Political News: Western Foreign Policy, Torture, Surveillance, and Assassination
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-04-10 11:56:43 UTC
- Modified: 2014-04-10 11:57:55 UTC
PRISM
Condoleezza Rice, former United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor has joined the board of cloud file storage and syncing firm Dropbox.
Torture
While much has been said of the torture techniques used by the US government in the early days of the War on Terror, including waterboarding and sleep deprivation, a prisoner named Abu Zubaydah was subjected to all 10 sanctioned torture techniques, including the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
“Tapes can also be edited and spliced, with effective results, if the tampering can be hidden,” the CIA manual explained in a section previously redacted. The CIA further elaborated on the effects of having a tape “edited to make it sound like a confession.”
Just-released transcripts of a secret session at the Guantanamo war court show defense lawyers want a list of the countries where the CIA secretly jailed the alleged USS Cole bomber, and the names of people who worked at the agency's black sites. But the prosecution won't provide them.
From Cold War-era coups to “enhanced interrogation” in the “war on terror,” the CIA has courted the suspicion and hatred of the Muslim world. But it was not always so. For several years after its creation in 1947, the agency was an outpost of support for Arab nationalism in the U.S. government.
The head of the Senate Intelligence Committee appealed to President Barack Obama to reconsider his administration's decision to task the CIA with editing a torture report harshly critical of the spy agency's treatment of terror suspects after the Sept. 11 attacks before it can be made public.
Syria
You can't keep a good war criminal down: Tony Blair cannot resist calling for more war every time he opens his mouth.
Iraq
Rather a side issue, but even if we accept Zoe Williams view that dead Iraqi children don’t matter, she appears not to have noticed that Blair introduced tuition fees, academies, kick-started NHS privatization, allowed the banksters’ bonanza leading to worldwide economic crash and oversaw the greatest widening of the gap between rich and poor in British history.
Somalia
In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. It’s nine million people who have been battling widespread starvation ever since. America and other European nations saw this as a great opportunity to rob the country of its food supply and dump their nuclear waste in Somalia’s now unprotected seas.
According to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, approximately 12 miles into the ocean from the coast is sovereign territory of the state. Every Somali highjacking that has ever occurred happened within those 12 miles.
Venezuela
€£600 million of UK aid money is going to help companies like Unilever and Monsanto take over African land and agriculture, writes Miriam Ross. The corporate power-grab will be disastrous for the small-scale farmers who feed at least 70% of Africa's people.
Ukraine
*Since Russian troops first entered the Crimean peninsula in early March, a series of media polling outlets have asked Americans how they want the U.S. to respond to the ongoing situation. Although two-thirds of Americans have reported following the situation at least “somewhat closely,” most Americans actually know very little about events on the ground — or even where the ground is. On March 28-31, 2014, we asked a national sample of 2,066 Americans (fielded via Survey Sampling International Inc. (SSI), what action they wanted the U.S. to take in Ukraine, but with a twist: In addition to measuring standard demographic characteristics and general foreign policy attitudes, we also asked our survey respondents to locate Ukraine on a map as part of a larger, ongoing project to study foreign policy knowledge. We wanted to see where Americans think Ukraine is and to learn if this knowledge (or lack thereof) is related to their foreign policy views. We found that only one out of six Americans can find Ukraine on a map, and that this lack of knowledge is related to preferences: The farther their guesses were from Ukraine’s actual location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene with military force…* The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur breaks it down.
Behind the U.S.-backed coup that ousted the democratically elected president of Ukraine are the economic interests of giant corporations – from Cargill to Chevron – which see the country as a potential “gold mine” of profits from agricultural and energy exploitation, reports JP Sottile.
Surely these men were not Blackwater – simply because such a company does not exist anymore. It has changed its name twice in recent years and is now called Academi.
[...]
Greystone Limited mercenaries are part of what is called ‘America’s Secret Army,’ providing non-state military support not constrained by any interstate agreements, The Voice of Russia reported.
What's been happening in the Ukraine recently makes little sense without seeing it in broader geopolitical and historical contexts, so in my search for a firmer understanding of what's going on, I've been consulting the history books. First off, it needs to be said that the Ukraine is historically a part of Russia. It has been "an independent nation-state" in name since 1991, but has been completely dependent on external support ever since. And most of this "support" has not been in its best interest, to say the least.
Many are militant fascists. They’re thugs. They’re criminals.
The flywheel of political repressions in Ukraine is gaining momentum these days. In sharp contrast with the liberal approach by president Yanukovych to the “Euromaidan” rout, the interim Kievan administration did not hesitate much about cracking down the public uprising against the “neo-Nazi regime” on the rise in the East and South of Ukraine. Today only in Kharkov at least 70 activists have been arrested during so-called “anti-terrorist operation”. According to the reports, foreign mercinaries presumably from the US Greystone Ltd private military contractor firm were participating in the operation along with the National Guard (majorly consisting of the ultranationalist Pravy (Right) Sector fighters) and some loyal Interior Ministry units.
AstroTurfing
“The US corporate media and education system provide the ideological chains of fascism.”
The supreme court's relaxing of donation rules just made US elections even more undemocratic and corruptible
The U.S. Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission may actually undermine the Court's reasoning in Citizens United that unlimited spending from Super PACs pose no risk of corruption.
We already knew that bots were writing news content, automating narrative stories from data-rich topics like sports scores and financial markets. Now, robo-reporters are starting to get scoops. They're not just writing stories; they're breaking them.
Privacy
Back in December, documents revealed the NSA had been using Google's ad-tracking cookies to follow browsers across the web, effectively coopting ad networks into surveillance networks. A new paper from computer scientists at Princeton breaks down exactly how easy it is, even without the resources and access of the NSA. The researchers were able to reconstuct as much as 90% of a user's web activity just from monitoring traffic to ad-trackers like Google's DoubleClick. Crucially, the researchers didn't need any special access to the ad data. They just sat back and watched public traffic across the network.
NSA
Rep. Peter Welch, a Democrat from Vermont, has harsh words for comments that NSA Deputy Director Richard Ledgett made at a recent TED talk. Ledgett said, “President Madison would have been proud” of the process to authorize the NSA’s activities.
Thomas Drake
Thomas Drake will be discussing the spy agency's practices and how they relate to constitutional rights at an event put on by the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute of Politics.
Europe
Recent U.S. criticism will increase the conflict between the U.S. and Europe over NSA spying. The office of the U.S.Trade Representative(USTR) claims that creating an EU-centric system to avoid NSA spying would violate international trade laws.
NETmundial
WikiLeaks has published what the anti-secrecy organization says is the penultimate draft agreement expected to be discussed later this month in Brazil at a global internet governance meeting co-hosted by 12 countries including the United States.
Germany
Germany’s interior ministry reportedly approached the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) last October to ask for the file’s content, amid revelations the NSA had been tapping the Chancellor’s mobile phone, Germany’s The Local said in one of its reports.
Although Edward Snowden has never set foot on German soil—and is unlikely to do so any time soon—he remains a source of high drama for politicians in Berlin.
Holder
Several U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday urged the nation's attorney general to curtail the National Security Agency's collection of overseas electronic communications, saying President Barack Obama's promise to revamp a surveillance program focused on U.S. telephone records didn't go far enough.
Censorship
Reform
David Medine had not been on the job for a week as chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board when The Guardian dropped its first of many bombs supplied by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.
Drones
While Americans debate when and where the United States should use drones to strike at insurgents and terrorists who cannot be reached by other means, they may be overlooking an important trend: the move to supply a targeted killing capability to allied nations. This began when the Bush administration decided to provide technology and advice to help the government of Colombia kill the leaders of its narco-insurgency. Today, the U.S. military is also helping the armed forces of Yemen field systems for the targeted killing of anti-government extremists associated with al-Qaida. This is the beginning of a trend, as more states will field such capabilities, including drones, with or without American help.
The eponymous charge of presidential imperialism, by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. back in 1973, was largely centered on the waging of secret, unilateral war (in Cambodia, say). Such issues were also front and center in the debate over George W. Bush’s claims to executive authority — recall “enhanced interrogations,” the creation of military commissions, surveillance, treaty rights, and the like. And the Obama administration is surely vulnerable to these criticisms. Obama has shown more continuity than change in these areas, embracing a number of Bush-era practices and even pushing past them in some areas, for instance in authorizing the use of drones to kill American citizens overseas and in using military force in Libya without seeking congressional approval. (Bush, by contrast, sought and received legislative sanction for both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.)
A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit challenging the U.S. government’s killing of three Americans in Yemen drone strikes. The case was filed by the families of Samir Khan, Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, his teenage son, Abdulrahman, accusing top U.S. officials of unlawful killings. But on Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer ruled the victims’ constitutional rights were never violated and said the U.S. officials involved cannot be held liable. We get reaction from Maria LaHood, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and one of the attorneys working on Anwar Al-Awlaki’s case. "The courts have abdicated their roles with torture, they’ve abdicated their roles with indefinite detention," LaHood says. "Here we thought finally the courts would uphold the Constitution with the killing of American citizens."
Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, we all believe that government should be transparent and accountable, right?
How should we decide where we stand on a controversial government policy? A crucial first step is to try to establish key facts in the public record.
We also know that the US has eavesdropped on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, even though we don't know yet about the content of her conversations. This eavesdropping scandal could have started a huge diplomatic war between the US and Germany, but in a time when Russia was invading Crimea, these two decided to postpone the crisis for a while. Maybe the US believed this was a good opportunity to remind Germany that its hands are not clean on a number of international issues, too, and that the US knows everything about it. There is a lesson here for Turkey as well.
Snowden
Former President Bill Clinton called Edward Snowden “an imperfect messenger” who, while he leaked critical surveillance information, also began an important national debate on whether technology can interfere with citizen privacy.
“Every person remembers some moment in their life where they witnessed some injustice, big or small, and looked away, because the consequences of intervening seemed too intimidating,” former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden tells Vanity Fair about his motivation for leaking tens of thousands of secret documents. “But there’s a limit to the amount of incivility and inequality and inhumanity that each individual can tolerate. I crossed that line. And I’m no longer alone.”
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA-19) asks Attorney General Eric Holder if the Department of Justice treats third party information like Internet searches similarly to telephone records under the Patriot Act. This exchange occurred during an April 8, 2014, House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing.
Of course, one of the things that's bugged me most of all about the response from NSA defenders is the typical line: "we're not listening to you talk to your grandmother" or whatever similar line may be. But, as more and more revelations have come out, they get closer and closer to the kinds of communications I actually do have on a regular basis. Talking to sources working on interesting technology projects, talking to human rights and civil society groups around the globe. Spying on journalists. Each day there's more and more evidence that while the NSA might not care about some mythical person talking to his or her mythical grandmother, it is very much collecting all sorts of information that those very same people thought were private -- and which clearly have nothing to do with national security.
Europe
Yesterday’s invalidation of the Data Retention Directive opens up the question, what do the government and ISPs do next? Both are in a dubious legal situation now that data retention has no legal basis.
In a judgement issued this morning, the Court of Justice of the European Union opposed itself to the bulk data retention of our online communications by ruling the 2006 European Data Retention Directive invalid. In the midst of the ongoing debate on mass surveillance, this legal decision represents an important step towards regaining our fundamental right to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data.
There was a major victory for privacy rights today when the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that the 2006 Data Retention Directive is invalid on the grounds that it severely interferes with two of our fundamental rights: the right to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data.
Police
After 20 years of battling the US government for use of his family's land, a Nevada rancher’s “one-man range war” may soon end. The family says heavily-armed federal agents have surrounded the ranch as "trespass cattle” are removed from the disputed land.
Police officers generally insist that they are the biggest fans of being recorded. A PoliceOne explainer on how cops can beat a lawsuit that I've highlighted before stresses the important of having footage of an incident that may later be called into question. Video evidence, police instructor Richard Weinblatt wrote, "should actually be welcomed, as the majority of officers do what they are supposed to do and thus will be cleared by the video from any allegations of wrongdoing."
Human Rights
Kathy Kelly’s eyewitness reports from the U.S. War in Afghanistan
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