parts or all of Syria.

Either way, Israel might see the transformation of Syria in to a new mini-cold war theatre as advantageous.

However, the Israeli sphinx isn’t offering any answers quite yet.

 

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His new website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

A version of this article first appeared in The National, Abu Dhabi.

Not With a Whimper But a Sigh: Progessively Pragmatic Assessments of Obama Presidency

Absolving Obama , or The Lamentable Sigh of the Depressed Progressive 

by Chris Floyd - Empire Burlesque

Something very, very bad happened over the weekend.

President Obama made Digby sigh.

What did President Obama do that made Digby sigh? Well, that thing about increasing American military involvement in Syria. Digby quotes, and agrees with, a piece by Mark Lynch which she calls "a deeply skeptical and very depressing assessment of the decision to intervene in Syria."

Digby -- like most other sentient beings on the planet, and at least 85 percent of all Americans in the most recent polls -- believes that intervening in Syria is a bad decision and will in all likelihood make the situation, already a vast cauldron of human suffering, worse.

So who is to blame for this terrible decision, this stupid decision, this bad decision that will almost certainly extend, expand and prolong the suffering of multitudes of innocent human beings?

Now you and I might think that the person responsible for the decision to send American weapons to the Syrian rebels rests with the commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces and the Chief Executive of the U.S. government, positions subsumed within the office of the President of the United States -- a post currently held by Barack Obama.

But it turns out that President Barack Obama is not responsible for the decision of the commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces and the Chief Executive of the U.S. government to send American arms to the Syrian rebels.

So who is responsible, if Obama is not? You'll never guess.

Circumstances.

Yes, apparently, once again our noble Nobelist has been torn away from his true intentions and, very reluctantly, with heavy heart -- indeed, with the kind of tragic grandeur that perhaps only President Daniel Day-Lewis might have known in the grimmest days of the Civil War -- been forced, forced against his will, against the very inclination of his soul, to send the American war machine into yet another country.

For who can forget his anguished reluctance to escalate the Afghan War with his Bush-like surge? Or the heart-tormented nights he spent before intervening illegally in Libya? Or the sweat-drops of blood he shed in fervent prayer before escalating the drone attacks on Pakistani villages? Or the spiritual torment he must go through each and every week before, sadly, reluctantly, he orders a new raft of "extrajudicial killings" by his globe-spanning death squads?

And now, once again, despite what we may be sure were weeks of fervent petition to the Lord to let this cup pass from him, the president has been forced to act against his will and make another bad, stupid, murderous decision. As Digby puts it:

Everything I read says that President Obama, unlike many in his cabinet (including his former Secretary of State) has been extremely reluctant to engage but finds himself hemmed in by the circumstances.

You see, he has been "hemmed in by circumstances." Despite his extreme reluctance to use the American military machine in dubious, sinister and counterproductive operations -- and despite his position as commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces, the most powerful military in the history of the world, and as Chief Executive of the U.S. government, likewise the most powerful state in human history, he has been "hemmed in by circumstances" and forced to make this bad decision.

Yes, he can order the assassination of anyone on earth. Yes, he can read the emails and web trails of anyone on earth. Yes, he can launch a nuclear war tomorrow and destroy the planet. But he cannot resist the "circumstances" that have compelled him to intervene in Syria. Poor man. Poor, powerless, tragic man.

And what are those circumstances? Well, that is not crystal clear in Digby's lament, but apparently the main circumstance is the fact that a "red line" which Barack Obama himself freely decided would be the trigger for intervention has, apparently, according to assertions by his "intelligence" chiefs -- including many of the same people (such as his hand-picked Director of National Intelligence, James "Saddam moved his non-existent WMD to Syria" Clapper) who provided the "slam-dunk" intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

These are the "circumstances" that have "hemmed in" Obama. These are the iron chains which this poor man, who has no power -- not even the power to change his own mind about red lines and triggers -- is now bound with.

But it's not just Obama. Sadly, all our presidents are poor, powerless men, hemmed in by similar circumstances. As Digby tells us:

He certainly isn't the first president to find himself in that situation. America's military empire has perhaps been the most "exceptional" thing about us in recent decades.

Why, I suppose even poor, powerless George W. Bush found himself in such a hemming situation, forced by his own rhetoric and bullshit "red lines" to invade Iraq. And poor old Big Dawg Bill Clinton found himself forced to press the sanctions on Iraq that killed more than half a million children. And .....

It is all, as Digby says, very depressing. Depressing that America keeps going around the world fomenting war, chaos, bloodshed, instability and ruin, bankrupting its own people in the process while stuffing the pockets of war profiteers. And depressing too that none of our presidents apparently have the power to stop this from happening. They are all "hemmed in by circumstances," by the American military empire ... that same military empire that each one of them fought tooth and nail to get control of.

Digby concludes:

I hope he resists the pressures that Lynch illustrates above [i.e., sliding into ever-deeper involvement]. But the first step is always the hardest. The next ones will probably be easier which argues for not taking the step in the first place.

Sigh.

I must confess that my first reaction to the news that Obama is intervening militarily in Syria -- I'm sorry, that circumstances are intervening militarily in Syria -- was not exactly a sigh. But hey, maybe Digby's right. For really, what else can we do, but sigh and shrug and frown a little frown? He's "our guy" after all, right? Not perfect, but the best "we" can do for now, right? "We" fought like hell to re-elect him, so when he does something stupid, destructive, repressive or murderous, what else can you do? Turn on him? Leave the progressive "tribe"? God forbid! No, "we" can do so much more from inside the tent, bringing progressive pressure to bear by judicious but respectful criticism (and maybe some on-line petitions or something), tempered with "our" general support. Right? Right?

Sigh.

Snowden Press Reverb: Celeb Journos Throw 4th Under the Cyberdefense Bus

David Brooks, Tom Friedman, Bill Keller Wish Edward Snowden Had Just Followed Orders

by Norman Solomon

Edward Snowden’s disclosures, the New York Times reported on Sunday, “have renewed a longstanding concern: that young Internet aficionados whose skills the agencies need for counterterrorism and cyberdefense sometimes bring an anti-authority spirit that does not fit the security bureaucracy.”

Agencies like the NSA and CIA -- and private contractors like Booz Allen -- can’t be sure that all employees will obey the rules without interference from their own idealism. This is a basic dilemma for the warfare/surveillance state, which must hire and retain a huge pool of young talent to service the digital innards of a growing Big Brother.

With private firms scrambling to recruit workers for top-secret government contracts, the current situation was foreshadowed by novelist John Hersey in his 1960 book The Child Buyer. When the vice president of a contractor named United Lymphomilloid, “in charge of materials procurement,” goes shopping for a very bright ten-year-old, he explains that “my duties have an extremely high national-defense rating.” And he adds: “When a commodity that you need falls in short supply, you have to get out and hustle. I buy brains.”

That’s what Booz Allen and similar outfits do. They buy brains. And obedience.

But despite the best efforts of those contractors and government agencies, the brains still belong to people. And, as the Times put it, an “anti-authority spirit” might not fit “the security bureaucracy.”

In the long run, Edward Snowden didn’t fit. Neither did Bradley Manning. They both had brains that seemed useful to authority. But they also had principles and decided to act on them.

Like the NSA and its contractors, the U.S. military is in constant need of personnel. “According to his superiors . . . Manning was not working out as a soldier, and they discussed keeping him back when his unit was deployed to Iraq,” biographer Chase Madar writes in The Passion of Bradley Manning.

“However, in the fall of 2009, the occupation was desperate for intelligence analysts with computer skills, and Private Bradley Manning, his superiors hurriedly concluded, showed signs of improvement as a workable soldier. This is how, on October 10, 2009, Private First Class Bradley Manning was deployed . . . to Iraq as an intelligence analyst.”

In their own ways, with very different backgrounds and circumstances, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden have confounded the best-laid plans of the warfare/surveillance state. They worked for “the security bureaucracy,” but as time went on they found a higher calling than just following orders. They leaked information that we all have a right to know.

This month, not only with words but also with actions, Edward Snowden is transcending the moral limits of authority and insisting that we can fully defend the Bill of Rights, emphatically including the Fourth Amendment.

What a contrast with New York Times columnists David Brooks, Thomas Friedman and Bill Keller, who have responded to Snowden’s revelations by siding with the violators of civil liberties at the top of the U.S. government.

Brooks denounced Snowden as “a traitor” during a June 14 appearance on the PBS NewsHour, saying indignantly:

“He betrayed his oath, which was given to him and which he took implicitly and explicitly. He betrayed his company, the people who gave him a job, the people who trusted him. . . . He betrayed the democratic process. It’s not up to a lone 29-year-old to decide what's private and public. We have -- actually have procedures for that set down in the Constitution and established by tradition.”

Enthralled with lockstep compliance, Brooks preached the conformist gospel: “When you work for an institution, any institution, a company, a faculty, you don't get to violate the rules of that institution and decide for your own self what you’re going to do in a unilateral way that no one else can reverse. And that's exactly what he did. So he betrayed the trust of the institution. He betrayed what creates a government, which is being a civil servant, being a servant to a larger cause, and not going off on some unilateral thing because it makes you feel grandiose.”

In sync with such bombast, Tom Friedman and former Times executive editor Bill Keller have promoted a notably gutless argument for embracing the NSA’s newly revealed surveillance programs. Friedman wrote (on June 12) and Keller agreed (June 17) that our government is correct to curtail privacy rights against surveillance -- because if we fully retained those rights and then a big terrorist attack happened, the damage to civil liberties would be worse.

What a contrast between big-name journalists craven enough to toss the Fourth Amendment overboard and whistleblowers courageous enough to risk their lives for civil liberties.


Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” - normansolomon.com
 

Squeezing India: Washington Unhappy with Iran/India Energy Ties

India's Energy Ties with Iran Unsettle Washington

by John C.K. Daly - Oilprice.com

India's relentless search for hydrocarbons to fuel its booming economy has managed the rather neat diplomatic trick of annoying Washington, delighting Tehran and intriguing Baghdad, all the while leaving the Indian Treasury fretting about how to pay for its oil imports, given tightening sanctions on fiscal dealings with Iran.

On 7 June the US State Department reluctantly announced that it was renewing India's six-month waivers for implementing sanctions against Iran, along with seven other countries eligible for waivers from the sanctions owing to good faith efforts to substantially reduce their Iranian oil imports. In New Delhi's case, it is the U.S. and EU-led sanctions rather than any willingness on India's part that has seen a fall in its Iranian oil imports. India is the second largest buyer of Iranian oil, a nation with whom it has traditionally had close ties. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that India, China, Malaysia, South Korea, Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Taiwan had all qualified for an exception to sanctions under America's Iran Sanctions Act, based on additional significant reductions in the volume of their crude oil purchases from Iran. Kerry told reporters, "Today's determination is another example of the international community's strong and steady commitment to convince Iran to meet its international obligations. This determination takes place against the backdrop of other recent actions the administration has taken to increase pressure on Iran, including the issuance of a new executive order on June 3. The message to the Iranian regime from the international community is clear: take concrete actions to satisfy the concerns of the international community, or face increasing isolation and pressure."

But even with Washington's beneficence, New Delhi is struggling to find ways to pay for its Iranian oil imports.

The U.S. and European sanctions have deeply affected Iran's international oil trade, reducing its exports by more than 50 percent and costing Iran billions of dollars in revenue since the beginning on last year. Tightening the screws, the Obama administration is now attempting to reduce Iran's oil exports even further, to less than 500,000 barrels per day through tighter sanctions. Nevertheless, despite plummeting sales overseas, Iran, OPEC's second largest oil exporter, remains one of the world's largest oil producers, with sales bringing in tens of billions of dollars in revenue annually.

And Iran is anxious to keep India as a favored customer. Last month Iran offered India lucrative terms for developing its oilfields, routing a proposed natural gas pipeline through the sea to avoid Pakistan as well as insurance to Indian refiners provided New Delhi raised oil imports. Making its case, Iran sent a high-level delegation led by Oil Minister Rostam Ghasemi to India to urge New Delhi to raise its oil purchases, which slid to 13.3 million tons in 2012-13 from 18 million tons in 2011-12. Heightening Iran's concerns, later this year Indian imports are slated to fall further to around 11 million tons.

After meeting Ghasemi Indian Oil Minister M. Veerappa Moily issued a statement noting, “The Iranian side encouraged the Indian side to increase its crude purchase. “The Indian side explained that it would encourage companies to maintain their engagement in terms of crude oil purchase, taking into account their requirements, based on commercial and international considerations.”

While Iranian-Indian trade ties continue to deepen, with Indian-based Consul General of Iran Hassan Nourian predicting that bilateral trade between India and Iran will be worth $25 billion by 2017, India is hedging its bets about energy imports, and where to make up the shortfall from the increased sanctions regime.

…and what better place to look than the Middle East's rising petro-state, Iraq?

India's External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid is heading for Baghdad for a two-day visit beginning 19 June.

Top of the agenda?

Oil - Iraq is now India's second largest supplier of oil after Saudi Arabia, having replaced Iran and become a “critical partner” of India.

It is a potential marriage made in heaven. Iraq needs an assured market for its increasing crude production, having set itself a production target of 7 million bpd from its current 3 million bpd, while India is in search of a long-term partnership with a major oil producer.

While such deepening ties will thrill Washington as much as they distress Iran, there is still a wild card in the Iraqi mix – China, now Iraq's biggest customer, already purchasing nearly half the oil that Iraq produces, almost 1.5 million barrels a day. Worse still for Indian aspirations, China is now trying for an even bigger share, bidding for a stake currently owned by Exxon Mobil in one of Iraq's largest oil fields, West Qurna.

New Delhi's choices are stark – make Washington happy, alienate long-time partner Iran, and keep fingers crossed that Beijing doesn't stitch up any further Iraqi concessions.

Tough call.

Source: http://oilprice.com/Geopolitics/International/Indias-Energy-Ties-with-Iran-Unsettle-Washington.html

Five Gloved Fingers: Creating the Global Security State

The Making of a Global Security State: The Five Uncontrollable Urges of a Secrecy-Surveillance World

by Tom Engelhardt  - TomDispatch

As happens with so much news these days, the Edward Snowden revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) spying and just how far we’ve come in the building of a surveillance state have swept over us 24/7 -- waves of leaks, videos, charges, claims, counterclaims, skullduggery, and government threats. When a flood sweeps you away, it’s always hard to find a little dry land to survey the extent and nature of the damage. Here’s my attempt to look beyond the daily drumbeat of this developing story (which, it is promised, will go on for weeks, if not months) and identify five urges essential to understanding the world Edward Snowden has helped us glimpse.

Tomgram: Engelhardt, You Are Our Secret

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Thank you for the donations that have already come in for signed copies of Rebecca Solnit’s spectacular new “memoir” -- it’s actually so much more! -- The Faraway Nearby. For the many Solnit fans among you, don’t miss the chance to have a personalized copy of her new book in return for a $100 (or more) donation to this site. Your help really does keep TomDispatch above the waves and is unbelievably appreciated. Check out the Solnit (and other book offers) at our donation page by clicking here.]

 

The Making of a Global Security State: The Five Uncontrollable Urges of a Secrecy-Surveillance World

by Tom Engelhardt

1. The Urge to be Global

Corporately speaking, globalization has been ballyhooed since at least the 1990s, but in governmental terms only in the twenty-first century has that globalizing urge fully infected the workings of the American state itself. It’s become common since 9/11 to speak of a “national security state.” But if a week of ongoing revelations about NSA surveillance practices has revealed anything, it’s that the term is already grossly outdated. Based on what we now know, we should be talking about an American global security state.

Much attention has, understandably enough, been lavished on the phone and other metadata about American citizens that the NSA is now sweeping up and about the ways in which such activities may be abrogating the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. Far less attention has been paid to the ways in which the NSA (and other U.S. intelligence outfits) are sweeping up global data in part via the just-revealed Prism and other surveillance programs.

Sometimes, naming practices are revealing in themselves, and the National Security Agency’s key data mining tool, capable in March 2013 of gathering “97 billion pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide,” has been named “boundless informant.” If you want a sense of where the U.S. Intelligence Community imagines itself going, you couldn’t ask for a better hint than that word “boundless.” It seems that for our spooks, there are, conceptually speaking, no limits left on this planet.

Today, that "community" seeks to put not just the U.S., but the world fully under its penetrating gaze. By now, the first “heat map” has been published showing where such information is being sucked up from monthly: Iran tops the list (14 billion pieces of intelligence); then come Pakistan (13.5 billion), Jordan (12.7 billion), Egypt (7.6 billion), and India (6.3 billion). Whether you realize this or not, even for a superpower that has unprecedented numbers of military bases scattered across the planet and has divided the world into six military commands, this represents something new under the sun. The only question is what?

The twentieth century was the century of “totalitarianisms.” We don’t yet have a name, a term, for the surveillance structures Washington is building in this century, but there can be no question that, whatever the present constraints on the system, “total” has something to do with it and that we are being ushered into a new world. Despite the recent leaks, we still undoubtedly have a very limited picture of just what the present American surveillance world really looks like and what it plans for our future. One thing is clear, however: the ambitions behind it are staggering and global.

In the classic totalitarian regimes of the previous century, a secret police/surveillance force attempted, via every imaginable method, including informers, wire tappers, torture techniques, imprisonment, and so on to take total control of a national environment, to turn every citizen’s life into the equivalent of an open book, or more accurately a closed, secret file lodged somewhere in that police system. The most impressive of these efforts, the most global, was the Soviet one simply because the USSR was an imperial power with a set of disparate almost-states -- those SSRs of the Caucasus and Central Asia -- within its borders, and a series of Eastern European satellite states under its control as well. None of the twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, however, ever imagined doing the same thing on a genuinely global basis. There was no way to do so.

Washington’s urge to take control of the global communications environment, lock, stock, and chat room, to gather its “data” -- billions and billions of pieces of it -- and via inconceivably powerful computer systems, mine and arrange it, find patterns in it, and so turn the world into a secret set of connections, represents a remarkable development. For the first time, a great power wants to know, up close and personal, not just what its own citizens are doing, but those of distant lands as well: who they are communicating with, and how, and why, and what they are buying, and where they are travelling, and who they are bumping into (online and over the phone).

Until recently, once you left the environs of science fiction, that was simply beyond imagining. You could certainly find precursors for such a development in, for instance, the Cold War intelligence community’s urge to create a global satellite system that would bring every inch of the planet under a new kind of surveillance regime, that would map it thoroughly and identify what was being mapped down to the square inch, but nothing so globally up close and personal.

The next two urges are intertwined in such a way that they might be thought as a single category: your codes and theirs.

2. The Urge to Make You Transparent

The urge to possess you, or everything that can be known about you, has clearly taken possession of our global security state. With this, it’s become increasingly apparent, go other disturbing trends. Take something seemingly unrelated: the recent Supreme Court decision that allows the police to take a DNA swab from an arrestee (if the crime he or she is charged with is “serious”). Theoretically, this is being done for “identification” purposes, but in fact it's already being put to other uses entirely, especially in the solving of separate crimes.

If you stop to think about it, this development, in turn, represents a remarkable new level of state intrusion on private life, on your self. It means that, for the first time, in a sure-to-widen set of circumstances, the state increasingly has access not just -- as with NSA surveillance -- to your Internet codes and modes of communication, but to your most basic code of all, your DNA. As Justice Antonin Scalia put it in his dissent in the case, “Make no mistake about it: As an entirely predictable consequence of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.” Can global DNA databases be far behind?

If your DNA becomes the possession of the state, then you are a transparent human being at the most basic level imaginable. At every level, however, the pattern, the trend, the direction is the same (and it’s the same whether you’re talking about the government or giant corporations). Increasingly, access to you, your codes, your communications, your purchases, your credit card transactions, your location, your travels, your exchanges with friends, your tastes, your likes and dislikes is what’s wanted -- for what’s called your “safety” in the case of government and your business in the case of corporations.

Both want access to everything that can be known about you, because who knows until later what may prove the crucial piece of information to uncover a terrorist network or lure in a new network of customers. They want everything, at least, that can be run through a system of massive computers and sorted into patterns of various potentially useful kinds. You are to be, in this sense, the transparent man or transparent woman. Your acts, your life patterns, your rights, your codes are to be an open book to them -- and increasingly a closed book to you. You are to be their secret and that “you” is an ever more global one.

3. The Urge to Make Themselves Opaque

With this goes another reality. They are to become ever less accessible, ever more impenetrable, ever less knowable to you (except in the forms in which they would prefer you to know them). None of their codes or secrets are to be accessed by you on pain of imprisonment. Everything in the government -- which once was thought to be “your” government -- is increasingly disappearing into a professional universe of secrecy. In 2011, the last year for which figures are available, the government classified 92 million documents. And they did so on the same principle that they use in collecting seemingly meaningless or harmless information from you: that only in retrospect can anyone know whether a benign-looking document might prove anything but. Better to deny access to everything.

In the process, they are finding new ways of imposing silence on you, even when it comes to yourself. Since 2001, for instance, it has become possible for the FBI to present you with a National Security Letter which forces you to turn over information to them, but far more strikingly gags you from ever mentioning publicly that you got such a letter. Those who have received such letters (and 15,000 of them were issued in 2012) are legally enjoined from discussing or even acknowledging what’s happening to them; their lives, that is, are no longer theirs to discuss. If that isn’t Orwellian, what is?

President Obama offered this reassurance in the wake of the Snowden leaks: the National Security Agency, he insisted, is operating under the supervision of all three branches of the government. In fact, the opposite could be said to be true. All three branches, especially in their oversight roles, have been brought within the penumbra of secrecy of the global security state and so effectively coopted or muzzled. This is obviously true with our ex-professor of Constitutional law and the executive branch he presides over, which has in recent years been ramping up its own secret operations.

When it comes to Congress, the people’s representatives who are to perform oversight on the secret world have been presented with the equivalent of National Security Letters; that is, when let in on some of the secrets of that world, they find they can’t discuss them, can’t tell the American people about them, can’t openly debate them in Congress. In public sessions with Congress, we now know that those who run our most secret outfits, if pushed to the wall by difficult questions, will as a concession respond in the “least untruthful manner” possible, as Director of National Intelligence James Clapper put it last week.

Given the secret world’s control over Congress, representatives who are horrified by what they’ve learned about our government’s secrecy and surveillance practices, like Democratic Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, can only hint at their worries and fears. They can, in essence, wink at you, signal to you in obscure ways that something is out of whack, but they can’t tell you directly. Secrecy, after all.

Similarly, the judiciary, that third branch of government and other body of oversight, has, in the twenty-first century, been fully welcomed into the global security state’s atmosphere of total secrecy. So when the surveillance crews go to the judiciary for permission to listen in on the world, they go to a secret court, a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court, locked within that secret world. It, in turn, notoriously rubberstamps whatever it is they want to do, evidently offering no resistance whatsoever to their desires. (Of the 6,556 electronic surveillance requests submitted to the court in Obama’s first term in office, for instance, only one was denied.) In addition, unlike any other court in America, we, the American people, the transparent and ignorant public, can know next to nothing about it. And you know perfectly well why: the overriding needs of secrecy.

What, though, is the point of “oversight” if you can’t do anything other than what that secret world wants you to do?

We are, in other words, increasingly open to them and they are increasingly closed to us.

4. The Urge to Expand

As we’ve known at least since Dana Priest and William Arkin published their stunning series, “Top Secret America,” in the Washington Post in 2010, the U.S. Intelligence Community has expanded post-9/11 to levels unimaginable even in the Cold War era. Then, of course, it faced another superpower, not a small set of jihadis largely located in the backlands of the planet. It now exists on, as Arkin says, an “industrial scale.” And its urge to continue growing, to build yet more structures for surveillance, including a vast $2 billion NSA repository in Bluffdale, Utah, that will be capable of holding an almost unimaginable yottabyte of data, is increasingly written into its DNA.

For this vast, restless, endless expansion of surveillance of every sort and at every level, for the nearly half-million or possibly far more private contractors, aka “digital Blackwater,” now in the government surveillance business -- about 70% of the national intelligence budget reportedly goes to the private sector these days -- and the nearly five million Americans with security clearances (1.4 million with top security clearances, more than a third of them private contractors), the official explanation is "terrorism." It matters little that terrorism as a phenomenon is one of the lesser dangers Americans face in their daily lives and that, for some of the larger ones, ranging from food-borne illnesses to cars, guns, and what’s now called “extreme weather,” no one would think about building vast bureaucratic structures shrouded in secrecy, funded to the hilt, and offering Americans promises of ultimate safety.

Terrorism certainly rears its ugly head from time to time and there’s no question that the fear of some operation getting through the vast U.S. security net drives the employees of our global security state. As an explanation for the phenomenal growth of that state, however, it simply doesn’t hold water. In truth, compared to the previous century, U.S. enemies are remarkably scarce on this planet. So forget the official explanation and imagine our global-security-state-in-the-making in the grips of a kind of compulsive disorder in which the urge to go global, make the most private information of the citizen everywhere the property of the American state, and expand surveillance endlessly simply trumps any other way of doing things.

In other words, they can’t help themselves. The process, the phenomenon, has them by the throat, so much so that they can imagine no other way of being. In this mood, they are paving the way for a new global security -- or rather insecurity -- world. They are, for instance, hiking spending on “cybersecurity,” have already secretly launched the planet’s first cyberwar, are planning for more of them, intend to dominate the future cyber-landscape in a staggering fashion, continue to gather global data of every sort on a massive scale, and more generally are acting in ways that they would consider criminal if other countries engaged in them.

5. The Urge to Leak

The massive leaks of documents by Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden have few precedents in American history. Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers leak is their only obvious predecessor. They are not, however, happenstances of our moment. They are signs of what’s to come. If, in surveillance terms, the urge to go global and impose ultimate secrecy on both the state’s secrets and yours, to prosecute whistleblowers to the maximum (at this point usually via the Espionage Act or, in the case of Manning, via the charge of “aiding the enemy,” and with calls of “treason” already in the air when it comes to Snowden), it’s natural that the urge to leak will rise as well.

If the surveillance state has reached an industrial level of operations, and ever more secrets are being brought into computer systems, then vast troves of secrets exist to be revealed, already cached, organized, and ready for the plucking. If the security state itself goes global, then the urge to leak will go global, too.

In fact, it already has. It’s easy to forget that WikiLeaks was originally created not just for American secrets but any secrets. Similarly, Manning uploaded his vast trove of secrets from Iraq, and Snowden, who had already traveled the world in the service of secrecy, leaked to an American columnist living in Brazil and writing for a British newspaper. His flight to Hong Kong and dream of Icelandic citizenship could be considered another version of the globalizing impulse.

Rest assured, they will not be the last. An all-enveloping atmosphere of secrecy is not a natural state of being. Just look at us individually. We love to tell stories about each other. Gossiping is one of the most basic of human activities. Revealing what others don’t know is an essential urge. The urge, that is, to open it all up is at least as powerful as the urge to shut it all down.

So in our age, considering the gigantism of the U.S. surveillance and intelligence apparatus and the secrets it holds, it’s a given that the leak, too, will become more gigantic, that leaked documents will multiply in droves, and that resistance to regimes of secrecy and the invasion of private life that goes with them will also become more global. It’s hard from within the U.S. to imagine the shock in Pakistan, or Germany, or India, on discovering that your private life may now be the property of the U.S. government. (Imagine for a second the reaction here if Snowden had revealed that the Pakistani or Iranian or Chinese government was gathering and storing vast quantities of private emails, texts, phone calls, and credit card transactions from American citizens. The uproar would have been staggering.)

As a result of all this, we face a strangely contradictory future in which ever more draconian regimes of secrecy will confront the urge for ever greater transparency. President Obama came into office promising a “sunshine” administration that would open the workings of the government to the American people. He didn’t deliver, but Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden, and other leakers have, and no matter how difficult the government makes it to leak or how hard it cracks down on leakers, the urge is almost as unstoppable as the urge not to be your government’s property.

You may have secrets, but you are not a secret -- and you know it.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture (just published in a Kindle edition), runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

Copyright 2013 Tom Engelhardt

 

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Sharon Noble, Michael Geist, Janine Bandcroft June 17th, 2013

This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook - Pacific Free Press

Welcome to the dawning deja vu day of the bravely rebranded British Columbia. Yes, Toto, you're not back in dust bowl Kansas, but awake in the new reality of a BC dust bowl to come, if returned premier Christy Clark and her claque of counter-Evolutionaries manage to ram their "mandate" through the province's Legislature.

You see, Christy and her crusty coterie would have us all whisked back to the times of WAC Bennett; where leather-necked, hard hewn he-men hacked their way through primordial forests, and o'er top the perilous crag to cut timber and dig ore; venturing forth to roughshod tame the wild, and harness mighty Nature herself into Man's service.

At least, that's more or less the nation-building narrative Clark would have us believe; the truth of the matter is depressingly more prosaic.

Listen. Hear.

 Christy and the friends of Gordo the former, our near universally unloved previous political Judas are merely to continue the pillage of what remains of the province's once peerless public energy sector, as they simultaneously destroy our environment. It's a neat trick, promising to literally obliviate our past, while effectively obliterating our future in a fell, if four years prolonged blow. 

One of the many dark Voldemortian efforts feeding the BCLiberals false legend of bringing good things to light here is the infamous Smart Meter program. Foisted upon us with neither word of warning, nor debate in the rump Assemblage in Victoria by "he whose name BCLiberals are bade never spake," the billion dollar boondoggle is worse than irretrievable folly, it's dangerous and probably illegal.

Sharon Noble  is an activist with the Coalition to Stop Smart Meters, a grassroots group that has opposed the intrusion of BC's new standard of Hydro power metering for the past two years. Last month, they filed a class-action suit against the utility, citing broken promises and alleged customer intimidation by BC Hydro regarding installation of the devices, and a litany of health and privacy concerns the devices create.

Sharon Noble in the first half.

And; while the NSA unwarranted spying story rages in the United States, what's Canada's New Government doing here? Are Canada's telephone and internet providers similarly tasked by secretive homegrown spook agencies to monitor all our calls, while counting too every keystroke Canadians make? Short answer: Probably.

Dr. Michael Geist is professor of law at the University of Ottawa, where he too holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law. He is too the recipient of numerous honours and awards, including: 2010's Kroeger Award for Policy Leadership, and the Public Knowledge IP3 Award; the 2009 Les Fowlie Award for Intellectual Freedom from the Ontario Library Association; and 2008's Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award among others. Michael Geist's syndicated column, 'Law Bytes' is featured in the Toronto Star and Ottawa Citizen among other publications, and he's also served as editor for the books,'"Radical Extremism" to "Balanced Copyright": Canadian Copyright and the Digital Agenda', and 'In the Public Interest: The Future of Canadian Copyright Law'. He's also the author of the eponymous blog, MichaelGeist.ca, where he last week published the article, 'Who Is Watching the Watchers?: Ten Questions About Canada's Secret Metadata Surveillance Activities.'  

Michael Geist and electronic cloak and dagger Canadian style in the second half.

And; Victoria Street Newz publisher and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with some of what's going on on the streets of our city, and beyond. But first, Sharon Noble and the wacky world of BC Hydro's WiFi Smart meter program.

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca.  He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, http://www.pacificfreepress.com. Check out the GR blog at: http://gorillaradioblog.blogspot.ca/

G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.

Some past guests include: M. Junaid Alam, M. Shahid Alam, Gilad Atzmon, Joel Bakan, Maude Barlow, Ramzy Baroud, William Blum, Luciana Bohne, William Bowles, Mordecai Briemberg, Helen Caldicott, Noam Chomsky, Michel Chossudovsky, Diane Christian, Paul Cienfuegos, David Cromwell, Ezili Danto, Jon Elmer, Yves Engler, Laura Flanders, Amy Goodman, Denis Halliday, Chris Hedges, Julia Butterfly Hill, Robert Jensen, Dahr Jamail, Diana Johnstone, Malalai Joya, Kathy Kelly, Naomi Klein, Frances Moore Lappe, Ingmar Lee, Dave Lindorff, Alexandra Morton, Loretta Napoleoni, Andrew Nikiforuk, Ken O'Keefe, Greg Palast, Michael Parenti, Robert Parry, John Pilger, Kevin Pina, Paul Craig Roberts, David Rovics, Danny Schechter, David Schindler, Vandana Shiva, Tim Shorrock, Norman Solomon, Jean Saint-Vil, Harvey Wasserman, Paul Watson, Bernard Weiner, Andy Worthington, Mickey Z., Howard Zinn and many others.

Class Action Filed Against BCHydro "Smart" Meters

Groups File Class Action Suit over Smart Meters

By Natascia Lypny - The Tyee

By Natascia Lypny

by Natascia Lypny - The Tyee

Two anti-smart meter groups have filed a class action lawsuit against BC Hydro in an effort to end the installation of the devices in the homes of people who oppose them.

For two years, Sharon Noble of the Coalition to Stop Smart Meters said she's received "hundreds" of emails from people who say they were pressured by BC Hydro to replace their analog meters with the new wireless model and are now suffering health problems.

An Okanagan Valley customer alleges that BC Hydro cut off her power last week. According to a press release by the two groups, the woman, who suffers from electro-sensitivity, had had a smart meter installed against her will. (In January, BC Hydro announced it would not install smart meters against a customer's will.)

The press release alleges that after repeated attempts to get the corporation to remove it, the customer ordered a replacement analog meter from the United States, but BC Hydro said it didn't meet Canadian standards. The customer then found a Canadian meter that met the requirements, but the corporation insisted on the smart meter. Refusing, she had her power cut off, alleges the release.

Noble said the groups are protecting the identity of the woman, who is now seeking her own injunction against BC Hydro's action.

The class action lawsuit is seeking participants who have indicated to BC Hydro that they did not want a smart meter placed in their homes, yet one was, or will soon be, installed regardless.

"The way the smart meter program is being rolled out right now should be stopped," said the director of Citizens for Safe Technology, Una St. Clair. "It's not about the health of the people, it's about the health of the industry's pocket."

A BC Hydro spokesperson in charge of spokesperson was not available for a phone interview by press time, but a statement from the power generator authority said that smart meters have been proven safe and "are helping make substantial improvements to our electrical grid."

"Smart meters communicate using radio frequency signals similar to those used safely for decades in televisions, radios and other common household devices," the statement reads.

Noble explained the lawsuit is based on two premises: that the Open Access Transmission Tariff, which details how BC Hydro interacts with its customers, describes the rules and regulations around meters but not transmitters (a category under which the two groups classify smart meters); and a violation of the recently introduced intrusion upon seclusion law by the Ontario Supreme Court, which protects people's personal privacy. Noble claimed smart meters collect and transmit personal data in a way that violates this law.

The two groups announced the lawsuit Monday, and Noble couldn't say how many people had signed on yet.

"If a lawsuit does proceed, BC Hydro would work through the judicial process to present the facts about the new metering system," BC Hydro told The Tyee in a statement.

Nearly 30,000 people have signed Citizens for Safe Technology's petition calling for a moratorium on the smart meter program until the above conditions are met.

Noble wants a no-fee opt-out process introduced so that people have the choice whether or not to have smart meters in their homes, and those who have had them already installed may request they be removed.

She said the election influenced the timing of the lawsuit: "I want a commitment from Adrian Dix that he will change the Clean Energy Act so that no other family will face the threat of having their electricity turned off because they don't want radiation in their house."

Dix has said that, if elected, he will have the BC Utilities Commission review the smart meter program. The BC Greens promised in their platform to provide alternatives to those adversely affected by the wireless devices and to call a public inquiry into the smart meter program.


Natascia Lypny is completing a practicum at The Tyee.

- See more at:
http://thetyee.ca/Blogs/TheHook/2013/05/03/Smart-Meter-Class-Action/#sthash.cyeZiqd0.dpuf

Meaning of Deep Spying on Americans

The Deeper Meaning of Mass Spying in America

by James Petras

The exposure of the Obama regime’s use of the National Security Agency to secretly spy on the communications of hundreds of millions of US and overseas citizens has provoked world-wide denunciations. In the United States, despite widespread mass media coverage and the opposition of civil liberties organizations, there has not been any mass protest. Congressional leaders from both the Republican and Democratic Parties, as well as top judges, approved of the unprecedented domestic spy program.. Even worse, when the pervasive spy operations were revealed, top Senate and Congressional leaders repeated their endorsement of each and every intrusion into all electronic and written communication involving American citizens. President Obama and his Attorney General Holder openly and forcefully defended the NSA’s the universal spy operations.

The issues raised by this vast secret police apparatus and its penetration into and control over civil society, infringing on the citizens freedom of expression, go far beyond mere ‘violations of privacy’, as raised by many legal experts.

Most civil libertarians focus on the violations of individual rights, constitutional guarantees and the citizen’s privacy rights. These are important legal issues and the critics are right in raising them. However, these constitutional–legal critiques do not go far enough; they fail to raise even more fundamental issues; they avoid basic political questions.

Why has such a massive police-state apparatus and universal spying become so central to the ruling regime? Why has the entire executive, legislative and judicial leadership come out in public for such a blatant repudiation of all constitutional guarantees? Why do elected leaders defend universal political espionage against the citizenry? What kind of politics requires a police state? What kind of long-term, large scale domestic and foreign policies are illegal and unconstitutional as to require the building of a vast network of domestic spies and a hundred billion dollar corporate-state techno-espionage infrastructure in a time of budget ‘austerity’ with the slashing of social programs?

The second set of questions arises from the use of the espionage data. So far most critics have questioned the existence of massive state espionage but have avoided the vital issue of what measures are taken by the spymasters once they target individuals, groups, movements? The essential question is: What reprisals and sanctions follow from the ‘information’ that is collected, classified and made operational by these massive domestic spy networks? Now that the ‘secret’ of all-encompassing, state political spying has entered public discussion, the next step should be to reveal the secret operations that follow against those targeted by the spymasters as a ‘risk to national security’.

The Politics behind the Police State

The fundamental reason for the conversion of the state into a gigantic spy apparatus is the nature of deeply destructive domestic and foreign policies which the government has so forcefully pursued. The vast expansion of the police state apparatus is not a response to the terror attack of 9/11. The geometrical growth of spies, secret police budgets, and the vast intrusion into all citizen communications coincides with the wars across the globe. The decisions to militarize US global policy requires vast budgetary re-allocation , slashing social spending to fund empire-building; shredding public health and social security to bailout Wall Street. These are policies which greatly enhance profits for bankers and corporations while imposing regressive taxes on wage and salaried workers

Prolonged and extended wars abroad have been funded at the expense of citizens’ welfare at home. This policy had led to declining living standards for many tens of millions of citizens and rising dissatisfaction. The potential of social resistance as evidenced by the brief “Occupy Wall Street” movement which was endorsed by over 80% of the population, .The positive response alarmed the state and led to an escalation of police state measures. Mass spying is designed to identify the citizens who oppose both imperial wars and the destruction of domestic welfare; labeling them as ‘security threats’ is a means of controlling them through the use of arbitrary police powers. The expansion of the President’s war powers has been accompanied by the growth and scope of the state spy apparatus: the more the President orders overseas drone attacks, the greater the number of his military interventions, the greater the need for the political elite surrounding the President to increase its policing of citizens in anticipation of a popular backlash. In this context, the policy of mass spying is taken as ‘pre-emptive action’. The greater the police state operations, the greater the fear and insecurity among dissident citizens and activists.

The assault on the living standards of working and middle class Americans in order to fund the endless series of wars, and not the so-called ‘war on terror’, is the reason the state has developed massive cyber warfare against the US citizenry. The issue is not only a question of a violation of individual privacy: it is fundamentally an issue of state infringement of the collective rights of organized citizens to freely engage in public opposition to regressive socio-economic policies and question the empire. The proliferation of permanent bureaucratic institutions, with over a million security ‘data collectors’, is accompanied by tens of thousands of ‘field operators’, analysts and inquisitors acting arbitrarily to designate dissident citizens as ‘security risks’ and imposing reprisals according to the political needs of their ruling political bosses. The police state apparatus has its own rules of self-protection and self-perpetuation; it has its own linkages and may occasionally compete with the Pentagon. The police state links up with and protects the masters of Wall Street and the propagandists of the mass media – even as it (must) spy on them!

The police state is an instrument of the Executive Branch acting as a vehicle for its arbitrary prerogative powers. However on administrative matters, it possesses a degree of ‘autonomy’ to target dissident behavior. What is clear is the high degree of cohesion, vertical discipline and mutual defense, up and down the hierarchy. The fact that one whistle-blower, Edward Snowden, emerged from the hundreds of thousands of citizen spies is the exception, the lone whistle blower, which proves the rule: There are fewer defectors to be found among the million-member US spy network than in all the Mafia families in Europe and North America.

The domestic spy apparatus operates with impunity because of its network of powerful domestic and overseas allies. The entire bi-partisan Congressional leadership is privy to and complicit with its operations. Related branches of government, like the Internal Revenue Service, cooperate in providing information and pursuing targeted political groups and individuals. Israel is a key overseas ally of the National Security Agency, as has been documented in the Israeli press (Haaretz, June 8, 2013). Two Israeli high tech firms (Verint and Narus) with ties to the Israeli secret police (MOSSAD), have provided the spy software for the NSA and this, of course, has opened a window for Israeli spying in the US against Americans opposed to the Zionist state. The writer and critic, Steve Lendman points out that Israeli spymasters via their software “front companies” have long had the ability to ‘steal proprietary commercial and industrial data” with impunity. Because of the power and influence of the Presidents of the 52 Major American Jewish organizations, Justice Department officials have ordered dozens of Israeli espionage cases to be dropped. The tight Israeli ties to the US spy apparatus serves to prevent deeper scrutiny into its operation and political goals — at a very high price in terms of the security of US citizens. In recent years two incidents stand out: Israeli security ‘experts’ were contracted to advise the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security in their investigation and ‘Stasi-like’ repression of government critics and environmental activists (compared to ‘al Queda terrorists’ by the Israelis) – the discovery of which forced the resignation of OHS Director James Powers in 2010. In 2003, New Jersey governor, Jim McGreevy appointed his lover, an Israeli government operative and former IDF officer, to head that state’s ‘Homeland Security Department and later resigned, denouncing the Israeli, Golan Cipel, for blackmail in late 2004. These examples are a small sample illustrating the depth and scope of Israeli police state tactics intersecting in US domestic repression.

The Political and Economic Consequences of the Spy State

The denunciations of the mass spy operations are a positive step, as far as they go. But equally important is the question of what follows from the act of spying? We now know that hundreds of millions of Americans are being spied on by the state. We know that mass spying is official policy of the Executive and is approved by Congressional leaders. But we have only fragmented information on the repressive measures resulting from the investigations of “suspect individuals”. We can assume that there is a division of labor among data collectors, data analysts and field operatives following up “risky individuals and groups”, based on the internal criteria known only to the secret police. The key spy operatives are those who devise and apply the criteria for designating someone as a “security risk”. Individuals and groups who express critical views of domestic and foreign policy are “a risk”; those who act to protest are a “higher risk”; those who travel to conflict regions are presumed to be in the “highest risk” category, even if they have violated no law. The question of the lawfulness of a citizen’s views and actions does not enter into the spymasters’ equation; nor do any questions regarding the lawfulness of the acts committed by the spies against citizens. The criteria defining a security risk supersede any constitutional considerations and safeguards.

We know from a large number of published cases that lawful critics, illegally spied upon, have subsequently been arrested, tried and jailed – their lives and those of their friends and family members shattered. We know that hundreds of homes, workplaces and offices of suspects have been raided in ‘fishing expeditions’. We know that family members, associates, neighbors, clients, and employers of “suspects” have been interrogated, pressured and intimidated. Above all, we know that tens of millions of law abiding citizens, critical of domestic economic and overseas war policies, have been censored by the very real fear of the massive operations carried out by the police state. In this atmosphere of intimidation, any critical conversation or word spoken in any context or relayed via the media can be interpreted by nameless, faceless spies as a “security threat” – and one’s name can enter into the ever growing secret lists of “potential terrorists”. The very presence and dimensions of the police state is intimidating. While there are citizens who would claim that the police state is necessary to protect them from terrorists – But how many others feel compelled to embrace their state terrorists just to fend off any suspicion, hoping to stay off the growing lists? How many critical-minded Americans now fear the state and will never voice in public what they whisper at home?

The bigger the secret police, the greater its operations. The more regressive domestic economic policy, the greater the fear and loathing of the political elite.

Even as President Obama and his Democratic and Republican partners boast and bluster about their police state and its effective “security function”, the vast majority of Americans are becoming aware that fear instilled at home serves the interest of waging imperial wars abroad; that cowardice in the face of police state threats only encourages further cuts in their living standards. When will they learn that exposing spying is only the beginning of a solution? When will they recognize that ending the police state is essential to dismantling the costly empire and creating a safe, secure and prosperous America?

James Petras, a former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, owns a 50-year membership in the class struggle, is an adviser to the landless and jobless in Brazil and Argentina, and is co-author of Globalization Unmasked (Zed Books). 

Petras’ most recent book is The Arab Revolt and the Imperialist Counterattack. He can be reached at: jpetras@binghamton.edu. Read other articles by James, or visit James's website.