US surveillance state expands with new rulings

Crescent International

Far from being the shining light on the hill, the US is a police state in which there is no rule of law. The average citizen is not safe from the intrusive conduct of state organs. Even courts have succumbed to the demands of the police state. The latest blow to people's rights was delivered by a federal judge giving the government unfettered right to spy on people through the NSA.

Washington DC,

December 27, 2013, 17:24 EST

In a controversial ruling today (Friday, December 27), a US federal judge said that the NSA spying program does not violate the law. The ruling was delivered on the lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union against James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence.

Despite admitting that the NSA programs exposed by Edward Snowden "vacuums up information about virtually every telephone call to, from, or within the United States," Judge William Pauley decided that there was no evidence that the NSA had used any of the information that it had collected except “investigating and disrupting terrorist attacks”.

According to experts, Pauley’s decision is a victory for the Obama administration, which is likely to take it as a mandate to keep the NSA’s controversial massive surveillance program intact.

Major US media outlets did not give this controversial ruling much exposure; and even if they had, it is doubtful whether the US public would have been able to put up any resistance to the ruling.

Earlier this week, in a Christmas message, Snowden stated: “For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished.” He went on: “I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.”

The US surveillance state won another victory in the courts that will justify its expanding dragnet of surveillance and coercion that whittle away the essential rights of US citizens. Recently, another US judge ruled against the lawsuit pressed by a former student who was detained by federal agents at the Philadelphia International Airport because he was carrying Arabic flashcards.

Nicholas George alleged that the TSA agents violated his First and Fourth Amendment rights when they arrested him as he tried to board a flight from his Philadelphia home to Pomona College in 2009.

George claimed that after the first two officers discovered the cards, they swabbed his person and cell-phone for explosive residue, then called a supervisor. According to George, when the supervisor arrived, she subjected him to aggressive interrogation. Among the questions queried by the law enforcement agent included, “Do you know what language [Osama bin Laden] spoke?” and “Do you see why these cards are suspicious?” This reflects the climate of paranoia and Islamophobia that has been cultivated inside US governmental agencies since 9/11.

Chief Judge Theodore McKee ruled that despite the fact that George clearly had the right to carry the flashcards, the TSA agents were “at the outer boundary” of justifiability in detaining him.

In other words, harassment, discrimination, racial profiling, etc. are acceptable as long as they are in service of the ambiguous, never ending “war on terror.”

Intrusive surveillanceUnited States

Root of Wahhabi Terrorism Traced in ‘King of the Sands’

"King of the Sands", a film by Syrian director Najdat Anzour, is now being shown in Syrian movie theaters after high-level Saudi officials tried to prevent its showing.

The film is a biopic of the founder of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, and is considered as the first film to do so, as the subject has been considered a taboo for Saudis.

The director states that the root cause of the phenomenon of Wahhabi terrorism that is spreading in the entire world can be traced back to the beginnings of the Saud dynasty.

The director says the film is a useful piece of "history revision" that draws on what happened 100 years ago to comment on the "current chaos" in the Arab world.

Source: Al Alam

Who Dares Threaten United Islamic World?

As the Middle East seems engulfed in a never-ending cycle of violence, with further reports of bloodshed coming from Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Bahrain, Iran continues to warn against Israel’s plot to fragment and divide the region to better assert its own hegemonic power and claim victory over its nemesis, Islam. While politicians, experts and analysts continue to look at the Middle East through political lenses, speaking of territorial hegemony and a race for control over natural resources, Iran remains clear-headed in its assessment – while Western powers are looking indeed to control the Middle East’s incommensurable wealth, it is Islam that Israel seeks to destroy under its boots. More dangerous in Israel’s eyes than any political faction could ever be, Islam’s very power, its ability to unite and rally under one flag foreign nations, communities and creeds, is what truly poses a threat to the Israeli regime. Should the Islamic world ever set aside its differences and stand united under one leadership; strong with several billions of men and women, Islam would pose a challenge far too great to any entity or alliance of entities that threaten it. Who then could prevent Palestinians from reclaiming the lands of their forefathers? Who would then dare oppose the calls for justice of a nation whose power and numbers far outweigh any others? Just as Muslims are the world’s over-repressed and -oppressed, stigmatized and branded “terrorists” for daring express their faith, unity would bring salvation for a broken and divided people. A lost island amid the Islamic world, Israel is sowing discord far and wide across the region for its survival depends on it. One has only to look at the war raging against political Islam in the Arab world to understand what really is at stake. The Islamic Republic of Iran, the last bastion of the independent Islamic world, the only nation that to this day continues to defy the United States of America and its master puppet the the Israeli regime has been branded “the axis of evil.” The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which too attempted to defy America by extending a friendly hand to the Hamas – Palestinian faction – saw its leaders imprisoned over fabricated charges of treason, their followers accused of colluding with terrorists. The Hezbollah in Lebanon – a political faction led by Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah – which warned early in 2011 against a crisis in Syria, stressing that foreign hands were at work serving dark terrorist purposes in the region, was scorned by the media for defending and standing shoulder to shoulder with President Bashar al-Assad. Every time an Islamic faction, might it be Shiite or Sunni, has risen against the tide set in motion by Israel, its ideology and message have been systematically torn apart by the propaganda machine, their words twisted and their characters criminalized. Time and time again, the groups and political factions that choose to hold Islam at the base of their ideology have been associated to “terrorism.” It is this association that Israel wants to see endure. It is this trend, which the Tel Aviv regime wants Western psyches to understand as a universal truth. Ali Larijani, an Iranian philosopher, politician and the current chairman of the Parliament of Iran, warned earlier this month against such a ploy on the part of Israel. He stressed, “Muslims should not allow the occupying regime [of Israel] and other enemies of Islam to create discord and rifts in the Muslim world to serve their own interests.” His remark came last Thursday following a car explosion in a Shia-populated district of Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, where a reported 21 people died and over 200 were injured. The attack was meant as a warning to Hezbollah to disengage from Syria where it fighting against foreign-sponsored terrorists. Former Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Araqchi also came out on Thursday to decry the Zionist plot, condemning in the strongest terms possible the “wicked” intervention of Israel in the Levant and its desire to see divided the Muslim Ummah. “The resilient Lebanese people, particularly the Islamic resistance, will definitely thwart the wicked plot by the Zionists and their allies to destabilize Lebanon and provoke divisions among its ethnic groups,” he declared in a statement to the press. In his regional assessment of the situation, Larijani as well saw in the attack against the Muslim Brotherhood the shadowy hand of Israel. He said, “The massacre of [the Egyptian] people has inflicted irreparable damage on Egypt, which has a high position in the Muslim world, and this has fueled concerns about the Egyptian people and the country.” He added, “The global hegemony does not seek to resolve the Egyptian problem, and negotiations are the only solution to the problems that have emerged in this important country.” Since Wednesday, thousands of Egyptians have been slaughtered by the security forces. Unarmed civilians have been seen cornered by the army in mosques and makeshift hospitals, mercilessly executed by the secular anti-Morsi political coalition that Egypt has come to know as the interim government. When reporters uttered the words “religious witch-hunt” and “political cleansing” the government was quick to justify its move by declaring “it will stand fast before the threat of terrorism;” it soon added that the Muslim Brotherhood would be declared an outlaw organization. The Middle East in a state of utter disarray, Israel continues to carry out its nefarious plans for the region. Syria which posed the greatest military threat to Israel has been weakened by two years of war, Egypt, the region’s powerhouse is tittering on the edge of oblivion, staring civil war in the face, and Iraq is battling terrorism. Racked by internal conflicts, no countries in the Middle East can claim to oppose the Zionist hegemony, save Iran, the last bulwark against imperialism. —- Source: Press TV

Why the West Loves Mandela (and Hates Mugabe)

By Stephen Gowans

In the wake of Nelson Mandela’s death, hosannas continue to be sung to the former ANC leader and South African president from both the left, for his role in ending the institutional racism of apartheid, and from the right, for ostensibly the same reason. But the right’s embrace of Mandela as an anti-racist hero doesn’t ring true. Is there another reason establishment media and mainstream politicians are as Mandela-crazy as the left?

According to Doug Saunders, reporter for the unabashedly big business-promoting Canadian daily, The Globe and Mail, there is.

In a December 6 article, “From revolutionary to economic manager: Mandela’s lesson in change,” Saunders writes that Mandela’s “great accomplishment” was to protect the South African economy as a sphere for exploitation by the white property-owning minority and Western corporate and financial elite from the rank-and-file demands for economic justice of the movement he led.

Saunders doesn’t put it in quite these terms, hiding the sectional interests of bond holders, land owners, and foreign investors behind Mandela’s embrace of “sound” principles of economic management, but the meaning is the same.

Saunders quotes Alec Russell, a Financial Times writer who explains that under Mandela, the ANC “proved a reliable steward of sub-Sahara Africa’s largest economy, embracing orthodox fiscal and monetary policies…” That is, Mandela made sure that the flow of profits from South African mines and agriculture into the coffers of foreign investors and the white business elite wasn’t interrupted by the implementation of the ANC’s economic justice program, with its calls for nationalizing the mines and redistributing land.

Instead, Mandela dismissed calls for economic justice as a “culture of entitlement” of which South Africans needed to rid themselves. That he managed to persuade them to do so meant that the peaceful digestion of profits by those at the top could continue uninterrupted.

But it was not Mandela’s betrayal of the ANC’s economic program that Saunders thinks merits the right’s admiration, though the right certainly is grateful. Mandela’s genius, according to Saunders, was that he did it “without alienating his radical followers or creating a dangerous factional struggle within his movement.”

Thus, in Saunder’s view, Mandela was a special kind of leader: one who could use his enormous prestige and charisma to induce his followers to sacrifice their own interests for the greater good of the elite that had grown rich off their sweat, going so far as to acquiesce in the repudiation of their own economic program.

“Here is the crucial lesson of Mr. Mandela for modern politicians,” writes Saunders. “The principled successful leader is the one who betrays his party members for the larger interests of the nation. When one has to decide between the rank-and-file and the greater good, the party should never come first.”

For Saunders and most other mainstream journalists, “the larger interests of the nation” are the larger interests of banks, land owners, bond holders and share holders. This is the idea expressed in the old adage “What’s good for GM, is good for America.” Since mainstream media are large corporations, interlocked with other large corporations, and are dependent on still other large corporations for advertising revenue, the placing of an equal sign between corporate interests and the national interest comes quite naturally. Would we be shocked to discover that a mass-circulation newspaper owned by environmentalists (if such a thing existed) opposed fracking? (Journalists will rejoin, “I say what I like.” But as Michael Parenti once pointed out, journalists say what they like because their bosses like what they say.)

Predictably, Saunders ends his encomium to the party-betraying Mandela, the ‘good’ liberation hero, with a reference to the ‘bad’ south African liberation hero, Robert Mugabe. “One only needs look north to Zimbabwe to see what usually happens when revolutionaries” fail to follow Mandela’s economically conservative path, writes Saunders.

At one point, Mugabe’s predilection for orthodox fiscal and monetary policy was a strong as Mandela’s. Yet after almost a decade-and-a-half of the Western media demonizing Mugabe as an autocratic thug, it’s difficult to remember that he, too, was once the toast of Western capitals.

The West’s love affair with Mugabe came to an abrupt end when he rejected the Washington Consensus and embarked on a fast-track land reform program. Its disdain for him deepened when he launched an indigenization program to place majority control of the country’s mineral resources in the hands of black Zimbabweans.

Mugabe’s transition from ‘good’ liberation hero to ‘bad’, from saint to demon, coincided with his transition from “reliable steward” of Zimbabwe’s economy (that is, reliable steward of foreign investor and white colonial settler interests) to promoter of indigenous black economic interests.

That’s a transition Mandela never made. Had he, the elite of the imperialist world would not now be flocking to South Africa for Saint Mandela’s funeral, overflowing with fulsome eulogies.

From Bahrain to Ukraine: Hail the Western Salesmen of Subversion and Deception

FINIAN CUNNINGHAM

The Manama Dialogue held in Bahrain at the weekend – attended by US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague, among other senior Western officials – is presented with gravitas and self-importance as a forum to «earnestly» discuss «security issues» in the Middle East and beyond.

In reality, the event – held in the Bahraini capital, Manama – is nothing but a talking shop of fake concepts, hollow posturing and boilerplate verbosity. A talking shop, complete with garish window dressing and manikins, to hide the gruesome nature of the real Western political business that goes on in the basement of the oil-rich region.

Like the general position of Washington and London towards the Persian Gulf Arab regimes, the Manama Dialogue is all about selling propaganda and deception to cover the most brutal facts of life, sold with the guise of genial, virtuous vendors.

One of these brutal facts is that the Western governments are fully complicit in the repression of their Persian Arab clients against their own people. Another brutal fact is that it is Western governments and their Persian Arab clients who are fuelling insecurity and violence across the Middle East, as in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, by covertly supporting extremist regime-change mercenaries, such as Al Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant, both of which are linked to Al Qaeda.

Yet another brutal fact is that the Persian Gulf is one of the most militarized and insecure locations in the world, partly because of Western support for illicitly nuclear-armed Israel, and partly because of reckless weapons sales by America and Britain to the tinderbox region. 

Nevertheless, senior representatives of the war-dealing Western states have the audacity to address a conference in the region on «peace and security».

Like a parallel universe, speakers and delegates were ensconced in a plush hotel by their Bahraini hosts to hold forth on democracy, rule of law and terrorism. Meanwhile, a few kilometres away from the venue, the Western-backed Bahraini regime was deploying its riot police to club and gas peaceful pro-democracy supporters. The protesters were trying to exercise their universal right to freedom of peaceful assembly and expression – the same human rights that Washington and London repeatedly declare they are champion retailers of.

These rights have been systematically denied to Bahraini civilians for the past three years (and before) by the US and British-backed absolute monarchy in Bahrain.  Since February 2011, when the pro-democracy movement rekindled in the Persian Gulf kingdom, regime forces have killed nearly 100 civilians, some of whom died under torture during detention; hundreds have been maimed with grotesque injuries, such as the loss of eyes and limbs from shot gun pellets; infants and elderly have been poisoned in their homes from the deliberate, excessive use of tear gas; and thousands of families have been plunged into misery because fathers and sons have been locked up in jails without a semblance of due legal process.  All this barbarity is done with the tacit support of Washington and London, and with the shameful indifference of the Western news media.

For a tiny population of only 600,000 native Bahrainis (an expatriate foreign worker population is of the same size) the toll of brutality and suffering inflicted by the Khalifa regime has been immense. And in this fierce assault on the mainly Shia population, the Bahraini rulers have been fully assisted by Saudi Arabia, which sent troops into the neighbouring island back in March 2011 to crush the pro-democracy demonstrations. Saudi troops have remained in Bahrain ever since – albeit covertly, by donning Bahraini uniforms. Washington and London are fully apprised of the situation. In fact, it was the US and Britain that gave the green light to the House of Saud to embark on the crushing of protests in Bahrain, just as the Saudi rulers have been doing in their own Eastern Province and other parts of that oil-rich kingdom.

It is instructive to compare and contrast what is happening in the Ukraine and the official Western response. The protests in Kiev have evidently been driven by a determined minority, using violent and organized subversion, and calling for the overthrow of the elected authorities.  This is not the exercise of international human rights, as in Bahrain; in the case of the Ukraine, it is a call to sedition.

Furthermore, the agitating groups in the Ukraine, such as the Fatherland Party and the neo-fascist Freedom Party, are known to have well-established logistical links to foreign agencies that are committed to fomenting regime change in targeted nations. These agencies include the American CIA and the benign-sounding National Endowment for Democracy. Certainly, the methodical tactics of disruption deployed recently against government buildings in Kiev strongly imply a covert military input…

To upbraid the Ukrainian state for responding with a heavy-hand in the face of this wanton subversion against its sovereign authority, as Western governments have charged, is at best naive and at worst blatant propaganda to distort the real situation.

Apparently, innocent civilian bystanders were caught up in the melee and incurred injuries. There were, however, no deaths, and Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov later issued a public apology for police conduct. Since the height of the commotion a week ago, the demonstrations in the Ukrainian capital have subsided. This pattern again implies that the protests and public were manipulated for an ulterior agenda – an agenda that was not merely about expressing dissent against the government’s EU rejection, but rather was more sinister in scope, namely to destabilize the state.

The contrast with Bahrain could hardly be more lucid. Here the «authorities» are an unelected regime comprised largely of one family – the al Khalifas, headed by a self-appointed king, Hamad bin Issa al Khalifa. His hereditary successor will be his eldest son, Crown Prince Salman. The Bahraini regime rules by absolute decree with the guise of a consultative «parliament» that is «elected» through a heavily gerrymandered process.

The Bahraini regime and its foreign supporters – Washington, London and Saudi Arabia – have claimed that the largely peaceful pro-democracy protests are manipulated by foreign agents. It is claimed that these agents include Shia Iran and the Lebanese resistance movement, Hezbollah. The US and British governments do not reiterate this too often or loudly because they know full well that the accusation is an utter figment of imagination. There is not an iota of evidence for the involvement of Iran, Hezbollah or any other foreign agency in the Bahraini demonstrations. These protests have been sustained for nearly three years simply by the civilian population’s own desire to have the right to democratically elect a government, rather than being lorded over by a corrupt and venal crony family racket. 

Unlike the Ukraine, Bahrain is a simple and straightforward case of democracy being brutally denied to a civilian population that has remained peaceful despite relentless provocation from an unelected regime.

The double standards and hypocrisy of the Western governments and the mainstream news media as shown by the differing response to events in the Ukraine and Bahrain is glaring. A short-lived bid to sow chaos in the Ukraine by a provable foreign-backed subversion against an elected government is given the highest profile by Western governments and media as «a noble bid for democracy against an autocratic regime». Whereas in Bahrain, a sustained pro-democracy movement by unarmed, peaceful civilians against a brutal, unelected autocrat is, well, simply ignored by the West.

Indeed, Bahrain is not merely ignored by the West. It is indulged and tacitly backed to the hilt by Washington and London.  The attendance of such prominent figures as Chuck Hagel and William Hague at the Manama Dialogue in Bahrain at the weekend – during which they spouted platitudes about security, democracy and rule of law – is the US and British government’s way of reassuring the Bahraini and Saudi regimes of their ongoing support to crush democracy. 

Meanwhile, Chuck Hagel announced during the weekend forum that the US has no intention of scaling back its military presence (read: arms sales) in the Persian Gulf despite the recent diplomatic detente with Iran. «Diplomacy, must be backed up with military power,» Hagel told delegates. The Pentagon chief also disclosed that the US was going ahead with the sale of 15,000 anti-tank missiles to Saudi Arabia worth $1 billion. These missiles will probably end up in the hands of Al Qaeda militants waging a war of terror against Syria for the Western-backed objective of regime change in that country.  Ironically, and ludicrously, the British Foreign Secretary William Hague warned delegates that «extremists» operating in Syria (with the covert support of the US, Britain and Saudi Arabia among others) present a grave security threat to the Middle East region and Europe.

Outside the Manama conference, where peaceful protesters were having their heads cracked open by Bahraini riot police, one banner held up by the crowd read: «Why do Western governments not support calls for democracy in Bahrain?»

What a cruel joke. Western governments do not support democracy in Bahrain – or anywhere else for that matter – because they make money from oil and arms sales by supporting dictatorships, and from crushing and subverting democracy. Bahrain and the Ukraine are just two examples of the general concept. Despite their polished and preening rhetoric, Washington and London are nothing but the salesmen for subversion and deception.