Blowing It: Thoughts on Snowden by a Fellow Whistleblower

Edward Snowden’s Long Flight: What a Whistleblower Thinks a Fellow Whistleblower Might Have Thought

by Peter Van Buren - TomDispatch

As a State Department whistleblower, I think a lot about Edward Snowden. I can’t help myself. My friendships with other whistleblowers like Tom Drake, Jesslyn Radack, Daniel Ellsberg, and John Kiriakou lead me to believe that, however different we may be as individuals, our acts have given us much in common. I suspect that includes Snowden, though I’ve never had the slightest contact with him. Still, as he took his long flight from Hong Kong into the unknown, I couldn’t help feeling that he was thinking some of my thoughts, or I his. Here are five things that I imagine were on his mind (they would have been on mine) as that plane took off.

 

 Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, Obama's War on Whistleblowers Finds Another Target

 Sometimes, it’s hard to grasp just how our world has been transformed since September 11, 2001. But here’s a little exchange at NBC Nightly News a few days back -- just part of the humdrum flow of TV news-chat -- that somehow caught my attention. News anchor Brian Williams and Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell were discussing how the Obama administration was dealing with NSA leaker Edward Snowden, then reportedly somewhere in the bowels of Moscow’s international airport. Here was the exchange:

“Williams: The U.S. can say whatever it wishes and the press secretary can get angry and so on, what real power does the United States have here?

“Mitchell: It’s got a lot of leverage against Russia and China. They’re working behind the scenes, but short of rendition -- and that’s not going to happen getting him out of Russia -- there’s isn’t anything physical that they can do. So they have to just exert the pressure and hope that diplomacy works, but Vladimir Putin is a tough customer.”

It was that reference to “rendition” -- to, that is, the kidnapping of terror suspects by American forces (usually the CIA) off global streets (or highways or backlands) and their “rendering” to the United States, or to U.S. Navy ships in global waters, or to the prisons of allied regimes willing to torture any “suspect” and share whatever information (or misinformation) might be extracted with Washington. For a while, this practice was called “extraordinary rendition,” but it’s now so deeply embedded in our American world that it’s become highly ordinary rendition. In any case, the implication of Mitchell’s passing comment was that the U.S. wouldn’t “render” someone from an airport in the capital of a major power, but if that wasn’t “going to happen getting him out of Russia,” I think it’s hard not to complete Mitchell’s sentence with something like “it might be a perfectly reasonable option for Washington in, say, Ecuador.”

We are, in other words, in a new world where practices that once would have shocked have become the norm of news and pundit chitchat. TomDispatch, however, refuses to consider any of this “normal.” We have over these last years regularly focused on the way Washington’s most oppressive powers have been wildly enhanced and on people we now know as “whistleblowers,” people like Bradley Manning, who saw something truly, unnervingly different in our American world and decided they just had to do something about it. TomDispatch regular Peter Van Buren is one of them and today he considers what Snowden might be going through. Tom 

 

Edward Snowden’s Long Flight: What a Whistleblower Thinks a Fellow Whistleblower Might Have Thought

by Peter Van Buren

I Am Afraid

Whistleblowers act on conscience because they encounter something so horrifying, unconstitutional, wasteful, fraudulent, or mismanaged that they are overcome by the need to speak out. There is always a calculus of pain and gain (for others, if not oneself), but first thoughts are about what you’ve uncovered, the information you feel compelled to bring into the light, rather than your own circumstances.

In my case, I was ignorant of what would happen once I blew the whistle. I didn’t expect the Department of State to attack me. National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Tom Drake was similarly unprepared. He initially believed that, when the FBI first came to interview him, they were on his side, eager to learn more about the criminal acts he had uncovered at the NSA. Snowden was different in this. He had the example of Bradley Manning and others to learn from. He clearly never doubted that the full weight of the U.S. government would fall on him.

He knew what to fear. He knew the Obama administration was determined to make any whistleblower pay, likely via yet another prosecution under the Espionage Act (with the potential for the death penalty). He also knew what his government had done since 9/11 without compunction: it had tortured and abused people to crush them; it had forced those it considered enemies into years of indefinite imprisonment, creating isolation cells for suspected terrorists and even a pre-trial whistleblower. It had murdered Americans without due process, and then, of course, there were the extraordinary renditions in which U.S. agents kidnapped perceived enemies and delivered them into the archipelago of post-9/11 horrors.

Sooner or later, if you’re a whistleblower, you get scared. It’s only human. On that flight, I imagine that Edward Snowden, for all his youthful confidence and bravado, was afraid. Would the Russians turn him over to Washington as part of some secret deal, maybe the sort of spy-for-spy trade that would harken back to the Cold War era?

Even if he made it out of Moscow, he couldn’t have doubted that the full resources of the NSA and other parts of the U.S. government would be turned on him. How many CIA case officers and Joint Special Operations Command types did the U.S. have undercover in Ecuador? After all, the dirty tricks had already started. The partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke Snowden's story, had his laptop stolen from their residence in Brazil. This happened only after Greenwald told him via Skype that he would send him an encrypted copy of Snowden’s documents.

In such moments, you try to push back the sense of paranoia that creeps into your mind when you realize that you are being monitored, followed, watched. It’s uncomfortable, scary. You have to wonder what your fate will be once the media grows bored with your story, or when whatever government has given you asylum changes its stance vis-a-vis the U.S. When the knock comes at the door, who will protect you? So who can doubt that fear made the journey with him?

Could I Go Back to the U.S.?

Amnesty International was on target when it stated that Snowden “could be at risk of ill-treatment if extradited to the U.S.” As if to prove them right, months, if not years, before any trial, Speaker of the House John Boehner called Snowden a “traitor”; Congressman Peter King called him a “defector”; and others were already demanding his execution. If that wasn’t enough, the abuse Bradley Manning suffered had already convinced Snowden that a fair trial and humane treatment were impossible dreams for a whistleblower of his sort. (He specifically cited Manning in his appeal for asylum to Ecuador.)

So on that flight he knew -- as he had long known -- that the natural desire to go back to the U.S. and make a stand was beyond foolhardy. Yet the urge to return to the country he loves must have been traveling with him, too. Perhaps on that flight he found himself grimly amused that, after years of running roughshod over international standards -- Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, “enhanced interrogation techniques,” “black sites” -- the U.S. had the nerve to chide Hong Kong, China, and Russia for not following the rule of law. He certainly knew that his own revelations about massive NSA cyber-spying on Hong Kong and China had deeply embarrassed the Obama administration. It had, after all, been blistering the Chinese for hacking into U.S. military and corporate computers. He himself had ensured that the Chinese wouldn’t turn him over, in the same way that history -- decades of U.S. bullying in Latin America -- ensured that he had a shot at a future in someplace like in Ecuador.

If he knew his extradition history, Snowden might also have thought about another time when Washington squirmed as a man it wanted left a friendly country for asylum. In 2004, the U.S. had chess great Bobby Fischer detained in Japan on charges that he had attended a 1992 match in Yugoslavia in violation of a U.S. trade ban. Others suggested that the real reason Washington was after him may have been Fischer’s post 9/11 statement: "It's time to finish off the U.S. once and for all. This just shows what comes around, goes around."

Fischer’s American passport was revoked just like Snowden’s. In the fashion of Hong Kong more recently, the Japanese released Fischer on an immigration technicality, and he flew to Iceland where he was granted citizenship. I was a diplomat in Japan at the time, and had a ringside seat for the negotiations. They must have paralleled what went on in Hong Kong: the appeals to treaty and international law; U.S. diplomats sounding like so many disappointed parents scolding a child; the pale hopes expressed for future good relations; the search for a sympathetic ear among local law enforcement agencies, immigration, and the foreign ministry -- anybody, in fact -- and finally, the desperate attempt to call in personal favors to buy more time for whatever Plan B might be. As with Snowden, in the end the U.S. stood by helplessly as its prey flew off.

How Will I Live Now?

At some point every whistleblower realizes his life will never be the same. For me, that meant losing my job of 24 years at the State Department. For Tom Drake, it meant financial ruin as the government tried to bankrupt him through endless litigation. For CIA agent John Kiriakou, it might have been the moment when, convicted of disclosing classified information to journalists, he said goodbye to his family and walked into Loretto Federal Correctional Institution.

Snowden could not have avoided anxiety about the future. Wherever he ended up, how would he live? What work would he do? He’s just turned 30 and faces, at best, a lifetime in some foreign country he’s never seen where he might not know the language or much of anything else.

So fear again, in a slightly different form. It never leaves you, not when you take on the world’s most powerful government. Would he ever see his family and friends again? Would they disown him, fearful of retaliation or affected by the smear campaign against him? Would his parents/best friend/girlfriend come to believe he was a traitor, a defector, a dangerous man? All whistleblowers find their personal relationships strained. Marriages are tested or broken, friends lost, children teased or bullied at school. I know from my own whistleblower’s journey that it’s an ugly penalty -- encouraged by a government scorned -- for acting on conscience.

If he had a deeper sense of history, Snowden might have found humor in the way the Obama administration chose to revoke his passport just before he left Hong Kong. After all, in the Cold War years, it was the “evil empire,” the Soviet Union, which was notorious for refusing to grant dissidents passports, while the U.S. regularly waived such requirements when they escaped to the West.

To deepen the irony of the moment, perhaps he was able to Google up the 2009-2011 figures on U.S. grants of asylum: 1,222 Russians, 9,493 Chinese, and 22 Ecuadorians, not including family members. Maybe he learned that, despite the tantrums U.S. officials threw regarding the international obligation of Russia to extradite him, the U.S. has recently refused Russian requests to extradite two of its citizens.

Snowden might have mused over then-candidate Obama's explicit pledge to protect whistleblowers. "Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government," Obama then said, "is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism... should be encouraged rather than stifled as they have been during the Bush administration." It might have been Snowden's only laugh of the flight.

I Don’t Hate the U.S., I Love It Deeply, But Believe It Has Strayed

On that flight, Snowden took his love of America with him. It’s what all of us whistleblowers share: a love of country, if not necessarily its government, its military, or its intelligence services. We care what happens to us the people. That may have been his anchor on his unsettling journey. It would have been mine.

Remember, if we were working in the government in the first place, like every federal employee, soldier, and many government contractors, we had taken an oath that stated: “I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” We didn’t pledge fealty to the government or a president or party, only -- as the Constitution makes clear -- to the ultimate source of legitimacy in our nation, “the people.”

In an interview, Snowden indicated that he held off on making his disclosures for some time, in hopes that Barack Obama might look into the abyss and decide to become the bravest president in our history by reversing the country’s course. Only when Obama’s courage or intelligence failed was it time to become a whistleblower.

Some pundits claim that Snowden deserves nothing, because he didn’t go through “proper channels.” They couldn’t be more wrong and Snowden knows it. As with many of us whistleblowers facing a government acting in opposition to the Constitution, Snowden went through the channels that matter most: he used a free press to speak directly to his real boss, the American people.

In that sense, whatever the fear and anxiety about his life and his future, he must have felt easy with his actions. He had not betrayed his country, he had sought to inform it.

As with Bradley Manning, Obama administration officials are now claiming that Snowden has blood on his hands. Typically, Secretary of State John Kerry claimed: “People may die as a consequence to what this man did. It is possible that the United States would be attacked because terrorists may now know how to protect themselves in some way or another that they didn't know before.” Snowden had heard the same slurs circling around Bradley Manning: that he had put people in danger. After the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to speak of the war on terror, there is irony too obvious to dwell upon in such charges.

Flying into the unknown, Snowden had to feel secure in having risked everything to show Americans how their government and the NSA bend or break laws to collect information on us in direct conflict with the Fourth Amendment’s protections. Amnesty International pointed out that blood-on-hands wasn’t at issue. "It appears he is being charged primarily for revealing U.S. and other governments’ unlawful actions that violate human rights.” Those whispers of support are something to take into the dark with you.

I Believe in Things Bigger Than Myself

Some of the charges against Snowden would make anyone pause: that, for instance, he did what he did for the thrill of publicity, out of narcissism, or for his own selfish reasons. To any of the members of the post-9/11 club of whistleblowers, the idea that we acted primarily for our own benefit has a theater of the absurd quality to it. Having been there, the negative sentiments expressed do not read or ring true.

Snowden himself laughed off the notion that he had acted for his own benefit. If he had wanted money, any number of foreign governments would have paid handsomely for the information he handed out to journalists for free and he would never have had to embark on that plane flight from Hong Kong. (No one ever called Aldrich Ames a whistleblower.) If he wanted fame, there were potential book contracts and film deals to be had.

No, it was conscience. I wouldn’t be surprised if somewhere along the line Snowden had read the Declaration of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal: "Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience. Therefore individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring."

Edward Snowden undoubtedly took comfort knowing that a growing group of Americans are outraged enough to resist a government turning against its own people. His thoughts were mirrored by Julian Assange, who said, “In the Obama administration's attempt to crush these young whistleblowers with espionage charges, the U.S. government is taking on a generation, a young generation of people who find the mass violation of the rights of privacy and open process unacceptable. In taking on the generation, the Obama administration can only lose.” Snowden surely hoped President Obama would ask himself why he has pursued more than double the number of Espionage Act cases of all his presidential predecessors combined, and why almost all of those prosecutions failed.

On that flight, Edward Snowden must have reflected on what he had lost, including the high salary, the sweet life in Hawaii and Switzerland, the personal relationships, and the excitement of being on the inside, as well as the coolness of knowing tomorrow’s news today. He has already lost much that matters in an individual life, but not everything that matters. Sometimes -- and any whistleblower comes to know this in a deep way -- you have to believe that something other, more, deeper, better than yourself matters. You have to believe that one courageous act of conscience might make a difference in an America gone astray or simply that, matter or not, you did the right thing for your country. 

 

Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement in his book We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. A TomDispatch regular, he writes about current events at his blog, We Meant Well. Van Buren’s next book, Ghosts of Tom Joad, A Story of the #99Percent, is due out in March 2014.

Copyright 2013 Peter Van Buren

 

PRISM Spawn: NUCLEON, PINWALE, MAINWAY, MARINA, and the EVIL OLIVE

New Documents Shed Light on NSA's Dragnet Surveillance

by Tom Burghardt  -  Antifascist Calling…

With the Obama administration in full damage control mode over revelations of blanket surveillance of global electronic communications, new documents published by The Guardian, including the draft of a 2009 report by the NSA's Inspector General marked Top Secret and a Secret 2007 Justice Department memo prepared for then US Attorney General Michael Mukasey, show that "a federal judge sitting on the secret surveillance panel called the Fisa court would approve a bulk collection order for internet metadata 'every 90 days'."

An unnamed "senior administration official" confirmed the existence of a Bush-era surveillance program which gobbled-up "vast amounts of records detailing the email and internet usage of Americans," but claimed, without evidence, that "it ended in 2011," according to The Guardian.

Early last month, the British newspaper began publishing documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, including a Top Secret FISA court order to Verizon Business Services, which requires the firm "on an ongoing, daily basis" to hand over information on all telephone calls within its system.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the NSA's "monitoring of Americans includes customer records from the three major phone networks as well as emails and Web searches, and the agency also has cataloged credit-card transactions." The secret state's spying initiative "also encompasses phone-call data from AT&T Inc. and Sprint Nextel Corp., records from Internet-service providers and purchase information."

Days later, The Washington Post revealed that the Bush administration's "warrantless wiretapping" program known as STELLAR WIND, had been succeeded by four "collection programs" two of which, MAINWAY and MARINA, "process trillions of 'metadata' records for storage and analysis."

Additional programs, the Post reported, operating "on a much smaller scale, are aimed at content," one of which "intercepts telephone calls and routes the spoken words to a system called NUCLEON."

Although the news outlets principally responsible for bringing these stories to light, principally The Guardian, Washington Post, South China Morning Post, and now Der Spiegel, have not (as yet) published complete sets of NSA documents, and their reporting has barely scratched the surface of content-siphoning deep packet inspection (DPI) programs for internet and telephone surveillance (indeed, PRISM may be a subset of larger and more pernicious programs that collect, analyze and store everything), what we have learned so far is deeply troubling and pose grave threats to civil liberties.

New PRISM Slides, More Questions

Filling in some of the blanks, on June 29 The Washington Post published four additional PRISM slides from the 41-slide deck provided to The Guardian and Post by Edward Snowden.

Confirming what civil libertarians, journalists and political analysts have long maintained, NSA can and probably does "acquire" anything an individual analyst might request as Snowden averred. This includes, according to new information provided by the Post: chats, email, file transfers, internet telephone, login/ID, metadata, photos, social networking, stored data in the cloud, video, video conferencing.

If that isn't a surveillance dragnet, then words fail.

Recall, that previous reporting disclosed that major US internet and high tech firms, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple gave NSA "direct access" to their systems.

"The program," according to The Guardian, "facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information. The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the US, or those Americans whose communications include people outside the US."

"It also opens the possibility of communications made entirely within the US being collected without warrants," a near probability in this writer's opinion.

In a report that appeared the same day, The Washington Post disclosed that NSA and the FBI "are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets," and that the agency "s accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers."

Although the firms all denied that they hand over customer data to the government, their self-serving claims are undercut by evidence that NSA-cleared company personnel, including "collection managers," send "content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations," rather than directly to company servers.

"Under Prism," the Associated Press reported, "the delivery process varied by company."

"Google, for instance, says it makes secure file transfers. Others use contractors or have set up stand-alone systems. Some have set up user interfaces making it easier for the government, according to a security expert familiar with the process."

"With Prism," AP reported, "the government gets a user's entire email inbox. Every email, including contacts with American citizens, becomes government property."

"Once the NSA has an inbox, it can search its huge archives for information about everyone with whom the target communicated. All those people can be investigated, too."

The slides published June 29 shed some light on how the process works. We learn for example that when an analyst "tasks" PRISM for information on a new "target," it is automatically passed on to a supervisor who "who reviews the 'selectors' or search terms. The supervisor must endorse the analyst's 'reasonable belief,' defined as 51 percent confidence, that the specified target is a foreign national who is overseas at the time of collection."

Tasking orders can be sent to multiple sources, "for example, to a private company and to an NSA access point that taps into the Internet's main gateway switches." (for background see: Mark Klein, Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine, Klein's affidavit in EFF's lawsuit, Hepting v. AT&T and his groundbreaking 2006 piece for Wired Magazine).

The FBI "uses government equipment on private company property to retrieve matching information from a participating company, such as Microsoft or Yahoo and pass it without further review to the NSA." (see Verizon whistleblower Babak Pasdar's affidavit on how FBI "tasking" is accomplished via its Quantico circuit).

"For stored communications, but not for live surveillance" we're informed that the Bureau's Electronic Communications Surveillance Unit (ECSU) "consults its own databases to make sure the selectors do not match known Americans."

If this is what the Bureau is now claiming, it is disingenuous at best. In fact, as Antifascist Calling reported back in 2009, the FBI's Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW), a virtual Library of Babel, is a content management and data mining system with the ability to access and analyze aggregated data from some fifty hitherto separate datasets. That the Bureau would feel compelled to "minimize" domestic information it provides to a "sister" agency beggars belief.

In fact, one of the new PRISM slides reveal that from "the FBI's interception unit on the premises of private companies, the information is passed to one or more 'customers' at the NSA, CIA or FBI."

"Depending on the company," Barton Gellman and Todd Lindeman report, "a tasking may return e-mails, attachments, address books, calendars, files stored in the cloud, text or audio or video chats and 'metadata' that identify the locations, devices used and other information about a target."

Elapsed times from "tasking to response" from the above-named firms or other "partners" such as banks, credit card companies, etc. range from "minutes to hours." An unnamed "senior intelligence official" told the Post, "Much as we might wish otherwise, the latency is not zero."

"After communications information is acquired," the data is "processed and analyzed by specialized systems that handle voice, text, video and 'digital network information' that includes the locations and unique device signatures of targets."

We also learn how some of these code named systems function.

For example, PRINTURA is described as a tool "which automates the traffic flow." The Post reports that "the same FBI-run equipment sends the search results to the NSA." Once it is received, in bulk, "PRINTURA sorts and dispatches the data stream through a complex sequence of systems that extract and process voice, text, video and metadata."

Once dispatched from PRINTURA, described as a "librarian and traffic cop," SCISSORS and Protocol Exploitation "sort data types for analysis in NUCLEON (voice), PINWALE (video), MAINWAY (call records) and MARINA (internet records)."

While the Post claims that "systems identified as FALLOUT and CONVEYANCE appear to be the final filtering to reduce the intake of information about Americans," information provided by NSA whistleblower William Binney dispute such assertions.

In fact, Binney told investigative journalist James Bamford for his Wired Magazine piece on NSA's giant Utah Data Center, that the agency "could have installed its tapping gear at the nation's cable landing stations--the more than two dozen sites on the periphery of the US where fiber-optic cables come ashore. If it had taken that route, the NSA would have been able to limit its eavesdropping to just international communications, which at the time was all that was allowed under US law."

"Instead," the former cofounder of the agency's Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center (SARC) told Bamford that NSA "chose to put the wiretapping rooms at key junction points throughout the country--large, windowless buildings known as switches--thus gaining access to not just international communications but also to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the US."

"The network of intercept stations goes far beyond the single room in an AT&T building in San Francisco exposed by a whistle-blower in 2006. 'I think there's 10 to 20 of them,' Binney says. 'That's not just San Francisco; they have them in the middle of the country and also on the East Coast'."

In other words, NSA's network of "secret rooms" were installed at key junctures that would facilitate, not "minimize" wholesale domestic surveillance.

Expanding on just how intrusive NSA "collection" programs are, Binney told The New Yorker in a Jane Mayer piece on the Obama regime's prosecution of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, that a surveillance program he helped design as SARC director, ThinThread, was "bastardized" after 9/11 and "stripped of privacy controls" that would filter out Americans' communications.

"'It was my brainchild,' Binney told Mayer. "'But they removed the protections, the anonymization process. When you remove that, you can target anyone.' He said that although he was not 'read in' to the new secret surveillance program, 'my people were brought in, and they told me, 'Can you believe they're doing this? They're getting billing records on US citizens! They're putting pen registers'--logs of dialed phone numbers--'on everyone in the country!'"

And they continue to do so today without one iota of oversight from a thoroughly compromised Congress.

New Programs Exposed

The programs described above all evolved from the Bush administration's so-called President's Surveillance Program, PSP, which has continued under Obama. As Antifascist Calling reported in 2009, citing a declassified 38-page report by inspectors general of the CIA, NSA, the Departments of Defense, Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the report failed to disclose what these programs actually do, claiming they are "too sensitive" for an "unclassified setting."

Shrouded beneath impenetrable layers of secrecy and deceit, these undisclosed programs lie at the dark heart of the state's war against the American people.

For example, the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General described FBI participation in the PSP as that of a "passive recipient of intelligence collected under the program." Recent revelations by Edward Snowden expose such statements as bald-faced lies. And when the OIG claimed that Bureau efforts "to improve cooperation with the NSA to enhance the usefulness of PSP-derived information to FBI agents," that too, is a craven misrepresentation given what we now know about the key role the FBI plays in NSA's PRISM program.

However, the unclassified version of NSA's Inspector General's report on the PSP published by The Guardian paints a far-different picture.

A close reading of the document reveals that a federal judge sitting on the FISA would approve a bulk collection order for metadata "every 90 days," as long as it "involved" the "communications with at least one communicant outside the United States or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States".

"Eventually," Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman reported, the agency "gained authority to 'analyze communications metadata associated with United States persons and persons believed to be in the United States'."

Although the administration now claims that specific program ended in 2011, online collection of data on Americans continues today.

Last week The Guardian reported that NSA's Special Source Operations (SSO) directorate running PRISM is collecting and analyzing "significant amounts of data from US communications systems in the course of monitoring foreign targets."

"The NSA," Greenwald and Ackerman disclosed, "called it the 'One-End Foreign (1EF) solution'."

That program, code named EVIL OLIVE, was intended to broaden "the scope" of what it is able to surveil and relied, "legally, on 'FAA Authority', a reference to the 2008 Fisa Amendments Act that relaxed surveillance restrictions."

"This new system, SSO stated in December, enables vastly increased collection by the NSA of internet traffic. 'The 1EF solution is allowing more than 75% of the traffic to pass through the filter,' the SSO December document reads. 'This milestone not only opened the aperture of the access but allowed the possibility for more traffic to be identified, selected and forwarded to NSA repositories'."

After EVIL OLIVE's "deployment, traffic has literally doubled."

Referencing another NSA collection program, this one code named SHELL TRUMPET, an SSO official wrote that the program had just "processed its One Trillionth metadata record."

"Explaining that the five-year old program 'began as a near-real-time metadata analyzer ... for a classic collection system', the SSO official noted: 'In its five year history, numerous other systems from across the Agency have come to use ShellTrumpet's processing capabilities for performance monitoring' and other tasks, such as 'direct email tip alerting'," The Guardian reported.

These, and hitherto as yet unknown programs, are advancing by leaps and bounds due to technological breakthroughs, the result of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars showered on the agency in wake of the 9/11 provocation. As Greenwald and Ackerman reported, "almost half of those trillion pieces of internet metadata were processed in 2012, the document detailed: 'though it took five years to get to the one trillion mark, almost half of this volume was processed in this calendar year'."

"Another SSO entry," this one dated February 6, 2013, "described ongoing plans to expand metadata collection. A joint surveillance collection operation with an unnamed partner agency yielded a new program 'to query metadata' that was 'turned on in the Fall 2012'."

Two additional programs, code named MOON LIGHT PATH AND SPINNERET, "are planned to be added by September 2013." Curiously enough, this is when NSA's Utah Data Center is slated to "go live."

In fact, these programs and their siblings are useful not simply for harvesting metadata, but for "collecting" and storing all electronic communications, including their content; hence the rather circumspect reference to "direct email tip alerting."

Fully a transatlantic affair, Greenwald and Ackerman noted that another SSO entry dated September 21, 2012 revealed that a program called TRANSIENT THURIBLE is "'a new Government Communications Head Quarters (GCHQ) managed XKeyScore (XKS) Deep Dive was declared operational.' The entry states that GCHQ 'modified' an existing program so the NSA could 'benefit' from what GCHQ harvested."

There is much we do not yet know about these programs, how "collected" data is exploited by government agencies, nor the present and future implications for civil liberties and privacy in the United States and globally. What we do know however, is that the Obama administration, including their national security spokespeople and their media and political apologists are lying.

Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists based in Montreal, he is a Contributing Editor with Cyrano's Journal Today. His articles can be read on Dissident Voice, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, and the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press and has contributed to the new book from Global Research, The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century.

Recognizing and Remembering This Country on Canada Day

Genocide, racism and Canada Day: An Algonquin-Anishinaabekwe love letter

by Lynn Gehl Gii-Zhigaate-Mnidoo-Kwe - Rabble.ca

Living in Canada as I do, I encounter proud Canadians all the time, more so around the time of Canada Day celebrations. The commonly held view put forward by these proud Canadians is that Canada is the country where they were born, and that Canada is the country that welcomed their parents and grandparents with open arms and gave them the new beginning they so very much needed.

Given this, they tell me. "A proud Canadian is who I am."

As an Algonquin Anishinaabe-kwe I experience these "proud Canadian statements" as both racist and ungrounded. Unfortunately for both of us proud Canadians are usually offended when I tell them so.

I experience "proud Canadian statements" as racist because Canada the nation state was built on racist and genocidal policies that were and are harmful and disenfranchising to Indigenous peoples.

As an Indigenous person I know that these racist and genocidal policies continue to exist today in the form of the Indian Act, and the Comprehensive Land Claims and the Self-Government policies. While the Indian Act imposes colonial law and poverty on Indigenous nations, the Land Claims and Self-Government policies take advantage of this same poverty and impose a negotiation process that offers very little in terms of genuine self-government and long term viability. In this way Canada pushes Indigenous people into unsustainable living conditions, and then imposes policies on them that assure their termination as distinct social political entities.

When I reflect on this I realize this Canadian-made genocidal process takes place in large part because most Canadians do not have the time and mind space to determine for themselves that genocide is what it is. Upon reflection, I have learned that this is the way that genocide sometimes operates -- right in front of people's eyes, yet these same people can't see it because Canada has blinded its citizens ability to see it. Genocide in plain sight is the worst form of genocide to raise awareness about.

I have found that in my process of making the invisible visible, most people get angry at me. They get angry because I am challenging their treasured ideology of Canada, the great and benevolent country. What Canadians need to realize, though, is that this emotional reaction is oftentimes the nature of new knowledge. People become emotional with new knowledge because they have become destabilised in terms of what is dear to them.

While you may be emotional about my statement that I find "proud Canadian statements" racist -- this does not mean I am incorrect. Indeed Canada, and all it has become, is racist and genocidal.

While this may explain why I experience "proud Canadians statements" as racist, this does not explain why I also experience them as ungrounded. I perceive them as ungrounded because the story of Canada has no real cultural depth beyond that of a song, a flag, and a fictional story of two founding nations: the British and the French.

Through effective strategies of nationalism -- strategies that deny and supress genuine cultural meaning -- when people find themselves in moments of despair, they have no cultural knowledge of who they are and how to find their way home. Instead they find themselves in a dark cave where all they are able to do is drink, eat and shop, for example. In this way, while Canada may claim to respect who people are, most people void of their ancestral Indigenous knowledge which includes prayer, song, dance and ritual are particularly lonely and thus vulnerable in moments of despair. Let's face it, nationalism is unable to provide the necessary medicine when people need it most.

We are all Indigenous to the earth and we are all born into rich ancestral traditions of Indigenous cultural knowledge. Indigenous knowledge is the cultural knowledge that has shaped your ancestors since time immemorial; it is the cultural knowledge that has stood the test of time.

Yet, in the process of shaping proud Canadians, Canada breaks down and dismisses this precious ancestral knowledge. In this way, "Canada the Great" actually lets proud Canadians down when they are in most need of a cultural backbone to guide them to a safe place.

The need for a paradigm shift

Humans are in need of a huge paradigm shift, much like the one that took hold regarding the earth and the sun -- that being that it is the earth that orbits the sun rather than the sun orbiting the earth. The current economic and materialistic paradigm is harming all life on earth.

Indigenous people -- again, we are all Indigenous to the earth -- who remain rooted in their own life sustaining Indigenous knowledge are at once both the canaries suffering the most from the current paradigm, as well as the holders of the ancient Indigenous knowledge systems required for the much needed paradigm shift. The problem is that nation states such as Canada have been very successful at monopolizing people's mindsets in a way that they are convinced that they are "people of a country" rather than "Indigenous people of the earth."

Nationalism has also been successful at convincing Canadians that Indigenous knowledge philosophy and culture is primitive, non-progressive, and thus unworthy of being respected as a valid source of knowledge.

What is worse is that nationalism has been successful at convincing proud Canadians that their hard earned tax dollars are being squandered by the Indigenous people of Turtle Island. In doing this, Canada creates a blinding system where proud Canadians are unable to see the source of the environmental destruction, and the very real value of earth centred Indigenous knowledge systems.

Unfortunately, because nation states are stuck in the current paradigm, and because they hold the financial power and all that it provides such as institutional power to control people, individuals who are already overworked and over tired do not have the time to do the work needed to learn the truth. Despite this we need to keep in mind that Canada will only teach you what will serve their paradigm -- even if that paradigm is harming all life on earth, your children’s lives and their children's lives included. Do not underestimate the role that state nationalism has had on your mind set and practices.

Some interesting historical facts about Canada

I want to share with readers some of the history that the foundation of Canada rests on. Most Canadians are unaware of this knowledge as the state’s education system opts not to teach this truth:

- The 1869 Gradual Enfranchisement Act was implemented to destroy Indigenous self-government. The election of Chiefs and Councillors became the exclusive process for male band members only.

- In 1869, Indigenous governance practices, such as gender balance, consensus decision making, wampum diplomacy, and restorative justice, were outlawed.

- In 1869, all rules, regulations, and elected Indigenous officials were subject to confirmation by the government of Canada, whereby they could depose the leaders that they did not approve of.

- Through the 1876 Indian Act, when an Indigenous woman married a White man she became a White woman and was no longer considered an Indian. As a result, she and her children had to leave their home community.

- Beginning in the 1880s, Indigenous traditional culture was deemed a criminal offense. Cultural traditions criminalized consisted of prayer, song, dance, drumming, the sacred pipe, giveaways, the vision quest, the sun dance, the sweat lodge, smudging, traditional dress, and the potlatch.

- Beginning in 1886, Indians could not leave their reserve community unless they obtained a pass from the Indian agent.

- To reduce the effectiveness of Indigenous leaders and organizations, in 1927 it became illegal for Indians to hire lawyers or advisors to help them with their grievances against the government of Canada.

- In 1936, Indian agents were granted the power to preside at, and direct, band council meetings, as well as cast the deciding vote in elections in the event of a tie.

- It was not until the 1960s when Indian people could vote in Canada. If they wanted to vote before this date they had to give up being an Indian.

Dr. Lynn Gehl is an Algonquin Anishinaabe-kwe from the Ottawa River Valley. She has a section 15 Charter challenge regarding the continued sex discrimination in The Indian Act, is an outspoken critic of the Ontario Algonquin land claims and self-government process, and recently published a book titledAnishinaabeg Stories: Featuring Petroglyphs, Petrographs, and Wampum Belts. You can reach her at lynngehl[at]gmail[dot]com and see more of her work at www.lynngehl.com

Standing on Guard for Canada's Coast

We stand on guard for thee...against Big Oil

by Chris Genovali - Raincoast Conservation Foundation

There is a poignancy in the National Energy Board’s (NEB) review process for the Northern Gateway project concluding right before Canada Day. As we celebrate this iconic holiday, many Canadians are questioning whether our democratic institutions and processes still work, or if they have been irreparably compromised by the undue influence of an increasingly monolithic oil industry. Having just spent the last two years participating in one of those processes, at Raincoast we are hoping it is the former, not the latter.

We made a commitment to oppose Enbridge's proposal both within and outside the federal Joint Review Panel (JRP) process. So in addition to our Art for an Oil-Free Coast and Groundswell outreach initiatives, we have been giving it our all as interveners in the Northern Gateway JRP.

While we filed with the NEB in 2011, the prelude to our role in the hearings actually started seven years earlier. In 2004, Raincoast began five years of ocean surveys to determine the abundance and distribution of BC's marine mammals and birds. Our goal was to inform the growing debate about turning the BC coast into an energy corridor.

In 2009, Raincoast completed seven seasons and 14,000 kilometres of survey trackline, counting several thousand marine mammals and well over 20,000 marine birds. This work formed an important part of our JRP evidence.

In the time between filing our initial evidence in the hearings two years ago and submitting our final arguments this past month, we have engaged in a staggering amount of work. In addition to the dedication of the entire Raincoast staff, our efforts have been supported by legal counsel at Ecojustice and our JRP coalition partners Living Oceans Society and Forest Ethics.

Although the hearings have concluded, Raincoast’s work to stop Northern Gateway has not. In December, the JRP makes its recommendations to the Prime Minister. And while we welcome the BC government’s rejection of the Enbridge application, the province has clearly left the door open to future reconsideration of Northern Gateway.

It's critical that we maintain momentum. Our aim over the next six months is to keep this issue at the top of the political agenda, in the media spotlight and on the public’s mind. We need your help to continue our efforts to stop this ill-advised tar sands pipeline and oil tanker proposal.


Please support us by making a tax-deductible donation to Raincoast Conservation Foundation.

Morsi's Drift To Mubarek

Massive Protests Across Egypt Demand President Morsi's Resignation

by TRNN

Lina Attalah: Millions expected to protest across Egypt demanding new elections as pro-Morsi forces stage counter demonstrations - fear that army may intervene and re-establish direct control.

Lina Attalah is the Managing Editor at Egypt Independent (formerly Al-Masry Al-Youm English Edition). Lina studied journalism at the American University in Cairo. Before joining Egypt Independent, she wrote for Reuters, Cairo Times, the Daily Star, and the Christian Science Monitor, among others. In 2005, she worked as radio producer and campaign coordinator with the BBC World Service Trust in Darfur, Sudan. She also worked as project manager for a number of research-based projects with multimedia outputs around the themes of space, mobility, and intellectual history. Lina is particularly drawn to border areas, where human geography issues of conflict and desire are rampant.

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Mazin Al Nahawi, Dave Lindorff, Janine Bandcroft July 1, 2013

This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook - Pacific Free Press

Canadians largely still believe "we" constitute a force for good in the world. Despite clear and present evidence of "our" complicity in coups, occupations, and conspiracies to profit from the misery foisted upon anonymous others in foreign lands, ask most Canadians about their nation's role in the world and they'll tell you; "we're the good guys."

This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in Palestine, where successive Canadian governments maintain vociferous and bipartisan support of the state of Israel, even while paying lip service to the unmet humanitarian needs of the captive populations of Gaza, Jerusalem, and the West Bank.

Listen. Hear.

Worse though than the national government's dismal record in this regard is the defense by Non-Governmental Organizations of its ineffectual actions, but more commonly abrogated duty to intercede, who invoke the "complexity" of the issue, saying that precludes utter condemnation of Israeli crimes, while forestalling a response to those crimes required under treaty agreements.

But is Palestine really the too-complicated-to-understand issue NGO's, governments, and the media say it is?

Mazin Al Nahawi is a Palestinian refugee from Safad, occupied Palestine living here in Victoria, the traditional territory of the Lkwungen, Esquimalt, and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples. He's a graduate of the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts - Criticism Department, Damascus, Syria where he too studied Arab Linguistics.

Mazin Al Nahawi in the first half.

And; as Edward Snowden's rabbit run from the mighty all-seeing eye unfolds across the multitudinous screens of the world's unblinking media gaze, the myriad collateral issues his alleged theft reveal are hardly beginning to be appreciated. One of these, broken by McClatchey Newspapers, is the so-called Insider Threat Program, quietly initiated by president Obama in 2011 which requires government employees outside of generally regarded "national security" departments observe and report on any suspicions they may harbour about their coworkers.

Dave Lindorff is a long-time investigative reporter, author, and co-founder of the investigative news website, This Can't Be Happening.org. His book titles include: 'This Can't Be Happening: Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy,' 'Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For Profit Hospital Chains,' and 'Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal.' He is also co-author, with Barbara Olshansky of, 'The Case for Impeachment: Legal Arguments for Removing President George W. Bush from Office.' Dave is also recipient of a 2011 Project Censored award for his expose, 'Toxic Intervention,' uncovering the use of Depleted Uranium by NATO forces during the "liberation" of Libya.

Dave Lindorff and what is really happening to American democracy 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 in the coming week. But first, Mazin Al Nahawi and rescuer's folly in Palestine.

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

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

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

The Snowden Odyssey: When Traitors Rule, Patriots Become Prisoners

The Real Traitors to America are in Washington and New York: Obama/Biden full-court press on Snowden is a bad joke

by Dave Lindorff  - This Can't Be Happening

It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry as the US goes all out to get its hands on National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

We've got the US leaning on Russia to push him out of his sanctuary in their Moscow airport. We've got Obama and the State Department warning countries around the globe not to accept him or allow him to transit their airspace. And now there's smilin' Joe Biden, lecturing Ecuador's President Rafael Correa (threatening would be a better word) about not granting asylum to Snowden, whom the Obama administration and the Republican and Democratic stooges in Congress are branding a "traitor."

Meanwhile, the real traitors who have done so much to destroy America are buying politicians of both parties, using their undue influence to gut any effort at real regulation, all the while earning fat bonuses in their corner offices at megabanks like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citi Group, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo. No need to extradite those guys in order to prosecute 'em. They're right here in the USA. All that's lacking is a will to bring charges for things like mortgage fraud, derivative fraud, collusion, lying under oath, etc. But Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, a former corporate lawyer himself, has already declared that he will not prosecute Wall Street's banks for their frauds in bringing down the US economy.

Even Cyrus Vance Jr., the supposedly tough-as-nails, no-nonsense district attorney of Manhattan, whose jurisdiction encompasses the home offices of most of the biggest "too-big-to-fail" banks, won't indict any of them or any of their top executives. It's not that he won't indict a bank, but instead of going after Goldman or Citi or Chase, he has indicted -- ready for this? -- a little independently owned community-based Chinatown bank called Abacus Bank, which has total assets of less than $250 million. That's million. For comparison, the largest US bank, JP Morgan Chase, has total assets of $2.39 trillion dollars, which is almost 10,000 times as big. Worse yet, although Vance, in indicting the bank, claimed its fraud (a bank employee, fired and voluntarily reported to regulators by the bank, had been been falsely inflating loan applicants' incomes to help them take bigger loans), was "an example of what brought down the US economy," actually Abacus has a loan default rate of 0.5%, which is just one-tenth of the national average bank loan default rate of 5-6%.

Why hasn't Vance, at least, indicted some of the big banks, which many knowledgeable analysts and critics have said are little more than giant organized crime syndicates, in some cases such as B of A, Citibank and HSBC actually knowingly laundering vast amounts of drug cartel cash? His deputy says it's because there is no evidence of prosecutable crimes committed by them! Probably it's the same reason Washington politicians won't go after them: it would jeopardize all that banker campaign lucre -- and Vance surely has his eye on the New York governor's mansion in Albany.

And so, back to Snowden, whose only "crime" has been to expose the galloping fascism of the US government, which has, behind our backs, established a national domestic surveillance system so vast and Orwellian that the old East German Stasi or Soviet KGB couldn't even dream about having such a thing.

So now we have Vice President Joe Biden, who came to his post from a position as Senator of Delaware, the state that is the legal home for some of the most criminal corporations in the country because of its lax oversight laws and its protections against shareholder activism, lecturing Ecuador about the importance of the "rule of law," and threatening the country with loss of its "most-favored-nation" exemption from import duties on exports to the US if it grants Snowden asylum from US prosecution.

But wait! As President Correa has pointed out, his country has been trying for years to get the US to extradite two bankers, Roberto and William Isaias, to face charges in a bank fraud and collapse of Filanbanko that was at the center of a US-style systemic bank collapse. That collapse ultimately cost the little country's 15 million people a staggering $8 billion in losses. The two men, who fled to the US in 2000 and have been protected from prosecution by the US since then, were sentenced in absentia to eight years in jail [1] earlier this year.

Double standard you say?

Well, let's face it, the US has become a kind of haven for international financial criminals, much as Brazil used to be a haven for bank robbers, and Argentina and Chile for Nazi mass murderers. If colossal bank fraud, in practice, is not a crime here in the US, then it's not extraditable. And as our "Justice" Department head Holder would put it, "We don't do bank or banker prosecutions, unless perhaps they are tiny banks. We just prosecute whistleblowing traitors."

Canada and the Palestinian Al Nakba

Al Nakba and Canada

by Mazin Al Nahawi / Dissident Voice

It is a shame that John Baird and his boss Stephen Harper haven’t learned yet from Canada’s colonial past.

For over a century, the Palestine question has been described as the most complex political issue of our modern time. A very “complicated” equation that after a half of a century of Zionist colonization to set up and establish a colonial “Jewish state” in Palestine, a mathematician, none other than Einstein himself, had something to say about the crimes committed in his name as a Jew, and in the name of Judaism.

In a letter by Einstein to the Zionist, Shepard Rifkin, executive director for “American Friends of the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel”, dated April 10, 1948 (the date is very important, it’s only a month before the illegal creation of the Zionist state in Palestine), he wrote:

Mr. Shepard Rifkin
Dear Sir:

When a real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine the first responsible for it would be the British and the second responsible for it the Terrorist organizations build up from our own ranks.

I am not willing to see anybody associated with those misled and criminal people.

Sincerely yours,
(Signed, ‘A. Einstein’)

It didn’t require more than three lines to solve this “complex” matter, and it seems that Einstein was very confident in naming the culprits for the “catastrophe in Palestine”, as he precisely described it. One month after that letter, the Palestinian Arabs began to call the day of the creation of the Israeli occupation state, which consisted of the robbery of their homeland and existence, as AL NAKBA (Cataclysm or Catastrophe). That was 65 years ago.

The fact that someone like Einstein could figure out such a complicated issue can not eliminate the complexity of the matter. Indeed, Palestinians are still waiting, because 65 years was not enough for most of the “civilized world” to understand the Palestinian struggle for liberation and justice and to acknowledge its root causes.

Unlike the Zionist sympathizers, apologists and propagandists nowadays, the Zionist leadership who committed genocide against the indigenous Arabs of Palestine in order to establish a “Jewish state” in a land that originally had less than 3.5 % Jewish population by 1880s1, were more frank about the colonial nature of their Zionist project, and from its beginning and early formation stages.

Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian, journalist and the father of the political Zionist movement, wrote in his diary:

We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country… expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.2

More sickening, and in order to accomplish his fantasy plan and “buy” Palestine from the Turks, Herzl was ready to exploit the Turkish crimes against the Armenians and “to influence the European press (in London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna) to handle the Armenian question in a spirit more friendly to the Turks.” 3 In his admission, he used his profession and betrayed his integrity as a journalist. A journalist must have principles, morals, integrity and honesty, and Herzl, at his best, was an excellent professional propagandist.

Russian colonialist Chaim Weizmann, the first president of the Zionist state, in an address to the English Zionist Federation on September 19, 1919:

By a Jewish National Home I mean the creation of such conditions that as the country is developed we can pour in a considerable number of immigrants, and finally establish such a society in Palestine that Palestine shall be as Jewish as England is English or America American.4

Concerning the issue of Palestine’s native population, Weizmann, in his remarks about the 1917 Balfour declaration, on record with the Jewish Agency Executive, stated:

With regard to the Arab question – the British told me that there are several hundred thousand Negroes there but that this matter has no significance. 5

The British colonialists were not less racist toward the Arab Palestinians. They had already sponsored and incorporated the Zionist colonization in their own imperial project to dominate the East Mediterranean strategic position and secure the on-going theft of its resources. Balfour, the author of the shameful Balfour Declaration, explained the British position toward the natives of Palestine:

For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country… The four great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land. In my opinion that is right. 6

Of course, the natives who suddenly inhabited Balfour’s “ancient land“ and their whole existence are only a matter of “desire and prejudices” and for the sake of humanity they needed to be expelled to open the door for Britain’s new 20th Century Crusade and expand its imperial needs.

Another Russian colonialist, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the icon of the Zionist right wing, explained the Zionist aims in Palestine in his article “The Iron Wall”. He wrote:

We cannot give any compensation for Palestine, neither to the Palestinians nor to other Arabs. Therefore, a voluntary agreement is inconceivable. All Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in total, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy. Not only must this be so, it is so whether we admit it or not. What does the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate mean for us? It is the fact that a disinterested power committed itself to create such security conditions that the local population would be deterred from interfering with our efforts. 7

For Jabotinsky it was just another European settler colonization, like the United States, Canada or Australia. He was aware of Zionism as a colonial adventure with direct brutal assault against the indigenous natives. He stated:

My readers have a general idea of the history of colonization in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonization being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent.” He added later: “Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of “Palestine” into the “Land of Israel”. 8

Moshe Dayan, a Zionist war criminal who helped form the Haganah gangs, and participated in organizing the terror and massacres against the Palestinians to expel them from their ancestors’ land, in a rare confession said:

Let us not today fling accusation at the murderers. What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before [the Palestinians'] very eyes we are possessing the land and villages where they, and their ancestors, have lived … We are the generation of colonizers, and without the gun barrel we cannot plant a tree and build a home. 9

Finally, David Ben Gurion, the main director of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, in a letter to his son in 1937, stated:

We must expel the Arabs and take their places and if we have to use force, to guarantee our own right to settle in those places ­ then we have force at our disposal.10

The conscience of that Polish colonist surprisingly developed later when he told Nahum Goldman president of the World Jewish Congress:

“I don’t understand your optimism,” Ben-Gurion declared. “Why should the Arabs make peace? If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is NATURAL: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism: 11 the Nazis, 12 Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? They may perhaps forget in one or two generations’ time, but for the moment there is no chance. So it’s simple: we have to stay strong and maintain a powerful army. Our whole policy is there. Otherwise the Arabs will wipe us out. 13

Ben Gurion was an atheist. Still, while admitting to the Zionist theft of Palestine, he managed to talk about an imaginary friend in the sky, God and his “promised land”! And based on a book Ben Gurion published in 1918 in New York, he believed that the Arab natives of Palestine were the “flesh and the blood of old Judeans”,14 yet later when the same natives rejected his “Jewish state” in their land, he did not object to expelling them and stealing their land. Actually, with regard to the Arabs expulsion, he told a meeting of the Jewish Agency:

I don’t see anything immoral in it. 15

Now if I should put all these damning statements and confessions in one sentence to explain why the Palestinians are resisting it would be:

It is the occupation, stupid!

In spite of all of the Zionist leadership literature, writings, documented minutes of cabinet meetings regarding colonization and the plans to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its indigenous Arabs (See Plan Dalet), still Canada has sustained all manner of support for the Zionist project and its racist establishment, including military, while promoting itself as a “fair and peace-loving state”.

Before the Zionists decided on Palestine as a homeland for Jews, in their first conference in Basel 1897, Canadian Evangelicals were already sending their religious colonial settlers and crusades to “prepare” the land for the “return” of the Jews to quicken the Apocalypse. Even before Herzl initiated his efforts to approach the Ottomans, who were themselves occupiers in Palestine, a Canadian Christian Zionist, Henry Wentworth Monk, was working to accomplish that exact goal, to “buy” Palestine from the Turks.

On the state level, Lester Pearson summarized Canadian foreign policy regarding Palestine. He was a devoted Christian Zionist whose memoirs refer to the Zionist state as “the land of my Sunday school lessons”. 16 The same Sunday religious “lessons” taught him the geography of his imaginary biblical holy land so he knew it “more than the geography of Ontario”. 17 If someone with these qualifications chaired the pivotal United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, there can be no surprise when later the Zionist state was carved out of historical Palestine. Pearson stated:

I have never waivered in my view that a solution to the problem was impossible without the recognition of a Jewish state in Palestine. To me this was always the core of the matter. 18

As if Palestine was a part of Pearson’s family property and the Arab “tenants” having no say. Gandhi, who luckily missed Pearson’s type of “school and lessons,” had the simple common sense which easily debunked the racist mentality of Pearson and his Zionist buddies. Gandhi wrote in September 1938:

The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after return to Palestine. Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood? Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews, partly or wholly as their national home. 19

It is important to note that Pearson upheld the racist Mackenzie Law which did not allow European Jews fleeing the Holocaust in Europe to enter Canada. His desire to “protect” Jews was not different from Ben Gurion’s who said:

If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative. For we must take into account not only the lives of these children but also the history of the people of Israel. 20

Talking of the imaginary history which many Zionists like Ben Gurion and Pearson have used to legitimize their crimes of ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Arab Palestinians, Tel Aviv University Professor of Archaeology Ze’ev Herzog summed up the major archaeological findings of 70 years of intensive excavations in Palestine with the following:

The patriarchs’ acts are legendary, the Israelites did not sojourn in Egypt or make an exodus, they did not conquer the land. Neither is there any mention of the empire of David and Solomon, nor of the source of belief in the God of Israel. These facts have been known for years, but Israel is a stubborn people and nobody wants to hear about it.21

The core of the matter for colonialists like Pearson and his overseers in London and Washington is simply to allow greedy corporations, destructive oil and gas companies, to continue their theft of the resources and minerals underneath a “land without people.” “Balfour of Canada” or “Rabbi Pearson”, as many Zionists once called him, said: “Israel may assume an important role in Western defence as the southern pivot of current plans for the defence.” 22 Pearson’s devotion to Zionism did not add much to the nonsensical Zionist colonial narrative. Theodor Herzl already portrayed the prospective “Jewish state” as Europe’s “wall of defense against Asia” and an “outpost of civilisation against barbarism.”23

Let us remember Pearson’s true legacy: he “refused to call for Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, and had Canada deliver weapons to the French to put down the Algerian and Vietnamese independence movements.” 24 Many other atrocities are detailed in Yves Engler’s book, Lester Pearson’s Peacekeeping – The Truth may Hurt.

Actually Noam Chomsky outlined what kind of war criminal Pearson was when he wrote in the foreword of Engler’s book:

Lester Pearson was a major criminal, really extreme. He didn’t have the power to be like an American president, but if he’d had it, he would have been the same. He tried. 25

So what John Baird did during his recent visit to Jerusalem, occupied Palestine is nothing but another example of the long bond and co-operation between the Canadian state and the Israeli occupation state.

Another obvious sign of the unconditional support, aid, and cover-up for the racist Israeli apartheid in Palestine, John Baird, still proud of the shameful ties, said:

Let me state at the outset, and for the record, that Israel has no greater friend in the world than Canada. I make that point around the world often. 26

The irony is that Canada refused entry to Jewish refugees who were trying to escape the European Holocaust and helped to block every escape route except Palestine. This same Canada is now claiming to be the greatest friend of the “Jewish state”. Herzl foresaw the help being offered by the anti-Jewish societies who do not accept Jews among themselves, but want them to “return to their ancient homeland”, Palestine. He predicted in his diary that:

The antisemites will become our most loyal friends, the antisemites nations will become our allies.27

The Canadian government has a history of supporting apartheid, along with other destructive policies from mining, to militarism, and backing up big corporations stealing from poor nations. Just ask Haitians about Canada’s part in dismantling and privatizing their country,28 but the Canadian corporate media does a good job of comforting and baby sitting the Canadian audiences.

In the past the Canadian government gave similar support and aid to the other European racist apartheid in South Africa. Nelson Mandela said clearly:

But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.29

Not so in the case of Canada which acts as if it still does not “know” about its continuing complicity with apartheid. Although it was exposed in South Africa, it is still patiently waiting to be exposed in Palestine.

John Baird needs to visit the indigenous “reservations”, the Canadian bantustans style in his “democratic state” and listen to their vocabulary. Words like “Colonization” and “Decolonization” are very common and repeated consistently among the threatened indigenous people inside Canada and outside. Both terms express reality and solution to their struggle. But these words are absent and will never be heard in any of the mainstream corporate media.

A colonialist promoter like Baird should know that he is not welcome in Jerusalem, occupied Palestine, nor in Canada State if it were up to the indigenous people.

But unlike Einstein’s brain, the Zionist brains of Pearson, Harper and Baird are the average abnormal brains in the Canadian government, never evolved from their colonial racist limited mentality.

In 1904 a Canadian Christian Zionist called Reverend Lucas, who had qualifications to be a Sunday school teacher anywhere in Canada, wrote a book called Canada and Canaan, and in it he made this amazing note:

Canada instead of Canaan! Moses would have danced with joy. 30

Indeed, Canada and the Israeli apartheid in Canaan/Palestine are nothing but twin colonial settler states built on racism, genocide, and dispossession.

Mazin Al Nahawi is a Palestinian refugee from Safad, occupied Palestine. He finished the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts - Criticism Department, Damascus, Syria in 1996. Now he lives in Victoria, BC, Canada, on land that is the traditional territory of the Lkwungen, Esquimalt, and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples. Read other articles by Mazin.

1. The Population of Palestine: Population Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and The Mandate (Ch 1, Table 1.4D) by Prof Justin McCarthy (Columbia University Press, 1990). [↩]
2. The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, vol. 1, p. 88. [↩]
3. The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, p.387. [↩]
4. Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948, by Nur Masalha, p. 41. And The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann: August 1898-July 1931, by Chaïm Weizmann, p. 257. [↩]
5. Chaim Weizmann quoted by Arthur Ruppin [The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians, by Noam Chomsky, p481. Source: Yosef Heller, Bama'avak Lamdina (Jerusalem, 1985), p.140]. [↩]
6. Crossroads to Israel 1917-1948, by Christopher Sykes, (1965, reprinted Indiana University Press, Bloomingtron, IN, 1973), p. 5. [↩]
7. The Iron Wall: We and the Arabs. 1923. [↩]
8. Ibid. [↩]
9. The Iron Wall, by Avi Shlaim, p. 101. [↩]
10. See the full English translation of Ben-Gurion’s letter. The original Hebrew (from the Ben-Gurion Archives) – Source: Journal of Palestine Studies. [↩]
11. The word “Semitic” is an adjective derived from “Shem”, one of the three sons of “Noah” in the Biblical mythology (Genesis 5.32, 6.10, 10.21). The term was first coined by a German “historian” theologist August Ludwig von Schlözer in Eichhorn’s “Repertorium”, vol. VIII (Leipzig, 1781), p. 161. Schlözer used the term to refer to the languages related to “Hebrew”, which is nothing but an appropriation of a square Aramaic (See: Hidden Histories: Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean, by Basem L. Ra’ad.) The term “antisemitism” was first used by Wilhelm Marr (1819-1904), a German racist nationalist Journalist, who created it in 1879 to describe the anti-Jewish campaigns in Europe. Ironically the Zionists themselves carry on the same term. [↩]
12. See: The Zionist-Nazi Collaboration, by William James Martin. [↩]
13. The Jewish Paradox, by Nahum Goldman, 1978, p. 99. [↩]
14. David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Eretz Israel in the Past and in the Present, 1918. [↩]
15. Righteous Victims, by Benny Morris, p. 144. [↩]
16. Personal Policy Making: Canada’s Role in the Adoption of the Palestine Partition Resolution, by Eliezer Tauber, p. 84. [↩]
17. Ibid [↩]
18. The Domestic Battleground: Canada and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, by David Taras, p. 129. [↩]
19. The Jews In Palestine, by Mahatma Gandhi. Published in the Harijan 26-11-1938. [↩]
20. The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, by Tom Segev, Henry Holt and Co., New York, First Owl Books Edition 2000, p. 28. [↩]
21. Ha’aretz Magazine, Friday, October 29, 1999 . [↩]
22. Lester Pearson’s 1952 memo to cabinet. [↩]
23. One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, by Tom Segev, 2001, p. 150. [↩]
24. See Yves Engler’s post: “The truth about Lester Pearson”. [↩]
25. Lester Pearson’s Peacekeeping – The Truth May Hurt, by Yves Engler. Publisher: RED Publishing (Mar 15 2012), p. 9. [↩]
26. Address by Minister Baird to the American Jewish Committee May 3, 2012 – Washington, D.C. [↩]
27. The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl. Vol. 1, p. 84. [↩]
28. See this article: “Canada’s ‘Right Arm’: FOCAL’s Role in the Privatization of Haiti. And this one: A Very Canadian Coup d’état in Haiti: The Top 10 Ways that Canada’s Government Helped the 2004 Coup and its Reign of Terror. [↩]
29. From President Mandela’s speech at the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, 04 December 1997, Pretoria. [↩]
30. Lucas, D.V., Canaan and Canada. Toronto: William Briggs, 1904, p. 33. [↩]