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http://youtu.be/G-Cen0DyZeo
Humanity Is Drowning In Washington’s Criminality
Paul Craig Roberts
August 13, 2013 Americans will soon be locked into an unaccountable police state unless US Representatives and Senators find the courage to ask questions and to sanction the executive branch officials who break the law, violate the Constitution, withhold information from Congress, and give false information about their crimes against law, the Constitution, the American people and those in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Guantanamo, and elsewhere. Congress needs to use the impeachment power that the Constitution provides and cease being subservient to the lawless executive branch. The US faces no threat that justifies the lawlessness and abuse of police powers that characterize the executive branch in the 21st century.
Impeachment is the most important power of Congress. Impeachment is what protects the citizens, the Constitution, and the other branches of government from abuse by the executive branch. If the power to remove abusive executive branch officials is not used, the power ceases to exist. An unused power is like a dead letter law. Its authority disappears. By acquiescing to executive branch lawlessness, Congress has allowed the executive branch to place itself above law and to escape accountability for its violations of law and the Constitution.
- National Intelligence Director James R. Clapper blatantly lied to Congress and remains in office. Keith B. Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency, has also misled Congress, and he remains in office. Attorney General Holder avoids telling Congress the truth on just about every subject, and he also remains in office. The same can be said for President Obama, one of the great deceivers of our time, who is so adverse to truth that truth seldom finds its way out of his mouth.
If an American citizen lies to a federal investigator, even if not under oath, the citizen can be arrested, prosecuted, and sent to prison. Yet, these same federal personnel can lie to Congress and to citizens with impunity. Whatever the American political system is, it has nothing whatsoever to do with accountable government. In Amerika no one is accountable but citizens, who are accountable not only to law but also to unaccountable charges for which no evidence is required.
Congress has the power to impeach any presidential appointee as well as the president. In the 1970s Congress was going to impeach President Richard Nixon simply because he lied about when he learned of the Watergate burglary. To avoid impeachment, Nixon resigned. In the 1990s, the House impeached President Bill Clinton for lying about his sexual affair with a White House intern. The Senate failed to convict, no doubt as many had sexual affairs of their own and didn’t want to be held accountable themselves.
- In the 1970s when I was on the Senate staff, corporate lobbyists would send attractive women to seduce Senators so that the interest groups could blackmail the Senators to do their bidding. Don’t be surprised if the NSA has adopted this corporate practice.
The improprieties of Nixon and Clinton were minor, indeed of little consequence, when compared to the crimes of George W. Bush and Obama, their vice presidents, and the bulk of their presidential appointees. Yet, impeachment is “off the table,” as Nancy Pelosi infamously declared. http://www.nytimes.com/cq/2006/11/08/cq_1916.html Why do Californian voters send a person to Congress who refuses to protect them from an unaccountable executive branch? Who does Nancy Pelosi serve? Certainly not the people of California. Most certainly not the US Constitution. Pelosi is in total violation of her oath of office. Will Californians re-elect her yet again? Little wonder America is failing.
The question demanding to be asked is: What is the purpose of the domestic surveillance of all Americans? This is surveillance out of all proportion to the alleged terrorist threat. The US Constitution is being ignored and domestic law violated. Why? Does the US government have an undeclared agenda for which the “terrorist threat” is a cover?
What is this agenda? Whose agenda is more important than the US Constitution and the accountability of government to law? No citizen is secure unless government is accountable to the Constitution and to law. It is an absurd idea that any American is more threatened by terrorism than by unaccountable government that can execute them, torture them, and throw them in prison for life without due process or any accountability whatsoever. Under Bush/Obama, the US has returned to the unaccountable power of caesars, czars, and autocrats.
In the famous play, “A Man For All Seasons,” Sir Thomas More, Chancellor of England, asks: So, you would have me to cut down the law in order to chase after devils? And what will we do, with the law cut down, when the devil turns on us?
This is the most important legal question ever asked, and it is seldom asked today, not in our law schools, not by our bar associations, and most certainly not by the Justice (sic) Department or US Attorneys.
American conservatives regard civil liberties as mere excuses for liberal judges to coddle criminals and terrorists. Never expect a conservative Republican, or more than two or three of them, to defend your civil liberty. Republicans simply do not believe in civil liberty. Democrats cannot conceive that Obama--the first black president in office, a member of an oppressed minority--would not defend civil liberty. This combination of disinterest and denial is why the US has become a police state.
Civil liberty has few friends in government, the political parties, law schools, bar associations, or the federal judiciary. Consequently, no citizen is secure. Recently, a housewife researched online for pressure cookers looking for the best deal. Her husband was searching for a backpack.
- The result was that a fully armed SWAT team appeared at the door demanding to search the premises and to have questions answered.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/08/government-knocking-doors-because-google-searches/67864/
I am always amazed when someone says: “I haven’t done anything wrong. I have nothing to fear.” If you have nothing to fear from the government, why did the Founding Fathers put the protections in the Constitution that Bush and Obama have stripped out? Unlike the Founding Fathers who designed our government to protect the citizens, the American sheeple trust the government to their own demise.
Glenn Greenwald recently explained how the mass of data that is being accumulated on every American is being mined for any signs of non-terrorist-related criminal behavior. As such warrantless searches are illegal evidence in a criminal trial, the authorities disguise the illegal way in which the evidence is obtained in order to secure conviction based on illegally obtained evidence. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article35773.htm
In other words, the use of the surveillance justified by the “war on terror” has already spread into prosecutions of ordinary criminals where it has corrupted legal safeguards and the integrity, if any, of the criminal court system, prosecutors and judges.
This is just one of the many ways in which you have much to fear, whether you think you are doing anything wrong or not. You can be framed for crimes based on inferences drawn from your Internet activity and jokes with friends on social media. Jurors made paranoid by the “terrorist threat” will convict you.
We should be very suspicious of the motive behind the universal spying on US citizens. The authorities are aware that the terrorist threat does not justify the unconstitutional and illegal spying. There have been hardly any real terrorist events in the US, which is why the FBI has to find clueless people around whom to organize an FBI orchestrated plot in order to keep the “terrorist threat” alive in the public’s mind. At last count, there have been 150 “sting operations” in which the FBI recruits people, who are out of touch with reality, to engage in a well-paid FBI designed plot. Once the dupes agree, they are arrested as terrorists and the plot revealed, always with the accompanying statement that the public was never in any danger as the FBI was in control.
- When 99 percent of all terrorism is organized by the FBI, why do we need NSA spying on every communication of every American and people in the rest of the world?
Terrorism seldom comes from outside. The source almost always is the government in power. The Czarist secret police set off bombs in order to blame and arrest labor agitators. The Nazis burned down the Reichstag in order to decimate the communists and assume unaccountable power in the name of “public safety.” An alleged terrorist threat is a way of using fear to block popular objection to the exercise of arbitrary government power.
In order to be “safe from terrorists,” the US population, with few objections, has accepted the demise of their civil liberties, such as habeas corpus, which reaches back centuries to Magna Carta as a constraint on government power. How, then, are they safe from their government? Americans today are in the same position as the English prior to the Great Charter of 1215. Americans are no longer protected by law and the Constitution from government tyranny.
The reason the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution was to make citizens safe from their government. If citizens allow the government to take away the Constitution, they might be safe from foreign terrorists, but they are no longer safe from their government.
Who do you think has more power over you, foreign terrorists or “your” government?
Washington defines all resistance to its imperialism and tyranny as “terrorism.” Thus, Americans who defend the environment, who defend wildlife, who defend civil liberties and human rights, who protest Washington’s wars and robbery of the people in behalf of special interests, all become “domestic extremists,” the term Homeland Security has substituted for “terrorist.” Those who are out of step with Washington and the powerful private interests that exploit us, other peoples, and the earth for their profits and power fall into the wrong side of Bush’s black and white division of the world: “you are for us or against us.”
In the United States independent thought is on the verge of being criminalized as are constitutionally guaranteed protests and the freedom of the press. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/10/james-risen-prison-journalism-criminalised The constitutional principle of freedom of speech is being redefined as treason, as aiding an undefined enemy, and as seeking to overthrow the government by casting aspersions on its motives and revealing its secret misdeeds.
- The power-mad inhabitants of Washington have brought the US so close to Gestapo Germany and Stalinist Russia that it is no longer funny. Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to see the difference.
The neoconservatives have declared that Americans are the “exceptional” and “indispensable people.” Yet, the civil liberties of Americans have declined the more “exceptional” and “indispensable” that Americans become. We are now so exceptional and indispensable that we no longer have any rights.
And neither does the rest of the world. Neoconservatism has created a new dangerous American nationalism. Neoconservatives have given Washington a monopoly on right and endowed its military aggressions with a morality that supersedes the Geneva Conventions and human rights. Washington, justified by its “exceptionalism,” has the right to attack populations in countries with which Washington is not at war, such as Pakistan and Yemen. Washington is using the cover of its “exceptionalism” to murder people in many countries. http://news.antiwar.com/2013/08/11/us-drones-pound-yemen-but-targets-arent-all-militants/print/ Hitler tried to market the exceptionalism of the German people, but he lacked Washington’s Madison Avenue skills.
Washington is always morally right, whatever it does, and those who report its crimes are traitors who, stripped of their coddling by civil liberties, are locked away and abused until they confess to their crimes against the state. Anyone who tells the truth, such as Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden, are branded enemies of the state and are ruthlessly persecuted.
How does the “indispensable, exceptional nation” have a diplomatic policy? How can a neoconized State Department be based on anything except coercion? It can’t. That is why Washington produces nothing but war and threats of war.
- Wherever a person looks, whatever a person hears, it is Washington’s threat--“we are going to bomb you into the stone age” if you don’t do what we want and agree to what we require.
- We are going to impose “sanctions,” Washington’s euphemism for embargoes, and starve your women and children to death, permit no medical supplies, ban you from the international payments system unless you relent and consent to being Washington’s puppet, and ban you from posting your news broadcasts on the Internet.
- This is the face that Washington presents to the world: the hard, mean face of a tyrant.
Washington’s power will survive a bit longer, because there are still politicians in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Latin America and in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the NGOs in Russia, who are paid off by the almighty dollar. In exchange for Washington’s money, they endorse Washington’s immorality and murderous destruction of law and life.
But the dollar is being destroyed by Quantitative Easing, and the domestic US economy is being destroyed by jobs offshoring. http://www.manufacturingnews.com/news/TAA0731131.html
Rome was powerful until the Germans ceased to believe it. Then the rotten edifice collapsed. Washington faces sooner or later the same fate. An inhumane, illegal, unconstitutional regime based on violence alone, devoid of all morality and all human compassion, is not acceptable to China, Russia, India, Iran, and Brazil, or to readers of this column.
- The evil that is Washington cannot last forever.
The criminals might destroy the world in nuclear war, but the lawlessness and lack of humanity in Washington, which murders more people as I write, is no longer acceptable to the rest of the world, not even to its European puppet states, despite the leaders being on Washington’s payroll.
- Gorbachev is correct. The collapse of the Soviet Union was a debacle for the entire world. It transformed the US from the “city upon the hill,” the “beacon for humanity,” into an aggressive militarist state. Consequently, Amerika has become despised by everyone who has a moral conscience and a sense of justice.
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http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/08/13/humanity-is-drowning-in-washingtons-criminality-paul-craig-roberts/
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About Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following.
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Publicerad den 31 maj 2013
Publicerad den 31 maj 2013
From economic turmoil to social
dissolution and cultural chaos, it can no longer be denied that the
once-opulent West is on the brink of collapse. In his new book,
respected economist and father of Reaganomics, Paul Craig Roberts,
explores the roots of this crisis and where we are going from here. This
is the GRTV Feature Interview with your host, James Corbett, and our
special guest, Paul Craig Roberts.
- I am the eye in the sky
Looking at you
- I can read your mind
I am the maker of rules
- Dealing with fools
I can cheat you blind
- And I don't need to see any more
To know that...
- I can read your mind, I can read your mind...***
-The NSA is Turning the Internet into a Total Surveillance System-
SvaraRaderaAlexander Abdo and Patrick Toomey
The Guardian
August 11, 2013
Another burst of sunlight permeated the National Security Agency’s black box of domestic surveillance last week.
According to the New York Times, the NSA is searching the content of virtually every email that comes into or goes out of the United States without a warrant.
To accomplish this astonishing invasion of Americans’ privacy, the NSA reportedly is making a copy of nearly every international email.
It then searches that cloned data, keeping all of the emails containing certain keywords and deleting the rest – all in a matter of seconds.
If you emailed a friend, family member or colleague overseas today (or if, from abroad, you emailed someone in the US), chances are that the NSA made a copy of that email and searched it for suspicious information.
Read more
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/11/nsa-internet-surveillance-email
http://www.infowars.com/the-nsa-is-turning-the-internet-into-a-total-surveillance-system/
-UK ordered Guardian to destroy hard drives in effort to stop Snowden revelations-
SvaraRaderaRT August 20
UK authorities reportedly raided the Guardian’s office in London to destroy hard drives in an effort to stop future publications of leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The action is unlikely to prevent new materials coming out.
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger revealed in a Monday article posted on the British newspaper's website that intelligence officials from the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) told him that he would either have to hand over all the classified documents or have the newspaper’s hard drives destroyed.
After more talks, two "security experts" from GCHQ - the British version of the National Security Agency - visited the Guardian’s London offices.
Rusbridger wrote that the government officials then watched as computers, which contained classified information passed on by Snowden, were physically destroyed in one of the newspaper building’s basements.
Another source familiar with the event confirmed to Reuters that Guardian employees destroyed the computers as UK officials observed.
During negotiations with the government, Rusbridger said that the newspaper could not fulfill its journalistic duty if it satisfied the authorities’ requests.
But GCHQ reportedly responded by telling the Guardian that it had already sparked the debate, which was enough.
"You've had your debate. There's no need to write any more," Reuters quoted the unnamed official as saying. [...]
http://rt.com/news/guardian-hard-drives-destroyed-697/
-UK detains Greenwald’s partner under Terrorism Act, confiscates electronics-
SvaraRaderahttp://rt.com/news/uk-detain-greenwald-partner-terrorism-645/
-The Guardian: Downing St. involved in 'Snowden materials' destruction order-
August 20
http://rt.com/news/legal-guardian-miranda-lawsuit-726/
-UK ordered Guardian to destroy hard drives in effort to stop Snowden revelations-
http://rt.com/news/guardian-hard-drives-destroyed-697/
--Intimidating journalists and their families new norm?--
SvaraRaderaRT August 20
To everyone’s regret, given the current state of secrecy and political repression, the detention of Glenn Greenwald’s partner seems to have become the norm, rather than the exception.
David Miranda, at London’s Heathrow airport earlier this week, is yet another example of the use of draconian “anti-terror” legislation in the US and UK to intimidate whistleblowers, journalists and their families, and anyone confronting the surveillance/police state directly. [...]
Those who fail to learn from history…
Such tactics as were employed in the detention of David Miranda are nothing new. In fact, they have been used repeatedly by authoritarian governments throughout recent history: Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, East Germany under the Stasi, and others. However, the respect for freedoms and basic human rights which supposedly have separated Western democracies from such regimes seem to have become merely anachronisms – vestiges of a bygone era when the United States and its allies could present themselves as just and righteous. [...]
http://rt.com/op-edge/greenwald-uk-snowden-intimidating-journalists-740/
--Ta-ta UK freedoms! Miranda matter outs vindictiveness of wounded police state--
SvaraRaderaRT August 19
As the definition of terrorism has expanded to cover activists, placard wavers, protesters and now, apparently, the partners of journalists, the arrest of Glenn Greenwald's partner is just another nail in the coffin of British Freedoms.
David Miranda had just spent a week in Berlin before flying back to his home country, Brazil, via London's Heathrow airport. As he attempted to transit on to his flight home - not enter the UK, mind you, just make an international connection - he was pulled to one side by the UK's border security officers and questioned for nine hours, as well as having all his technical equipment confiscated.
He was detained for the maximum period allowed under the draconian terms of Schedule 7 of the UK's Terrorism Act (2000). His apparent "crime"? To be the partner of campaigning journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the Edward Snowden whistleblowing stories.[...]
In the UK we now have secret courts covering all things "national security", pervasive Big Brother surveillance (as exemplified by GCHQ's TEMPORA program), and we have our spies involved in kidnapping and torture. [...]
http://rt.com/op-edge/uk-gay-greenwald-freedom-police-679/
http://intellihub.com/2013/08/21/why-is-the-government-leaving-our-most-critical-infrastructure-wide-open-to-terror-attacks/
SvaraRaderahahaha....
-Guardian editor on Miranda detention: ‘Terror and journalism being aligned’-
SvaraRaderaRT August 21
The UK government created a “lawless bit of Britain” under the terror act which suspends all checks and balances, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger said in an interview, adding that the paper is financing David Miranda's lawsuit against the Home Office.
Rusbridger called ports and airport transit lounges a “stateless bit of Britain,” where a government can use the word “terror” to “suspend all the normal rules.”
The comment was made in reference to UK authorities detaining and questioning David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, for nine hours in London’s Heathrow airport on Sunday under Schedule 7 of the UK’s anti-terrorism law.
Miranda told the BBC in an interview that he felt threatened during his 9-hour detention and as if “he were naked in front of a crowd.”
Greewald’s partner said that he was “forced to give passwords” to email and social media accounts to his interrogators. Authorities allegedly threatened him with prison if he did not comply. [...]
http://rt.com/news/guardian-rusbridger-miranda-uk-757/
-NSA spied on UN videoconferencing meetings - newspaper-
SvaraRaderaRT August 25
The US National Security Agency (NSA) successfully cracked the encryption code protecting the United Nations’ internal videoconferencing system, according to documents seen by Germany’s Der Spiegel.
The United States was not just busy spying on the European Union, the report revealed, but had its surveillance apparatus trained on the international body as well.
The publication reported on Sunday that the electronic breaching of the UN, which is headquartered in New York, occurred in the summer of 2012. Within three weeks of initially gaining access to the UN system, the NSA had increased the number of such decrypted communications from 12 to 458.
On one occasion, according to the report, while the Americans were attempting to break into UN communications, they discovered the Chinese were attempting to crack the encryption code as well.
In February, a US cyber security company said it had traced “hundreds of data breaches since 2004” to a Chinese military unit in Shanghai.
Chinese authorities rejected the claims.
Der Spiegel‘s report continued from earlier revelations about the NSA spying on EU institutions, explaining that the US agency gained access to the virtual private network (VPN) used by the EU’s embassies in the United States.
It also said that the US spy agency oversees a monitoring program called the “Special Collection Service,” which is jointly staffed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and NSA. The system reportedly exists in over 80 embassies and consulates around the world, often without the knowledge of the host country.
The existence of the system was revealed in July 2013 by Edward Snowden, an American citizen and former NSA contractor.
In June, Der Spiegel revealed that the US intelligence service monitors around half a billion telephone calls, emails and text messages from Germany every month, setting off a firestorm of protest among German citizens.
On August 15, Germany’s Vice Chancellor and Minister of Economics and Technology, Philipp Rösler, said Germany will take definite action to limit the NSA’s ability to spy on European Union communications.
The first step will be to build “a strong European information technology industry that can offer alternatives” to US-owned firms that collaborate with the NSA, said Rösler.
http://rt.com/news/nsa-us-un-germany-snowden-964/
'Privacy rights don’t exist in US anymore'
SvaraRaderaAugust 23
NSA has been collecting every e-mail since at least 1997, so it doesn’t have anything to do with security, Chris Kitze, founder of Unsene, an encrypted internet server, told RT, adding that now they are crossing a line and violating the constitution.
RT: President Obama says that some privacy can be breached in order to provide security. Where's the situation with observing privacy rights heading to in the US, in your opinion?
Chris Kitze: I don’t think they exist anymore in the US. That is what I hear from our customers. This has been going on for a long time and a company that I had that went public in 1998, in 1997 we went on a tour of the colocation facility. That is the place we hold all the servers. The person who was giving the tour said ‘that is the NSA room’. I asked ‘what do they do in here?’ and he said ‘they collect every e-mail and website visit that comes through here’.
That has been going on since 1997 so it doesn’t really have anything to do with security. They are trying to make it pretend like it does, but they have just been doing this forever. May be there are some security reasons. I don’t know the whole picture, I don’t have access to that information and I am sure there are good people in those agencies, who think they are doing something that is right, but they are crossing a line now and what they are doing is they are violating the constitution.
A lot of people I know who are lawyers and business people are up in arms about this privately. They haven’t come out and said ‘we are going to something strong about this’ but they are not happy with it.
You're saying that the US is turning into an electronic prison. Could you explain your point?[...]
http://rt.com/op-edge/privacy-breached-security-us-nsa-898/