America's Terrorists in Venezuela

US Proxy Terror War on Venezuela

by James Petras

Protest, dissent and the destructive terror of war are obviously very distinct forms of expressing opposition and bringing about change. The Obama-Kerry regime support the opposition in Venezuela as a ‘protest movement’ composed of ‘peaceful democratic opponents’ expressing their discontent with economic conditions, while they denounce the democratically-elected Maduro Administration as an ‘authoritarian regime’ violently repressing legitimate dissent. Washington disingenuously claims to have played no part in the actions of the Venezuelan opposition and that its pronouncements are merely directed at promoting democratic freedoms.

The overwhelming evidence show that the Venezuelan opposition has engaged in prolonged and extensive violence, including terrorist acts, assassinations, arson, and destruction of public property. Most recently this includes the murder of military officers and civilian supporters of the government. Widely circulated photographs, even in Washington-controlled media outlets, show opposition activists throwing Molotov cocktails at police and counter-demonstrators and building barricades for bloody street confrontations.

The Obama-Kerry Administration denies any involvement in the ongoing violence while unconditionally defending the opposition gangs of thugs. At the same time it demonizes every legitimate government action to defend its citizens, uphold the Constitution and enforce internationally recognized norms of law and order. The Obama-Kerry regime’s political intervention and its escalating rhetoric is designed to incite the opposition to further violent activity in order to destabilize the country for ‘regime change’.

US Secretary of State John Kerry’s vitriolic rhetoric is timed to counter the recent ebb of opposition activity, assuring the opposition that Washington supports its campaign of ‘warfare in the streets’. President Obama’s propaganda, the regime’s economic sanctions and the channeling of financial and military resources to the violent opposition groups is designed to reinvigorate the campaign of terror and sabotage against the Venezuelan government. The Kerry- Obama sanctions and their war of words provide external support for violent terrorists operating inside Venezuela.

Introduction

Kerry-Obama Rely on the Big Lie

Secretary of State Kerry’s accusation that the Venezuelan government is conducting a ‘campaign of terror’ against the peaceful opposition is a naked lie: The Bolivarian government, which had been the target of two months of street violence sabotage, is itself accused of the crimes committed by the US-backed proxy opposition. This is a favorite ploy of the empire in preparing the ground for ‘regime change’. Washington is intent on the violent overthrow of a democratic government and the establishment of another satellite regime in Latin America.

Washington’s proxy terrorist power grab is evident everywhere. The opposition is openly authoritarian in its demands. It raises economic and social issues as pretexts to undermine of the democratic, constitutional government by force and violence. They seek to weaken the government and have no interest in negotiations or signing any agreement on specific sets of issues. Government offers to meet and establish dialog have been rejected outright. Each government concession has been exploited as a sign of weakness. When the government released dozens of thugs arrested for throwing Molotov fire-bombs, they returned to the streets to burn more property and attack the police.

The opposition has been given every chance to win over Venezuela’s voters in dozens of Presidential, state and local elections. Refusing to accept the will of the majority in lawful elections, they have launched their violent assaults to undermine the people’s rule. Opposition mayors have worked with street thugs who block normal commerce while assaulting individual supporters of the national government.

The opposition has accumulated vast stores of arms and munitions in preparation for an armed uprising. It has trained snipers to assassinate military and police officers upholding the rule of law and have attacked municipal workers and citizen volunteers engaged in clearing streets of debris.

In terms of means, goals and ideology the opposition fits the description of an imperial-financed terrorist minority organized to seize power, destroy majority rule and impose an autocratic dictatorship which would serve as a proxy for US imperial power.

Democratic Politics or Terrorist Putsch?

In the 8 weeks up to March 15, 2014, the terrorist opposition committed 500 violent actions throughout the country. At least 68 members of the Venezuelan National Guard have been injured, shot, or killed by Secretary Kerry’s “democratic protestors”. On May 13, government officials were attacked with high powered rifle fire and seven snipers were arrested with arms and explosives. Paramilitary terrorists have been openly trained and housed at two or more elite universities (Carabobo University and UCV in Caracas). Phony claims of “autonomy” have been used to shield the fact that these privileged campuses are used to stockpile weapons, set up training bases and shelter for paramilitary gangs and snipers.

The economic impact is immense: Business revenues, salaries and wage losses run in the tens of millions. Sniper fire has prevented civil servants, pro-government workers and ordinary citizens from shopping, going to work and participating in pro-government counter demonstrations. The terrorists have sown fear and insecurity, primarily in middle class neighborhoods where they mostly operate – not daring to enter the militant poor and working class barrios.

The government is seen by the masses as extraordinarily tolerant (or excessively conciliatory) in their dealings with these violent opposition gangs, considering the scope and depth of mayhem: As of March 15, only 105 street thugs out the 1,529 violent demonstrators arrested remain in jail facing charges.

Many concerned Venezuelan and international democrats and experts on terrorism believe the Maduro government’s restraint has given the terrorists plenty of time and opportunity to arm, recruit and distribute US funds channeled through phony NGO’s, in preparation for even bigger and more destructive acts of terror, such as bombing bridges, power stations and clinics, as well as assassinating top civilian and military officials. Their assessment of the Maduro government’s security policy is that it is too narrowly focused on the ‘lowest level’ of activists – those caught with Molotov cocktails or engaged in other acts of violence – rather than the political and financial networks which extend deep into the major opposition political parties and business elite who provide funding, political cover and ideological justifications for the growing war of terror against ordinary Venezuelan citizens. Moreover, the ‘revolving door’ judicial system simply emboldens the thugs and saboteurs -- since a day in jail is a very small price for having blown up a community health center or engulfed a National Guardsman in flames.

The government, in its efforts to secure agreements with a section of the opposition, appears to have tied the hands of its security forces: small groups of National Guardsmen have become especially vulnerable to acts of terror from thugs protected by highly-placed opposition political leaders.

Conclusion

In the past two months over a thousand public buildings have been destroyed or damaged, mostly fire-bombed by what US Secretary of State John Kerry has called the “democratic and peaceful opposition”. Most of the arson is directed at buildings closely associated with the government’s popular and effective social welfare programs. These include neighborhood centers for adult education and training; free public medical and dental clinics; public banks providing low interest loans for micro-economic projects; primary and secondary public schools in poor neighborhoods; publicly-owned food-stores providing subsidized food and groceries as well as the trucks carrying subsidized food and essential goods to working-class neighborhoods; public transportation, municipal sanitary workers, community radio stations, pro-government media centers and local Socialist Party headquarters.

Recently large scale caches of arms, including automatic rifles and mortars were discovered in the underground parking lot owned by an opposition-controlled municipality. Another cache of 2,000 mortars and other weapons were found in the opposition stronghold, Táchira State, which borders Colombia, across which arms, drugs and mercenaries enter freely. Many of the National Guardsmen injured were shot by opposition snipers. On March 16, a National Guard captain was assassinated by a sniper shooting from a high rise apartment. The assassin was captured and turned out to be a Chinese mercenary hired by the opposition and part of a para-military hit team

Kerry-Obama’s claim that the protestors are mostly peaceful students is refuted by the fact that nearly two-thirds (971) of the total arrestees (1,529) are not students; many are self-styled street fighters receiving outside material support and funds.

Kerry’s claim that the US is ‘not involved’ and the State Department’s ludicrous effort to portray Venezuela’s charges of US intervention as “paranoia” have been refuted by official US documents showing a continuous annual flow of tens of millions of dollars to opposition organizations linked to the terror networks, including $15 million disbursed during the first two months of this year. The even greater extent of ‘covert’ material aid, including weapons, is unknown.

Top security experts knowledgeable about the subject of external funding for destabilization and terrorism, have reviewed the scope and depth of the ongoing damage and casualties in Venezuela. They have urged the Maduro government to allow the loyal Venezuelan armed forces to participate in quelling the violence. Their recommendations include a declaration of martial law and military sweeps into opposition strongholds to round-up and disarm the violent street thugs and terrorists; unlimited detention, pending trials, for suspected snipers and arsonists and military trials for those suspected of murdering soldiers, police and guardsmen. Opposition mayors, governors and university officials who have provided sanctuaries, training bases, funds and arms to the mercenaries should no longer be immune from prosecution. In recognition of the recent huge demonstrations by ordinary citizens and soldiers supporting a greater role for the Venezuelan Armed Forces and demanding firmer measures to end terror, President Maduro issued an ultimatum to the opposition to end their violence or face the full force of the state.

In addressing the Kerry-Obama regime, President Maduro, once again, demanded it stop aiding the violent opposition and denounced Washington’s threats to further undermine the Venezuelan economy with trade sanctions. He has called on Washington to join a tri-partite commission, including top representatives from the US, Venezuela and the Union of South American states (UNASUR), to discuss peace and sovereignty. While UNASUR is willing to support Maduro’s proposal for dialogue and his peace initiative, US Secretary of State Kerry is moving ahead with economic sanctions against Caracas in support of the US terror war by proxy.

The time for political conciliation is running out: the Venezuelan Armed Forces may finally be given their chance to end this imperial war by proxy.

Post-Script Hopefully, the arm-chair revolutionaries and chattering classes in North America and Europe, who have been so quick to criticize the Venezuelan government, will set aside their ‘reservations’ and organize a solidarity movement to protest the Kerry- Obama imperial war by proxy against Venezuelan democracy. To date they have spent too much time in internet chatter and not enough time in the streets.

Big Data and the Internet of Things

Invasion of the Data Snatchers: Big Data and the Internet of Things Means the Surveillance of Everything

by Catherine Crump and Matthew Harwood  - TomDispatch

Estimates vary, but by 2020 there could be over 30 billion devices connected to the Internet. Once dumb, they will have smartened up thanks to sensors and other technologies embedded in them and, thanks to your machines, your life will quite literally have gone online.

The implications are revolutionary. Your smart refrigerator will keep an inventory of food items, noting when they go bad. Your smart thermostat will learn your habits and adjust the temperature to your liking. Smart lights will illuminate dangerous parking garages, even as they keep an “eye” out for suspicious activity.

Techno-evangelists have a nice catchphrase for this future utopia of machines and the never-ending stream of information, known as Big Data, it produces: the Internet of Things. So abstract. So inoffensive. Ultimately, so meaningless.

A future Internet of Things does have the potential to offer real benefits, but the dark side of that seemingly shiny coin is this: companies will increasingly know all there is to know about you. Most people are already aware that virtually everything a typical person does on the Internet is tracked. In the not-too-distant future, however, real space will be increasingly like cyberspace, thanks to our headlong rush toward that Internet of Things. With the rise of the networked device, what people do in their homes, in their cars, in stores, and within their communities will be monitored and analyzed in ever more intrusive ways by corporations and, by extension, the government.

And one more thing: in cyberspace it is at least theoretically possible to log off. In your own well-wired home, there will be no “opt out.”

You can almost hear the ominous narrator’s voice from an old “Twilight Zone” episode saying, “Soon the net will close around all of us. There will be no escape.”

Except it’s no longer science fiction. It’s our barely distant present.

Tomgram: Crump and Harwood, The Net Closes Around Us

Twice in my life -- in the 1960s and the post-9/11 years -- I was suddenly aware of clicks and other strange noises on my phone. In both periods, I’ve wondered what the story was, and then made self-conscious jokes with whoever was on the other end of the line about those who might (or might not) be listening in. Twice in my life I’ve felt, up close and personal, that ominous, uncomfortable, twitchy sense of being overheard, without ever knowing if it was a manifestation of the paranoia of the times or of realism -- or perhaps of both.

I’m conceptually outraged by mass surveillance, but generally my personal attitude has always been: Go ahead. Read my email, listen to my phone calls, follow my web searches, check out my location via my cell phone. My tweets don’t exist -- but if they did, I’d say have at ‘em. I don’t give a damn.

And in some sense, I don’t, even though everyone, including me, is embarrassed by something. Everyone says something about someone they would rather not have made public (or perhaps have even said). Everyone has some thing -- or sometimes many things -- they would rather keep to themselves.

Increasingly, however, as the U.S. surveillance state grows ever more pervasive, domestically and globally, as the corporate version of the same expands exponentially, as prying “eyes” and “ears” of every technological variety proliferate, the question of who exactly we are arises. What are we without privacy, without a certain kind of unknowability? What are we when “our” information is potentially anyone’s information? We may soon find out. A recent experiment by two Stanford University graduate students who gathered just a few month’s worth of phone metadata on 546 volunteers has, for instance, made mincemeat of President Obama’s claim that the NSA’s massive version of metadata collection "is not looking at people's names and they're not looking at content." Using only the phone metadata they got, the Stanford researchers "inferred sensitive information about people's lives, including: neurological and heart conditions, gun ownership, marijuana cultivation, abortion, and participation in Alcoholics Anonymous."

And that’s just a crude version of what the future holds for all of us. There are various kinds of extinctions. That superb environmental reporter Elizabeth Kolbert has just written a powerful book, The Sixth Extinction, about the more usual (if horrifying) kind. Our developing surveillance world may offer us an example of another kind of extinction: of what we once knew as the private self. If you want to be chilled to the bone when it comes to this, check out today’s stunning report by the ACLU’s Catherine Crump and Matthew Harwood on where the corporate world is taking your identity. Tom

Invasion of the Data Snatchers: Big Data and the Internet of Things Means the Surveillance of Everything

by Catherine Crump and Matthew Harwood

 

Home Invasion

"[W]e estimate that only one percent of things that could have an IP address do have an IP address today, so we like to say that ninety-nine percent of the world is still asleep," Padmasree Warrior, Cisco's Chief Technology and Strategy Officer, told the Silicon Valley Summit in December. "It’s up to our imaginations to figure out what will happen when the ninety-nine percent wakes up."

Yes, imagine it. Welcome to a world where everything you do is collected, stored, analyzed, and, more often than not, packaged and sold to strangers -- including government agencies.

In January, Google announced its $3.2 billion purchase of Nest, a company that manufactures intelligent smoke detectors and thermostats. The signal couldn’t be clearer. Google believes Nest’s vision of the “conscious home” will prove profitable indeed. And there’s no denying how cool the technology is. Nest’s smoke detector, for instance, can differentiate between burnt toast and true danger. In the wee hours, it will conveniently shine its nightlight as you groggily shuffle to the toilet. It speaks rather than beeps. If there’s a problem, it can contact the fire department.

The fact that these technologies are so cool and potentially useful shouldn’t, however, blind us to their invasiveness as they operate 24/7, silently gathering data on everything we do. Will companies even tell consumers what information they’re gathering? Will consumers have the ability to determine what they’re comfortable with? Will companies sell or share data gathered from your home to third parties? And how will companies protect that data from hackers and other miscreants?

The dangers aren’t theoretical. In November, the British tech blogger Doctorbeet discovered that his new LG Smart TV was snooping on him. Every time he changed the channel, his activity was logged and transmitted unencrypted to LG. Doctorbeet checked the TV’s option screen and found that the setting “collection of watching info” was turned on by default. Being a techie, he turned it off, but it didn’t matter. The information continued to flow to the company anyway.

As more and more household devices -- your television, your thermostat, your refrigerator -- connect to the Internet, device manufacturers will undoubtedly follow a model of comprehensive data collection and possibly infinite storage. (And don’t count on them offering you an opt-out either.) They have seen the giants of the online world -- the Googles, the Facebooks -- make money off their users’ personal data and they want a cut of the spoils. Your home will know your secrets, and chances are it will have loose lips.

The result: more and more of what happens behind closed doors will be open to scrutiny by parties you would never invite into your home. After all, the Drug Enforcement Administration already subpoenas utility company records to determine if electricity consumption in specific homes is consistent with a marijuana-growing operation. What will come next? Will eating habits collected by smart fridges be repackaged and sold to healthcare or insurance companies as predictors of obesity or other health problems -- and so a reasonable basis for determining premiums? Will smart lights inform drug companies of insomniac owners?

Keep in mind that when such data flows are being scrutinized, you’ll no longer be able to pull down the shades, not when the Peeping Toms of the twenty-first century come packaged in glossy, alluring boxes. Many people will just be doing what Americans have always done -- upgrading their appliances. It may not initially dawn on them that they are also installing surveillance equipment targeted at them. And companies have obvious incentives to obscure this fact as much as possible.

As the “conscious home” becomes a reality, we will all have to make a crucial and conscious decision for ourselves: Will I let this device into my home? Renters may not have that option. And eventually there may only be internet-enabled appliances.

Commercial Stalking

The minute you leave your home, the ability to avoid surveillance technologies masquerading as something else will, if anything, lessen.

Physical sensors connected to the Internet are increasingly everywhere, ready to detect a unique identifier associated with you, usually one generated by your smartphone, then log what you do and leverage the data you generate for insight into your life. For instance, Apple introduced iBeacon last year. It’s a service based on transmitters that employ Bluetooth technology to track where Apple users are in stores and restaurants. (The company conveniently turned on Bluetooth by default via a software update it delivered to Apple iPhone owners.) Apps that use iBeacon harvest a user’s data, including his or her location, and sometimes can even turn on a device’s microphone to listen in on what’s going on.

Another company, Turnstyle Solutions Inc., has placed sensors around Toronto that surreptitiously record signals emitted by WiFi-enabled devices and can track users’ movements. Turnstyle can tell, for instance, when a person who visited a restaurant goes to a bar or a hotel. When people log-on to WiFi networks Turnstyle has installed at area restaurants or coffee shops and check Facebook, the company can go far beyond location, collecting “names, ages, genders, and social media profiles,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

The rationale for apps that track where you are is that business owners can use the data to tailor the customer experience to your liking. If you’re wandering around the male grooming section of a particular retailer, the store could shoot you a coupon to convince you to purchase that full body trimmer that promises a smooth shave every time. If customers enter Macy’s and zig right more often than left, the store can strategically place what’s popular or on sale in those high-traffic areas. This is basically what’s happening online now, and brick and mortar stores want in so they can compete against the Amazons of the world.

Not so surprisingly, however, such handy technology has already led to discriminatory behavior by retailers. About a year ago, an investigation by the Wall Street Journal found that prices quoted by online retailers like Staples and Home Depot changed based on who the customer was. People who lived in higher-income areas generally received the best deals, which is a form of digital redlining. In the future, count on brick and mortar stores to do the same thing by identifying your phone, picking up data about you, and pricing items according to just how juicy a customer they think you may be.

To be able to do this, retailers need companies that can provide rich data about our lives. That’s where a group of pioneering companies in the new universe of customer surveillance called data aggregators come in. Already a multibillion-dollar industry, aggregators like Acxiom, Experian, and Datalogix buy customer data from wherever they can -- banks, travel websites, retailers -- and turn it into Big Data. Then they analyze, package, and sell it to third parties. “Our digital reach,” said Scott Howe, CEO of the largest data aggregator, Acxiom, “will soon approach nearly every Internet user in the U.S.”

Last December, the Senate Commerce Committee investigated the business practices of the nine largest data aggregators: what information they collect, how they obtain it, their invasiveness, and who they sell it to. The committee found that these companies collect information ranging from the relatively mundane to the incredibly sensitive, including names and addresses, income levels, and medical histories. They then sell it off without giving serious consideration to what the buyers might do with it.

In the process, you could find yourself categorized as part of a group of “Mid-Life Strugglers: Families” or “Meager Metro Means” or “Oldies but Goodies,” which aggregator InfoUSA described as “gullible” people who “want to believe their luck can change.” Think of it as high-tech commercial profiling of the most exploitative sort.

The result is the creation of a twenty-first century permanent record of your very own, which you are unlikely to ever be able to see because, as the Senate report warned, the industry operates under “a veil of secrecy” with little or no regulation. “Three of the largest companies -- Acxiom, Experian, and Epsilon -- to date have been similarly secretive with the committee with respect to their practices, refusing to identify the specific sources of their data or the customers who purchase it.”

Congress’s watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, reviewed U.S. privacy law and found that citizens generally do not have the right to control the scope of information collected about them or limit its use, even when it pertains to their health or their finances. And if the information is incorrect -- something you might never find out -- there’s no U.S. law that requires data aggregators to correct it.

Paul Ohm, a policy advisor to the Federal Trade Commission, calls these immense troves of personal information “databases of ruin.” He worries that, over time, these databases will include new waves of data -- maybe from your conscious home or location information from commercial sensors -- and so become ever more consolidated. Soon, he fears, “these databases will grow to connect every individual to at least one closely guarded secret. This might be a secret about a medical condition, family history, or personal preference. It is a secret that, if revealed, would cause more than embarrassment or shame; it would lead to serious, concrete, devastating harm.”

Sooner or later, with smart devices seamlessly using sensors and Big Data provided by data aggregators, it will be possible to pick you out of a crowd and identify you in complex ways in real time. If intelligent surveillance cameras armed with facial recognition technology have access to social media profiles as well as the information stored by data aggregators, a digital dossier of your life could be called up on-demand whenever your face is recognized. Imagine the power retailers and companies will exert over your life if they not only know who you are and where you are, but what your weaknesses are -- whether that’s booze, cigarettes, or the appealing mortgage rate with the sketchy small print. Are we looking at a future where the car salesman really does know what he has to do to put us in that car?

Big Data is creating the possibility of a far more entrenched, class-based surveillance society that discriminates using our perceived successes and preys on our weaknesses.

The Great Outdoors

Recently, Newark Liberty International Airport upgraded lighting fixtures at one of its terminals to a more eco-friendly alternative known as LEDs. It turns out, however, that energy efficiency wasn’t the only benefit of the purchase. The fixtures also double as a surveillance system of cameras and sensors that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is using to watch for long lines, identify license plates, and -- its officials claim -- spot suspicious behavior.

With all the spying going on these days, this may not seem particularly invasive, but don’t worry, the manufacturers of such systems are thinking much bigger. “We see outdoor lighting as the perfect infrastructure to build a brand new network,” said Hugh Martin, CEO of Sensity Systems, a Sunnyvale, California-based company interested in making lighting smart. “We felt what you’d want to use this network for is to gather information about people and the planet.”

Pretty soon, just about anywhere you are, when you look up at that light pole, it is likely to be looking back down at you. Or into your home or car.

Other surveillance technologies are heading for the heavens. Persistent Surveillance Systems has developed a surveillance camera on steroids. When attached to small aircraft, the 192-megapixel cameras record the patterns of the planetary life they fly over for hours at a time. According to the Washington Post, this will give the police and other customers a “time machine” they can simply rewind when they need it. Placed strategically at the highest points of any town or city, these cameras could provide the sort of blanket surveillance that’s hard to avoid. The inventor of the camera, a retired Air Force officer, helped create a similar system for the city of Fallujah, the site of two of the most violent battles of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. It’s just one example of how wartime surveillance technologies are returning home for “civilian use.”

Private surveillance technology is also destroying one of America’s iconic freedoms: the open road. License plate readers are proliferating across America. These devices snap a picture of every passing car. One company, Vigilant Solutions, already holds 1.8 billion license plate records in its data warehouse, known as the National Vehicle Location Service (NVLS). Anyone with access to this information could easily find out where a person has driven simply by connecting the plate to the car owner. And keep in mind that it’s up to the companies gathering them to determine just who can access the information -- data of immense interest to private investigators and anyone else curious to track another person’s movements.

Like many businesses that trade in Big Data or construct massive databases, Vigilant is in regular contact with government agencies craving access to its meaty stores of information.

If You Build It, They Will Come

In February, the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) put out a solicitation to obtain access to a private license plate reader database for the purpose of “locating criminal aliens and absconders.” ICE claims that it wants to enhance officer safety by making it easier to arrest suspects away from their homes. When the mainstream media took notice and privacy advocates like the ACLU objected, new Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson pulled the plug on the project.

A big win? Don’t count on it, because police departments already have easy access to commercial license plate repositories. In the past, Vigilant has, for instance, allowed ICE to test its service free of charge. Police often pony up the cash to access such databases. As a quick experiment, go to Vigilant’s NVLS registration page, click on the drop-down menu beside “Agency name,” and scroll down. Trust us, you’ll get bored by the staggering list of police departments before you reach the bottom.

Which brings us to an axiom of our digital age: law enforcement will exploit any database built, if it makes it easier to figure out what the rest of us are up to. Lucky for them, there’s a wealth of data out there and available. Experian, one of the largest data aggregators, told the Senate Commerce Committee that “government agencies” regularly purchase information from them.

Often, those agencies don’t even have to pay for the privilege of accessing our data. In many cases, such an agency can simply issue its own subpoena (not seen by a judge) and compel companies to turn over our sensitive data. The culprit here is known as the “third party doctrine,” which some courts have aggressively (and wrongly) interpreted to mean that any information disclosed to a third party isn’t really private.

The danger of the rise of Big Data and the Internet of Things is straightforward enough. Whenever data is perpetually generated, collected, and stored, the result is going to be a virtual ATM of user information that government agencies can withdraw from with ease. Last year, for instance, local, state, and federal authorities issued 164,000 subpoenas to Verizon and more than 248,000 subpoenas to AT&T for user information, while issuing nearly 7,500 subpoenas to Google during the first half of 2013.

The Internet of Things means that, soon enough, the authorities will have yet more ways to learn yet more about us.

Big Data, Little Democracy?

Here are two obvious questions for our surveillance future: Who controls the data generated by our devices? Without doing anything except buying and installing them, do we somehow consent to having every piece of data they generate shared with Big Business and sometimes Big Brother? No one should have to isolate themselves from society and technology in the ascetic mold of Henry David Thoreau -- or more ominously, Ted Kaczynski -- to have some semblance of privacy.

In the future, even going all Jeremiah Johnson might not have the effect intended, since law enforcement could interpret your lack of a solid digital footprint as inherently suspicious. This would be like a police officer growing suspicious of a home just because it was all dark and locked up tight.

When everything is increasingly tracked and viewed through the lens of technological omniscience, what will the effect be on dissent and protest? Will security companies with risk assessment software troll through our data and crunch it to identify people they believe have the propensity to become criminals or troublemakers -- and then share that with law enforcement? (Something like it already seems to be happening in Chicago, where police are using computer analytic programs to identify people at a greater risk of violent behavior.)

There’s simply no way to forecast how these immense powers -- disproportionately accumulating in the hands of corporations seeking financial advantage and governments craving ever more control -- will be used. Chances are Big Data and the Internet of Things will make it harder for us to control our own lives, as we grow increasingly transparent to powerful corporations and government institutions that are becoming more opaque to us.

Catherine Crump is a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. She is a non-residential fellow with the Stanford Center for Internet and Society and an adjunct professor of clinical law at NYU. Her principle focus is representing individuals challenging the lawfulness of government surveillance programs. Follow her on Twitter at @CatherineNCrump.

Matthew Harwood is senior writer/editor with the ACLU. A TomDispatch regular, his work has been published by Al-Jazeera America, the American Conservative, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Guardian, Guernica, Reason, Salon, Truthout, and the Washington Monthly. He also regularly reviews books for the Future of Freedom Foundation. Follow him on Twitter at @mharwood31.

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Copyright 2014 Catherine Crump and Matthew Harwood

Valdez + 25

25 Years After Exxon Valdez, BP Was the Hidden Culprit

by Greg Palast  - Truthdig

Two decades ago I was the investigator for the legal team that sold you the bullshit that a drunken captain was the principal cause of the Exxon Valdez disaster, the oil tanker crackup that poisoned over a thousand miles of Alaska’s coastline 25 years ago on March 24, 1989.



A crew cleans up oil six years after the Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska. Photo by James McAlpine, © Palast Investigative Fund.

The truth is far uglier, and the real culprit—British Petroleum, now BP—got away without a scratch to its reputation or to its pocketbook.

And because BP’s willful negligence, prevarications and fraud in the Exxon Valdez spill cost the company nothing, its disdain for the law, for the environment and for the safety of its workers was repeated in the Gulf of Mexico with deadly consequences, resulting, two decades later, in the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Just this month, the Obama administration authorized BP to return to drilling in the Gulf.

It would be worth the time of our ever-trusting regulators to take a look at my Exxon Valdez BP files. They would see a decades-long pattern of BP’s lies, bribes and cover-ups that led, inexorably, to the Deepwater Horizon blowout—and that continue today within BP’s worldwide oil operations.

Here is a sample from my files on BP from the original Exxon Valdez fraud and racketeering investigation:

Fraud No. 1: The Emergency Sucker Boat fraud

Containing an oil spill—preventing spilled crude from spreading to the shore—is not rocket science.

As the principal owner of the Alaska Pipeline and Terminal, BP, not Exxon, was designated by law to prevent oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez from hitting the beach. It was BP’s disastrous failures, more than Exxon’s, that allowed the oil to devastate Alaska’s coast.

To contain a spill all you need are rubbers and suckers. It works like this:

If a tanker, oil rig or pipe bursts open, you surround it with a giant rubber skirt known as “boom.” Then you suck the oil out through vacuum hoses on board special “containment” ships. The containment ship, which lays out the boom and skimmer hoses, is the firetruck of oil spills. You simply don’t let tankers out of port unless a containment ship is ready to roll. It’s against the law.

But the law has never meant much to BP.

In May 1977, as the first tankers left Valdez, BP executives promised the state of Alaska that no tanker would leave port unless there were two containment barges at the ready and loaded with boom, with one placed near Bligh Island.

In fact, on March 24, 1989, when the Exxon Valdez ran aground, right at Bligh Island, the containment barge was far away in Valdez, locked in a dry dock, its boom and hoses under Alaskan ice. As a result, by the time the emergency oil spill vessel got to the stricken ship, the oil slick was a hundred miles in circumference and beyond control.

Two decades later, I watched fireboats uselessly spraying the burning oil on the Deepwater Horizon. Once again there were no BP skimmer barges, no boom surrounding the rig. Just as in Alaska, the promised spill containment operation was a con. By the time the Navy set out 400 miles of rubber boom days later, the slick was already as big as Cuba and slathering the Gulf shores.

Recently, Chevron and other big oil giants, now drilling the Gulf, have printed a series of full-page ads in papers across America touting their new state-of-the-art oil spill containment operations. Hey, thanks. But these are the same vessels BP and its fellow Gulf drillers promised before the Deepwater Horizon blew apart.

Fraud No. 2: Ghost Crews

There’s no sense having a firetruck without firemen. And so, years before the Exxon Valdez grounding, Alyeska, the oil company consortium headed by BP, promised the U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Congress, under oath, that the oil shipper would employ a trained and equipped crew around the clock to jump from helicopters, if needed, to contain an oil spill. My clients, the Chugach Natives of Alaska, agreed to give up ownership of the land under the Port of Valdez to the oil companies in return for those jobs.

The night the Exxon Valdez grounded, Chugach Natives watched from the beach at nearby Tatitlek Village as the tanker headed into the reef. They could have prevented the disaster—but they were helpless: BP had fired them.

In my team’s investigation for the Chugach, we discovered that, to save money, BP’s Alyeska simply drew up lists of nonexistent emergency spill response workers or wrote down names of untrained, unequipped dockworkers: an imaginary crew to man phantom emergency ships.

Fraud No. 3: Phantom Equipment

And the rubber boom? That was a phantom as well. BP’s Alyeska had promised that too, in writing. The equipment was supposed to be placed along the tanker route including Bligh Island—exactly the spot where the Exxon Valdez grounded.

And so, it was no surprise to me that 21 years later in the Gulf there were neither skimmers nor boom at the site of the Deepwater Horizon. The equipment was there, as in Alaska, only on paper.

Indeed, part of BP’s Gulf Coast response plan was a photocopy of the Alaska plan, including ways to wash down Arctic seals.

Cover-Up, Threats and Bribery

Did BP’s top executives and partners know of the ghost response teams and phantom equipment ruse? Yes, we have the documents and insiders’ testimony. Just three examples from my bulging file cabinet:

In a confidential letter dated April 19, 1984, Capt. James Woodle, BP’s commander of the port at Valdez, warned that “due to a reduction in manning, age of equipment, limited training and lack of personnel, serious doubt exists that [we] would be able to contain and clean up effectively a medium or large size oil spill.”

In response, BP threatened him with a file on his marital infidelities (fabricated), fired him, then forced him to destroy his files.

Ten months before the Exxon Valdez spill, BP’s Alyeska chief, Theo Polasek, told a secret meeting of the top executives of the Alaska group oil companies (including BP, Exxon and ConocoPhillips) that containing an oil spill “at the mid-point of Prince William Sound [is] not possible with present equipment.” But no change was made. Polasek was denied the funds needed to protect the mid-Sound—exactly where the tanker grounded.

In September 1984, before the Exxon Valdez disaster, BP’s shipping broker, Charles Hamel, was so concerned at what he saw as an immediate danger in Alaska that he flew by Concorde to London to warn BP’s chiefs of the looming emergency. In response, BP hired ex-CIA operatives to tap Hamel’s phone and intercept his mail. BP’s black ops team even ran a toy truck with a microphone into the air vents of a building where he was speaking with a congressman. (Ultimately, BP’s spooks were captured by a team of Navy SEALs.)

BP Gets Off Cheap

The team of attorneys representing the Natives and fishermen whose lives were destroyed by the tanker spill chose to hold back the true and ugly story of systematic fraud and penny-pinching negligence by BP and its partners. We focused instead on the simpler story of human frailty and error—“drunken skipper hits reef.”

We didn’t have a choice: Oil company chiefs had told our clients—Natives who were out of cash, isolated and desperate—that they wouldn’t get a dime unless we agreed not to use the “f-word”: fraud. Exxon would withhold payment for 20 years.

We buried the fraud charges—yet Exxon still didn’t pay for 22 years. By that time, a third of the Natives and fishermen in the lawsuit were dead.

And BP? Who said crime doesn’t pay? BP walked away with a nominal payment to Alaska’s Natives, fishermen and towns of $125 million—100 percent of it covered by insurance.

And that’s what led, years later, to the incineration of 11 men on the Deepwater Horizon and 600 miles of Gulf coastline still poisoned today.

BP and other oil companies have a clear motive for these safety games: skimmer barges, crews, equipment and operations cost billions of dollars a year worldwide to man and maintain. It’s cheaper to lie, cover up and buy the favor of politicians and regulators.

In London, BP executives told me on camera of their systematic bribery of presidents and their minions in the new Caspian Sea oil states. (Bribery charges against one bagman were dropped when in 2010 the National Security Agency acknowledged that it had authorized the bribes.)

But it’s not just “over there” that BP spreads its largesse. BP’s original sweetheart oil leases in the Gulf and the light hand of regulators were doubtless the result of favors—monetary and sexual—that the company lavished on U.S. regulatory agents at the Minerals Management Service, an agency that President Obama shuttered in response to the Deepwater Horizon blowout.

There’s also the monetary and political love laid upon America’s powerful. Although a foreign company, BP’s chief in Alaska, Bob Malone, became a co-chairman and fundraiser for George W. Bush’s election campaign.

Polluted Shores, Polluted Politics

In 2010 for the U.K.’s Channel 4 Television, I returned to Alaska with filmmaker Richard Rowley. In the quiet rivulets of the islands within Prince William Sound, we picked up gobs of oil with the telltale chemical markers of the Exxon Valdez. Then we flew to the Gulf Coast with Alaskan oil spill biologist Rick Steiner—and found miles and miles of BP’s oil oozing under beaches the company and the Obama administration had already declared clean.

Yet just last week, BP was awarded more tracts to drill in the Gulf even as its onetime vice president for Gulf exploration, David Rainey, stands trial on felony charges of obstruction of Congress.

It is clear that neither BP, its partners nor this administration can be trusted to safely punch more miles-deep holes in the Gulf of Mexico. As long as oil companies can pad their bottom line by scoffing at the law, as long as they can cheaply pollute the political process, the next disaster is not a matter of if, but when.

Palast’s investigation of BP opens his latest film, “Vultures and Vote Rustlers.” Prerelease editions are available on DVD and download for a donation to Palast’s foundation for investigative reporting.

And read the complete untold story of the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters in Palast’s “Vultures’ Picnic,” BBC Newsnight’s Culture Program’s Book of the Year.

Basta! Removing Venezuela's Fascist Footholds

Defeating Fascism before it’s too Late

by James Petras

Captain Jose Guillen Araque, of the Venezuelan National Guard, recently gave President Maduro a book on the rise of Nazism, warning that “fascism has to be defeated before it’s too late”!

In retaliation for his prophetic warning, the patriotic young captain was shot by a US-backed assassin on the streets of Marcay in the state of Aragua on March 16, 2014. This raised the number of Venezuelan soldiers and police killed since the fascist uprising to 29.

The killing of a prominent, patriotic officer on a major street in a provincial capital is one more indication that the Venezuelan fascists are on the move, confident of their support from Washington and from a broad swath of the Venezuelan upper and middle class. They constitute a minority of the electorate and they have no illusions about taking power via constitutional and democratic means.


Captain Guillen Araque had stepped forward to remind President Maduro that the road to power for Nazi and fascist totalitarian groups has been littered with the corpses of well-meaning democrats and social democrats throughout contemporary history because of their failure to use their constitutional powers to crush the enemies of democracy.

Introduction

The History of the rise of Fascism under Democracies

The term “fascist” in Venezuela is appropriately applied to the organized violent political groups currently engaged in mass terror in a campaign to destabilize and overthrow the democratically-elected Bolivarian government. Academic purist might argue that the Venezuelan fascists lack the racist and nationalist ideology of their German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese predecessors. While true, it is also irrelevant.

The Venezuelan brand of fascism is highly dependent on, and acts as a proxy for, US imperialism and their Colombian warlord allies. In one sense however, Venezuelan fascism’s racism is directed against its multiracial African-Amerindian Venezuelan working and peasant classes – as demonstrated by their vitriolic racism against the deceased President Hugo Chavez.

The essential connection with earlier fascist movements is found in its (1) profound class hostility to the popular majority; (2) its visceral hatred of the Chavista Socialist Party, winner of 18 of the last 19 elections; (3) its resort to the armed seizure of power by a minority acting on behalf of the domestic and US imperial ruling classes; (4) its intention to destroy the very democratic institutions and procedures which it exploits in order to gain political space; (5) its targeting of working class institutions – communal councils, neighborhood associations, public health and dental clinics, public schools, transport, subsidized food stores, political meeting places, public credit unions, trade union organizations and peasant co-operatives; (6) and its support of capitalist banks, huge commercial landed estates and manufacturing firms.

In Germany, Italy, Spain, France and Chile, fascist movements also began as small terrorist groups, who gained the financial backing of the capitalist elite because of their violence against working class organizations and democratic institutions and recruited primarily among middle class university students, elite professionals (especially doctors) and active and retired higher military officers – united in their hostility to the democratic order.

Tragically and all too often, democratic leaders, operating within a constitutional government, tended to regard fascists as “just another party”, refusing or unwilling to crush the armed thugs, who combined terror in the streets with elections to gain state power. Constitutionalist democrats have failed or were unwilling to see the political, civilian arm of the Nazis as part and parcel of one organic totalitarian enemy; so they negotiated and debated endlessly with elite fascists who meanwhile destroyed the economy while terrorists pounded away at the political and social foundations of the democratic state. The democrats refused to send out their multi-million mass supporters to face the fascist hordes. Worse, they even prided themselves on jailing their own supporters, police and soldiers, who had been accused of using ‘excessive force’ in their confrontation with fascist street thugs. Thus the fascists easily moved from the streets to state power. The elected democrats were so concerned about criticism from the international and capitalist media, elite critics and self-appointed ‘human rights’ organizations, that they facilitated the takeover by fascists. The people’s right to the armed defense of their democracy had been subordinated to the pretext of upholding ‘democratic norms’ - norms that any bourgeois state under assault would have rejected! Constitutional democrats failed to recognize how drastically politics had changed. They were no longer dealing with a parliamentary opposition preparing for the next election; they were confronted with armed terrorists and saboteurs committed to armed struggle and the seizure of political power by any means – including violent coups-d’états.

In the lexicon of fascism, democratic conciliation is a weakness, a vulnerability and an open invitation to escalate violence; ‘peace and love’ and ‘human rights’ slogans are to be exploited; calls for ‘negotiations’ are preambles for surrender; and ‘agreements’ preludes to capitulation.

To the terrorists, the democratic politicians who warn about a “threat of fascism” while acting as if they were engaged in ‘parliamentary skirmishes’, become an open target for violent attack.

This is how the fascists came to power, in Germany, Italy and Chile, while the constitutionalist democrats, to the last, refused to arm the millions of organized workers who could have throttled the fascists and saved democracy and preserved their own lives.

Fascism in Venezuela: A Mortal Threat Today

The martyred hero, Captain Guillen Araque’s warning of an imminent fascist danger in Venezuela has a powerful substantive basis. While the overt terrorist violence ebbs and flows, the underlying structural basis of fascism in the economy and society remains intact. The subterranean organizations, financing and organizing the flow of arms to fascists-in-waiting remain in place.

The political leaders of the opposition are playing a duplicitous game, constantly moving from legal forms of protest to sub-rosa complicity with the armed terrorists. There is no doubt that in any fascist putsch, the political oligarchs will emerge as the real rulers – and will share power with the leaders of the fascist organizations. In the meantime, their ‘respectability’ provides political cover; their ‘human rights’ campaigns to free incarcerated street thugs and arsonists earn ‘international media support’ while serving as ‘intermediaries’ between the open US funding agencies, and the clandestine terrorist underground.

In measuring the scope and depth of the fascist danger, it is a mistake to simply count the number of bombers, arsonists and snipers, without including the logistical, back-up and peripheral support groups and institutional backers who sustain the overt actors,

To ‘defeat fascism before it is too late’, the government must realistically assess the resources, organization and operational code of the fascist command and reject the overly sanguine and ‘upbeat’ pronouncements emanating from some ministers, advisers and legislators.

First, the fascists are not simply a small band confined to pounding on pots and attacking municipal workers in the upper-middle class neighborhoods of Caracas for the benefit of the international and corporate media. The fascists are organized on a national basis; their members are active throughout the country.

They target vital institutions and infrastructure in numerous strategic locations.

Their strategy is centrally-controlled, their operations are decentralized.

The fascists are an organized force; their financing, arming and actions are planned. Their demonstrations are not ‘spontaneous’, locally-organized actions, responding to government ‘repression’ as depicted in the bourgeois and imperial media.

The fascists bring together different cross currents of violent groups, frequently combining ideologically-driven right-wing professionals, large-scale smuggling gangs and drug traffickers (especially in border regions), paramilitary groups, mercenaries and known felons. These are the ‘frontline fascists’, financed by major currency speculators, protected by elected local officials, offered ‘sanctuary’ by real estate investors and high-level university bureaucrats.

The fascists are both ‘nationals’ and internationals: They include locally paid thugs and students from upper-middle class families; paramilitary Colombian soldiers, professional mercenaries of all sorts, ‘contract killers’ from US ‘security’ outfits and clandestine US Special Forces Operatives; and fascist ‘internationalists’ recruited from Miami, Central America, Latin America and Europe.

The organized terrorists have two strategic sanctuaries for launching their violent operations - Bogota and Miami, where prominent political leaders, like ex-President Alvaro Uribe and US Congressional leaders provide political support.

The convergence of highly lucrative criminal economic activity and political terrorism presents a formidable double threat to the stability of the Venezuelan economy and the security of the state . . . Criminals and terrorists find a common home under the US political tent, designed to overthrow Venezuela’s democratic government and crush the Bolivarian revolution of the Venezuelan people.

The backward and forward inter-linkages between criminals and terrorists inside and outside the country, between Washington senior policymakers, street drug pushers and contraband ‘camels’, provides the international elite mouthpieces and the muscle for street fighters and snipers.

Terrorist targets are not chosen at ‘random’; they are not products of an enraged citizenry protesting social and economic inequities. The carefully chosen targets of terrorism are the strategic programs which sustain the democratic administration; first and foremost the mass social institutions forming the base of the government. This explains why terrorists bomb health clinics for the poor, public schools and centers for adult education in the barrios, the state subsidized food stores and the public transport system. These are part of the vast, popular welfare system set up by the Bolivarian government. They are key building blocks in securing massive voter support in 18 out of the last 19 elections and popular power in the streets and communities. By destroying the social welfare infrastructure, the terrorists hope to break the social bonds between people and government.

Terrorists target the legitimate national security system: Namely, the police, National Guard, judges, public prosecutors and other authorities in charge of safeguarding citizens. The assassinations, violent attacks and threats against public officials, the fire-bombing of public buildings and public transport are designed to create a climate of fear and to demonstrate that the state is weak and incapable of protecting the everyday life of its citizens. The terrorists want to project an image of ‘dual power’ by seizing public spaces and blocking normal commerce… and by ‘governing the streets through the gun’. Above all the terrorists want to demobilize and curtail popular counter-demonstrations by blocking streets and sniping at activists engaged in political activity in contested neighborhoods. The terrorists know they can count on their ‘legal’ political opposition allies to provide them with a mass base via public demonstrations, which can serve as a shield for violent assaults and a pretext for greater sabotage.

Conclusion

Fascism, namely armed terrorism directed at violently overthrowing a democratic government, is a real and immediate threat in Venezuela. The day-to-day, ups and downs of street fighting and arson are not an adequate measure of the threat. As we have noted, the in-depth structural and organizational supports underlying the rise and growth of fascism are far more important. The challenge in Venezuela is to cut-off the economic and political basis of fascism. Unfortunately, up until recently the government has been overly sensitive to hostile criticism from overseas and domestic elites who rush to defend fascists – in the name of “democratic freedom”. The government of Venezuela has enormous resources at its disposal to root out the fascist threat. Even if firm action causes an outcry from overseas liberal friends, most pro-democracy advocates believe it is incumbent upon the government to act against those opposition officials who continue to incite armed rebellion.

Most recently, there have been clear signs that the Venezuelan government, with its powerful democratic and constitutional mandate, is moving with awareness of the fascist danger and will act with determination to stamp it out in the streets and in the suites.

The National Assembly has voted to strip Congresswoman Corina Machado of her immunity as a deputy in the National Assembly so she can be prosecuted for inciting violence. The President of the National Assembly Diosdado Cabello has presented detailed documentary evidence of her role in organizing and promoting armed rebellion. Several opposition mayors, actively involved in promoting and protecting snipers, street thugs and arsonists, have been charged and arrested.

The majority of Venezuelans confronted by the rising tide of fascist violence support the punishment of these high officials engaged in or supporting sabotage. Without firm action, Venezuelan intelligence agencies as well as the average citizen agree that these ‘opposition’ politicos will continue to promote violence and provide sanctuary for paramilitary assassins.

The government has realized that they are engaged in a real war, planned by a centralized leadership and executed by decentralized operatives. Legislative leaders are coming to grips with the political psychology of fascism, which interprets Presidential offers of political conciliation and judicial leniency as weakness to be exploited by further violence. The most significant advance toward stopping the fascist threat lies in the government’s recognition of the links between the parliamentary and business elite and the fascist terrorists: financial speculators, smugglers and big-time hoarders of food and other essential commodities are all part and parcel of the same fascist drive for power together with the terrorists who bomb public food markets and attack the trucks transporting food to the poor neighborhoods. One revolutionary worker said to me after a street skirmish: “Por la razon y la fuerza no pasaran!”(Through reason and force they will be defeated)…

Australia's Next Stolen Generation

Another Stolen Generation: How Australia Still Wrecks Aboriginal Families

by John Pilger - Information Clearing House 

The tape is searing. There is the voice of an infant screaming as he is wrenched from his mother, who pleads, "There is nothing wrong with my baby. Why are you doing this to us? I would've been hung years ago, wouldn't I? Because [as an Aboriginal Australian] you're guilty before you're found innocent." The child's grandmother demands to know why "the stealing of our kids is happening all over again". A welfare official says, "I'm gunna take him, mate."

This happened to an Aboriginal family in outback New South Wales. It is happening across Australia in a scandalous and largely unrecognised abuse of human rights that evokes the infamous stolen generation of the last century. Up to the 1970s, thousands of mixed-race children were stolen from their mothers by welfare officials. The children were given to institutions as cheap or slave labour; many were abused.

Described by a chief protector of Aborigines as "breeding out the colour", the policy was known as assimilation. It was influenced by the same eugenics movement that inspired the Nazis. In 1997 a landmark report, Bringing Them Home, disclosed that as many 50,000 children and their mothers had endured "the humiliation, the degradation and sheer brutality of the act of forced separation ... the product of the deliberate, calculated policies of the state". The report called this genocide.

Assimilation remains Australian government policy in all but name. Euphemisms such as "reconciliation" and "Stronger Futures" cover similar social engineering and an enduring, insidious racism in the political elite, the bureaucracy and wider Australian society. When in 2008 prime minister Kevin Rudd apologised for the stolen generation, he added: "I want to be blunt about this. There will be no compensation." The Sydney Morning Herald congratulated Rudd on a "shrewd manoeuvre" that "cleared away a piece of political wreckage in a way that responds to some of its own supporters' emotional needs, yet changes nothing".

Today, the theft of Aboriginal children – including babies taken from the birth table – is now more widespread than at any time during the last century. As of June last year, almost 14,000 Aboriginal children had been "removed". This is five times the number when Bringing Them Home was written. More than a third of all removed children are Aboriginal – from 3% of the population. At the present rate, this mass removal of Aboriginal children will result in a stolen generation of more than 3,300 children in the Northern Territory alone.

Pat (not her real name) is the mother whose anguish was secretly recorded on a phone as four department of child services officials, and six police, descended on her home. On the tape an official claims they have come only for an "assessment". But two of the police officers, who knew Pat, told her they saw no risk to her child and warned her to "get out of here quick". Pat fled, cradling her infant, but the one-year-old was eventually seized without her knowing why. The next morning a police officer returned to apologise to her and said her baby should never have been taken away. Pat has no idea where her son is.

Once she was "invited" by officials to bring her children to "neutral" offices to discuss a "care plan". The doors were locked and officials seized the children, with one of the youngest dragging on a police officer's gun belt. Many Indigenous mothers are unaware of their legal rights. A secretive children's court has become notorious for rubber-stamping removals.

Most Aboriginal families live on the edge. Their life expectancy in towns a short flight from Sydney is as low as 37. Dickensian diseases are rife; Australia is the only developed country not to have eradicated trachoma, which blinds Aboriginal children.

Pat has both complied with and struggled bravely against a punitive bureaucracy that can remove children on hearsay. She has twice been acquitted of false charges, including "kidnapping" her own children. A psychologist has described her as a capable and good mother.

Josie Crawshaw, the former director of a respected families' support organisation in Darwin, told me: "In remote areas, officials will go in with a plane in the early hours and fly the child thousands of kilometres from their community. There'll be no explanation, no support, and the child may be gone forever."

In 2012 the co-ordinator general of remote services for the Northern Territory, Olga Havnen, was sacked when she revealed that almost A$80m (£44m) was spent on the surveillance and removal of Aboriginal children compared with only A$500,000 (£275,000) on supporting the same impoverished families. She told me:

"The primary reasons for removing children are welfare issues directly related to poverty and inequality. The impact is just horrendous because if they are not reunited within six months, it's likely they won't see each other again. If South Africa was doing this, there'd be an international outcry."

She and others with long experience I have interviewed have echoed the Bringing them Home report, which described an official "attitude" in Australia that regarded all Aboriginal people as "morally deficient". A department of family and community services spokesman said that most removed Indigenous children in New South Wales were placed with Indigenous carers. According to Indigenous support networks, this is a smokescreen; it does not mean families, and it is control by divisiveness that is the bureaucracy's real achievement.

I met a group of Aboriginal grandmothers, all survivors of the first stolen generation, all now with stolen grandchildren. "We live in a state of fear, again," they said. David Shoebridge, a state Greens MP, told me: "The truth is, there is a market among whites for these kids, especially babies."

The New South Wales parliament is soon to debate legislation that introduces forced adoption and "guardianship". Children under two years old will be liable – without the mother's consent – if "removed" for more than six months. For many Aboriginal mothers like Pat, it can take six months merely to make contact with their children. "It's setting up Aboriginal families to fail," said Shoebridge.

I asked Josie Crawshaw why.

"The wilful ignorance in Australia about its first people has now become the kind of intolerance that gets to the point where you can smash an entire group of humanity and there is no fuss."

www.johnpilger.com

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Wendy Mendez, Calvin Cook, Janine Bandcroft Mar. 24, 2014

This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook - Gorilla-Radio.com

The horrors we daily see meted out by the World's most powerful against the most vulnerable may be difficult to understand without the benefit of historical context.

The grim truth is: Today's death squad mercenaries, and the junta regimes they both foment and support, are the fruit of dragon's teeth sown long ago.

This was perhaps nowhere more evident than in Iraq, where the so-called "Salvador Option" was resurrected by its mastermind, John Negroponte. During America's terror campaign in El Salvador in the 1970's, gangs of specially-trained soldiers were sent into the countryside to capture, torture, and kill civilians.

The stated goal then was to deter communists taking hold of the tiny country and providing a beach-head for a Russian invasion of the U.S.

Listen. Hear.

The secretive program was revealed to the American public following the slaying of Archbishop Oscar Romero in his church in 1980, and more graphically by the subsequent brutal rape and murder of three American nuns, and Jean Donovan, a lay missioner. Less known however was a similar terror campaign conducted throughout most of the 1980's in El Salvador's neighbour to the north, Guatemala.

Wendy Mendez is a Vancouver-based human rights defender and founder of H.I.J.O.S.Guatemala, or Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice Against Forgetting and Silence. H.I.J.O.S. uses public education, political art and murals, and demonstration to both articulate and strengthen Guatemala's justice movement. The organization is made of students, workers, professionals, and includes the children of Guatemala's disappeared and murdered. Mendez is herself a survivor of the Guatemalan genocide, she and her family fleeing the country following the disappearing of her mother, Luz Haydee Mendez in 1984.

Wendy Mendez will be in Victoria this Friday, presenting at the Central America Support Committee's monthly Cafe Sympatico at 1923 Fernwood Rd., in the heart of the Fernwood community.

Wendy Mendez in the first half.

And; last year, the Shawnigan Residents Association discovered plans by the local gravel quarry, South Island Aggregates to fill their sun-setted open pit mine with 5 million tonnes of "contaminated soil" on the slopes above Shawnigan Lake. They protested, beseeched, and appealed to every body involved in the process, but in the finish, the BC Ministry of the Environment approved the dump. A final appeal of the ministry's permit was heard earlier this month, and the last ditch effort commences today, scheduled to conclude April 4th.

Calvin Cook has lived along the lake for nearly thirty years, and is Vice President of the Shawnigan Residents Association.

Calvin Cook and a dump too much in the second half.

And; Victoria Street Newz publisher and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with some of what's good to do in and around the city, and beyond it too, in the coming week. But first, Wendy Mendez and Guatemala's Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice Against Forgetting and Silence.

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.

Call It Tar, or Call It Oil: By Any Name Alberta's Spreading Bitumen Pits Are Bad News

Oil Sands or Tar Sands? Actually, They're Neither

by Damien Gillis - The Common Sense Canadian

As the publisher of an online journal focusing on Canada’s environment and resource economy, the issue of what to call Alberta’s oil patch is an increasingly, um, sticky subject.

Do we use “oil sands”, capitulating to the industry’s late but valiant rebranding effort, or keep to “tar sands”, which is how we’ve generally referred to it in the past?

Or, like the Huffington Post and other newer, online publications, float between the two, depending on the story and author – which is what we’re doing more of lately.

Neither oil nor tar

The simple fact of the matter is that viscous, sand-encased substance lying under the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin is neither oil nor tar. Which makes it hypocritical and disingenuous for industry advocates to dismiss their critics for using the word “tar”, while at the same time misrepresenting their product as “oil”.

One thing that substance is most definitely not is sweet, light crude. It’s bitumen. At best, after considerable refining, it will become synthetic crude (or “syncrude”) and various other fuels and petrochemical products. It is never, nor will it ever be oil.

I have always preferred ”tar sands”, not because of its activist connotation, but because I believe tar more closely reflects the defining characteristics of bitumen than does oil. Of course, tar is not a single, naturally-occurring substance – rather “a very thick, black, sticky liquid…used especially for road surfaces”, as Merriam-Webster’s defines it. (On that note, a contractor I hired to patch a leaking crack between the asphalt and concrete perimeter at the rear of my building recommended a bitumen product for the job, which worked like a hot damn).

Says Wikipedia, “Tar can be produced from coal, wood, petroleum, or peat. It is black, and a mixture of hydrocarbons and free carbon.” A sticky, black substance often derived from coal or petroleum, which is used to patch roads. Sounds an awful lot like bitumen to me.

All of this matters because Alberta bitumen has a bigger environmental footprint than conventional oil – from the water and energy required to extract it, to the condensate required to dilute it and move it through a pipeline, to the emissions from refining and ultimately burning it. When it spills, like it did from an Enbridge pipeline into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River, it can prove a god awful mess to clean up (a misnomer itself, as this Michigan spill will never truly be cleaned up). So confusing bitumen with oil is letting it off the hook for being something quite different.

“Tar Sands” can be such a turn-off

That said, I always want to reach new readers, especially with regards to the vital conversation on Canada’s energy future. And the fact is, the oil industry and Harper government, though late out of the gate, have been highly effective at marginalizing the term “tar sands” and those who use it as left-wing nuts and out-of-touch tree-huggers. I’m not saying they’re objectively right about this. Of course they aren’t, especially with the sort of polarizing language they increasingly apply to anyone who dares question the industry: “radical”, “extremist”, or the most egregious, “eco-terrorist”.

Look, anthropogenic climate change is real. Even the oil industry is acknowledging as much these days. Alberta’s toxic tailings ponds are leaking into the Athabasca River – even the Harper government’s scientists recognize this now. So the notion that raising issues with the oil/tar sands makes one an extremist or even terrorist is as obscene as it is preposterous and only serves to further polarize the nation. For that, the industry and its government partners merit recrimination. Heck, even Conservative ex-PM Joe Clark thinks as much.

Nevertheless, the success of the oil lobby in terms of shifting the language paradigm around Alberta bitumen is a present reality which I feel compelled at least to confront.
American author stymied by oil sands/tar sands debate

Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Tony Horwitz encapsulated the issue on CBC radio’s The Current this past week while discussing his time in Alberta researching a new book. Host Anna Maria Tremonti asked, “When you got to Fort MacMurray, were you saying oil sands or tar sands?” Horowitz replied:

I was new to this topic and was sort of an agnostic on that question, but it quickly became clear to me that saying ‘tar sands’ would tar me as a hostile environmentalist. So, I began to say ‘oil sands’. Now that I’m back here in the US, I have to say most of the conversation, it’s ‘tar sands’ – but it’s a mark of how politicized this issue is that we can’t even agree on what to call this substance.

Environmentalists frame tar sands early on

“Oil sands” wasn’t always the go-to moniker for Alberta bitumen. In a rare coup for the environmental movement, the early rounds of the PR war over Alberta’s massive bitumen deposits went to tree-hugging opponents. The term, “tar sands” stuck in the public consciousness, both in Canada and amongst a growing legion of international critics.

This was the kind of rebranding exercise that is so often the province of “free market” conservatives and their pollsters – like Frank Luntz, who advised the Bush Administration to substitute “climate change” for global warming, in order to make it sound less alarming.

Sometime around the 2009 publication of National Geogrphic’s groundbreaking photo essay, titled “Scraping Bottom”, the oil lobby recognized it had a real branding problem on its hands. The cover story used the term “oil sands”, but the moonscape images it yielded fit perfectly into the environmental movement’s framing of the “tar sands”.

Soon, the industry and its Harper government allies would be racking up “Fossil” awards at annual climate summits, battling to keep the European Commission from slapping a surchage on Canadian bitumen exports (a battle it is losing, as the European Parliament recently recommended extending the EU’s Fuel Quality Directive beyond 2020) and dealing with the Obama Administration’s stonewalling on the Keystone XL pipeline - not to mention heavy-duty opposition to Alberta pipelines proposed to cross BC.

Oil lobby’s PR flacks play catch-up…and quickly

Somewhere in there, the industry got its act together and decided to go public with a multi-million dollar rebranding effort. This included the “Ethical Oil” concept (though you’ll never get any of them to admit a direct connection between this group, the Harper government and the oil industry). But, more importantly, it revolved around a massive advertising campaign – encompassing print, online, radio and television – dousing the Canadian public in saccharine ads extolling the virtues of improved technology, remediated wetlands and indispensable economic benefits. All emblazoned with two words: “OIL SANDS “.

A leaked 2013 Postmedia sales pitch to the industry’s leading lobby, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), offered to manufacture sympathetic news coverage across its national newspaper chain. Not long after this pitch, Postmedia demoted star national energy reporter Mike De Souza through the cancellation of its parliamentary bureau.

This on top of paid speaking engagements for two of the CBC’s most prominent on-air talents, National anchor Peter Mansbridge and pundit and radio host Rex Murphy. Neither of these newsmen and none of these outlets has seen fit to acknowledge any impropriety or ethical conflict in these situations.

So today, a survey of the nation’s leading media publications reveals that essentially all of them have chosen “oil” over “tar”. For Sun News and the CBC, “oilsands” is the most consistent choice – with the occasional “oil sands” mixed in.

The Globe and Mail prefers a space between oil and sands, as does the National Post, though parent Postmedia doesn’t appear to have a national policy on the subject yet, as The Vancouver Sun usually opts for “oilsands”. Meanwhile, CAPP itself uses “oil sands”.

Bigger than Po-tay-to/Po-tah-to

As author Horwitz noted, it’s pretty well impossible to engage in a sound debate about the oil sands/tar sands if we can’t even agree on what to call them.

Defaulting to oil sands may ensure a wider readership for our stories at The Common Sense Canadian, but in capitulating to the oil lobby’s choice of language, I recognize would be helping to legitimize its corporate, PR flack misnomer, the “oil sands.” Moreover, calling it “oil” glosses over the important differences between these two products – from the water and climate issues, to the properties which may very well make bitumen more prone to spills and more difficult to clean up. The consequences of this word choice are far more serious than po-tay-to/po-tah-to.

So how about we split the difference and call them what they really are: The Bitumen Sands?

Maybe not as catchy, but a hell of a lot more honest.

Damien Gillis is a Vancouver-based documentary filmmaker with a focus on environmental and social justice issues - especially relating to water, energy, and saving Canada's wild salmon - working with many environmental organizations in BC and around the world. He is the co-founder, along with Rafe Mair, of The Common Sense Canadian, and a board member of both the BC Environmental Network and the Haig-Brown Institute.

More articles by Damien Gillis

From Fool's Crusade to Mad Escapade: America's Experiments with World Disorder

Ukraine and Yugoslavia

by Diana Johnstone - CounterPunch

“I sometimes get the feeling that somewhere across that huge puddle, in America, people sit in a lab and conduct experiments, as if with rats, without actually understanding the consequences of what they are doing.”  – Vladimir Putin, 4 March 2014

Paris - Five years ago, I wrote a paper for a Belgrade conference commemorating the tenth anniversary of the start of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. In that paper I stressed that the disintegration of Yugoslavia had been used as an experimental laboratory to perfect various techniques that would subsequently be used in so-called “color revolutions” or other “regime change” operations directed against leaders considered undesirable by the United States government.

At that time, I specifically pointed to the similarities between the Krajina region of former Yugoslavia and Ukraine.

Here is what I wrote at the time:

Where did the wars of Yugoslav disintegration break out most violently? In a region called the Krajina. Krajina means borderland. So does Ukraine – it is a variant of the same Slavic root. Both Krajina and Ukraine are borderlands between Catholic Christians in the West and Orthodox Christians in the East. The population is divided between those in the East who want to remain tied to Russia, and those in the West who are drawn toward Catholic lands. But in Ukraine as a whole, polls show that some seventy percent of the population is against joining NATO. Yet the US and its satellites keep speaking of Ukraine’s “right” to join NATO. Nobody’s right not to join NATO is ever mentioned.

The condition for Ukraine to join NATO would be the expulsion of foreign military bases from Ukrainian territory. That would mean expelling Russia from its historic naval base at Sebastopol, essential for Russia’s Black Sea fleet. Sebastopol is on the Crimean peninsula, inhabited by patriotic Russians, which was only made an administrative part of Ukraine in 1954 by Nikita Khrushchev, a Ukrainian.

Rather the way Tito, a Croat, gave almost the whole Adriatic coastline of Yugoslavia to Croatia, and generally enforced administrative borders detrimental to the Serbs.

As the same causes may have the same effects, US insistence on “liberating” Ukraine from Russian influence may have the same effect as the West’s insistence on “liberating” the Catholic Croats from the Orthodox Serbs. That effect is war. But instead of a small war, against the Serbs, who had neither the means nor even the will to fight the West (since they largely thought they were part of it), a war in Ukraine would mean a war with Russia. A nuclear superpower. And one that will not stand idly by while the United States continues to move its fleet and its air bases to the edges of Russian territory, both in the Black Sea and in the Baltic, on land, sea and air.

Every day, the United States is busy expanding NATO, training forces, building bases, making deals. This goes on constantly but is scarcely reported by the media. The citizens of NATO countries have no idea what they are being led into. (…)

War was easy when it meant the destruction of a helpless and harmless Serbia, with no casualties among the NATO aggressors. But war with Russia – a fierce superpower with a nuclear arsenal – would not be so much fun.

So, now here we are five years later, and I am about to attend another commemoration in Belgrade, this time of the fifteenth anniversary of the start of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. And this time, I really have nothing to say. I have already said it, over and over.

Others are saying similar things, with more authority, from Professor Stephen Cohen to Paul Craig Roberts. Many of us have warned against the dangerous folly of seeking endlessly to provoke Russia by enlisting her neighbors in a military alliance whose enemy could only be… Russia.

Of all Russia’s neighbors, none is more organically linked to Russia by language, history, geopolitical reality, religion and powerful emotions. The U.S. Undersecretary of State for Europe and Eurasia, Victoria Nuland, has openly boasted that the United States has spent five billion dollars to gain influence in Ukraine – in reality, in order to draw Ukraine away from Russia and into the U.S. military alliance.

It is now no secret that Ms Nuland intrigued even against America’s European allies – who had a less brutal compromise in mind – in order to replace the elected President with the American protégé she calls “Yats”, who indeed was soon installed in a far right government resulting from violent actions by one of the very few violent fascist movements still surviving in Europe.

True, Western media do not report all the facts at their disposal. But the internet is there, and the facts are on the internet. And despite all this, European governments do not protest, there are no demonstrations in the streets, much of public opinion seems to accept the notion that the villain of this story is the Russian president, who is accused of engaging in unprovoked aggression against Crimea – even though he was responding to one of the most blatant provocations in history.

The facts are there. The facts are eloquent. What can I say that are not said by the facts?

So up to now, I have remained speechless in the face of what appears to me to be utter madness. However, on the eve of my trip to Belgrade, I agreed to answer questions from journalist Dragan Vukotic for the Serbian daily newspaper Politika. Here is that interview.

Q. In your book Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions, you have brought a different stance about NATO bombing of Yugoslavia than many of your intellectual colleagues in the West. What prompted you to make such an unpopular conclusion?

A. Long ago, as a student of Russia area studies, I spent several months in Yugoslavia living in a student dormitory in Belgrade and made friends there. I turned to such old friends for viewpoints rather than to the sources consulted by Western reporters. And I have a lifelong interest in US foreign policy. I began my inquiry into Yugoslav conflicts by reading key documents, such as speeches of Milosevic, the Serbian Academy memorandum and works by Alija Izetbegovic, noting the inaccuracy of the way they were represented in Western media. I was never under instructions from editors, and indeed my editors soon refused to publish my articles. I was not the only experienced observer to be excluded from Western media coverage.

Q. Although subsequent events have confirmed that the operation of illegal bombing of one country without permission of the Security Council was completely wrong, the mainstream western media and politicians still refer to successful „Kosovo model“. Can you please comment on this matter?

A. For them, it was a success, since it set a precedent for NATO intervention. They will never admit that they were mistaken.

Q. When it came to the preparation of the “humanitarian intervention” against Syria, Obama administration reported they were studying “the NATO air war in Kosovo as a possible blueprint for acting without a mandate from the United Nations”. (Please comment on this)

A. This is not surprising, since setting such a precedent was one of the motives for that air war.

Q. In one of your articles you asked the question about what the ICC stood for in the case of Libya. You recalled the “familiar pattern” with the case of ICTY and Yugoslavia. What do you really think of those instruments of international justice and their role in international relations?

A. In the context of the present world relationship of forces, the ICC like the ad hoc tribunals can only serve as instruments of United States hegemony. Those criminal tribunals are used only to stigmatize adversaries of the United States, while the main role of the ICC so far is to justify the ideological assumption that there exists an unbiased “international justice” that ignores national boundaries and serves to enforce human rights. As John Laughland has pointed out, a proper court must be the expression of a particular community that agrees to judge its own members. Moreover, these courts have no police of their own but must rely on the armed force of the United States, NATO and their client states, who as a result are automatically exempt from prosecution by these supposedly “international” courts.

Q. What is, in your opinion, the main purpose of declaring the so-called humanitarian intervention? Does it have more to do with the domestic public opinion or with the international partners?

A. The ideology of Human Rights (a dubious concept, incidentally, since “rights” should be grounded in concrete political arrangements, not on abstract concepts alone) serves both domestic and global purposes. For the European Union, it suggests a “soft” European nationalism based on social virtue. The United States, which is more forthright than today’s Europe in proclaiming its national interest, the ideology of Human Rights serves to endow foreign interventions with a crusading purpose that can appeal to European allies and above all to their domestic opinion, as well as to the English-speaking world in general (Canada and Australia in particular). It is the tribute vice pays to virtue, to echo LaRochefoucauld.

Q. You often use the term “US and its European satellites“. Please explain.

A. “Satellites” was the term used for members of the Warsaw Pact, and today the governments of the NATO member states follow Washington as obediently as the former followed Moscow, even when, as in the case of Ukraine, the United States goes against European interests.

Q. How do you see current goings on in Ukraine and Crimea, especially in terms of US-Russia relations?

A. US-Russian relations are determined primarily by an ongoing U.S. geostrategic hostility to Russia which is partly a matter of habit or inertia, partly a realization of the Brzezinski strategy of dividing Eurasia in order to maintain US world hegemony, and partly a reflection of Israeli-dominated Middle East policy toward Syria and Iran. Between the two major nuclear powers, there is clearly an aggressor and an aggressed. It is up to the aggressor to change course if relations are to be normal.

Simply compare. Is Russia urging Quebec to secede from Canada so that the province can join a military alliance led by Moscow? Evidently not. That would be comparable, and yet mild compared to the recent U.S. gambit led by Victoria Nuland aimed at bringing Ukraine, including the main Russian naval base at Sebastopol, into the Western orbit. The material reality of this political orbit is NATO, which since the end of the Soviet Union has systematically expanded toward Russia, which stations missiles whose only strategic function would be to provide the United States with a hypothetical nuclear first strike capacity against Russia, and which regularly holds military manoeuvers along Russian borders. Russia has done nothing against the United States, and recently provided President Obama with a face-saving way to avoid being voted down in Congress in regard to military action against Syria – action which was not desired by the Pentagon but only by the fraction of Israeli-oriented policy makers called “neocons”. Russia professes no hostile ideology, and only seeks normal relations with the West. What more can it do? It is up to Americans to come to their senses.

Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr