GCHQ and the NSA between them employ tens of thousands of people. I am bemused by the shock at the “revelation” they have been spying. What on Earth did journalists think that spies do all day? That includes electronics spies.
Since Katherine Gun revealed that we spy on other delegations – and the secretariat – within the UN building, it is hardly a shock that we spy on other governments at summits in the UK. For once, the government cannot pretend that the object is to save us all from terrorism, which is the usual catch all excuse. Nor in the real world is any of the G20 nations a military threat to the UK. The real truth of the matter is that our spies – GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 – are themselves a large and highly influential interest block within the state. Lots of people make a great deal of money out of the security state, and this kind of activity is actually simply an excuse for taking money from taxpayers – which is from everyone who has ever bought anything – and giving that money to the “security industry”.
I do not view spying on other governments as quite as despicable as spying on ordinary citizens, which is an unspeakable betrayal of the purpose of government. Spying on other governments is a game they all play to extort money each to their own security elites. But I will say that spying on the South African government seems pretty low. Why?
Interception of diplomatic communications is plainly a gross breach of the Vienna Conventions, even if the forms of communication have changed since they were drafted. I have never studied the particulars of international law as they relate to spying, but it seems to me an area that in the modern world needs regulation. There must be room here for the UN to be involved in preparing a Convention to outlaw the interception of international communications, with recourse to the International Court of Justice for those victim of it.
There is more work for the UN on Syria. We should all be grateful that Russia is holding out against the very dubious western claims that the Syrian government has deployed chemical weapons. But while Obama can declare all the red lines he wishes, they do not give any country a right to take action on Syrian soil without UN authority. That needs to be restated, strongly. There is no basis at all for the continued and massive Israeli attacks on Syria – they are absolutely illegal. Israeli strikes have definitely killed more people than the alleged deaths from chemical weapons. Can someone explain to me why that is not a red line?
The UN Secretary General should be speaking out, and the UN Security Council should be meeting, to discuss the Israeli attacks on Syria. The system of international law has broken down irretrievably.
@ Komodo
Last one before I hop off.
“Oh, dear. What’s he trying to divert us from now?
This, maybe?
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/20/us-palestinian-israel-children-idUSBRE95J0FR20130620
Palestinian children in the Gaza and the West Bank,….”
_________________
Correct, it was a cunning plot to divert people’s attention from something which you hadn’t posted.
Chump!
Please don’t tell me the subject of your next post lest I divert attention from it before you post.
“but I just can’t imagine the chief troll as a “her” myself.)”
Sure you can;
http://www.picturevip.com/x/clean/images/2013/06/18/cxJX8.jpg
(If I were a betting man, I lay odds that the Habbu-Clown is of a similar inclination !)
Well when the conversation dries up, ye olde thread is revisited; The out of topic comments.
Seeing as this blog is now subject to hosting the wannabe PHD researchers, whose remit is so focused that will not allow for any deviation from the subject at hand otherwise which can cost humongous amounts of time and money!
There are those who take themselves really seriously around here, thank crunchie they are not the blog owners. will these guys write in green pen to the BBC and Sky complaining about the flighty news readers mixing all manner of stuff together? Then there are the papers, these too mix up all the topic under the sun, but hey Mary did not write or broadcast any of them did she?!
Mary keep up the good work, and damn the moaners, they each have their own axe to grind, and their senior moments are getting more and more of an apparent trend.
PS Komodo I have not the time to respond to your question regards the DV issue, we are both on the same page-ish. However, as you have mentioned the perpetrators can be from either gender and the results equally terrible, hence the evident bias against males ought not overlook the female bullies who are busy abusing their men folk. Hopefully we can revisit this issue when there is enough time for both of us.
But I did post it, and you quoted it. Have you flushed your meds down the toilet again?
I’m posting this link, here.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/351208/irs-vs-pro-israel-groups-eliana-johnson
There. See what I did? I posted it. Now you can distract attention from it. Fine.
Fascinating story, though.
The IRS’s practices as described by Muthert touch on a political debate that has been raging in the United States and Israel since 2009. That’s when Washington Post columnist David Ignatius noted that opponents of Israeli settlements were fighting against tax exemption for groups that raise charitable contributions for organizations that support Israeli settlements. “Critics of Israeli settlements question why American taxpayers are supporting indirectly, through the exempt contributions, a process that the government condemns,” Ignatius wrote.
On March 27, 2009, the day after Ignatius’s article appeared, the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) filed a spate of administrative complaints with the Treasury Department and the IRS, alleging that pro-Israel groups raising funds for settlements in the West Bank were supporting “illegal and terrorist activities abroad.” Later that year, in October, the ADC said that it was waging an ongoing legal campaign against the IRS for what the ADC regarded as violations of the tax code by some pro-Israel groups.
Macky, that is discriminatory against gorillas in bikinis.
We have not heard any of the ziofuckwit claim “the shitty little strip of land” is the only democracy in the mid east, Asia, the planet, the solar system, they galaxy, the universe, and ever, and ever! If anyone does not agree then they are antisomits and stuff.
Fucking pitiful to get kids who lack any education to sign an official document in foreign. How low these crazy ziofuckwits will stoop?
Habba 3 07pm
Dad!
Go easy on the sherry will you and when your hand’s steady enough check this…..
@Komodo
20 Jun, 2013 – 2:49 pm
Komodo, you Chump! Fancy not posting stuff you’ve already posted. How can anyone ever take you seriously again?
OOps. Sorry Komodo I see you already dealt with it.
that’s the first time I’ve seen dad come up with genuine information. Funny how it was information counter to everything he’s ever promoted on these threads. But he obviously thought that was a price worth paying to make himself look cleverer than you. Even better that the lazy old fool hadn’t read your earlier post.
And in the meantime
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/20/us-palestinian-israel-children-idUSBRE95J0FR20130620
gets a really good bit of exposure. Genius!
Who’s the Chump now!
Steady on old chap, what gorillas have done, for you to insult the poor things in the most egregious fashion?
Those images shocked me, I say shocked me, I tell you shocked me, in a nasty sort of way, I was not expecting anything like that, but then I saw the funny side of it, but still I am in shock, the ugly guy who has posed for these pics.
“He still isn’t convinced that Hastings was in his Benz which exploded and burned early Tuesday morning, and won’t be sure for weeks”
Nor should he be. The body in the car was so badly burned it was unidentifiable. DNA analysis takes a fair while.
@Macky 3 08pm
Now that’s just plain scary! But kinda funny.
I have to admit, even in my wildest nightmares that wouldn’t be Dad.
LOL
I always say that Her Maj becomes very animated around horses. Especially so today as she picks up £198,000+ for winning the Gold Cup with a horse called Estimate that the Aga Khan gave her for her 80th birthday.
The total prize money for the ‘meeting’ is over £10 million. All the toads were crawling round her. Her son, the arms salesman, gave her the prize.
Raise the flags. Ring out the bells. It’s Austerity Great Britain, 2013.
If you were a betting man/woman/gorilla, what would you say were the odds for that being a genuine car accident?
Now that’s genuinely scary.
SAMs from No Man’s Island, Jives. Another honest mistake by the spooks.
Just lost another post by allegedly getting thee CAPTCHA check wrong, and redoing it a few times accomplished nothing.
Coroners should increasingly be establishing what occurred too – e.g., an apparent murder, an accident,etc., as assassinations are increasingly made to look like accidents or suicides.
Look what happened in the Kelly and Ivens cases. Brutal murders were made out to look like suicides, thanks to delays coroners engaged in. They both were rumored to be some kind of terrorist attack, and then the coroners settled for suicides.
I think that the Mossad carried have arranged all three murders, i.e., getting a kidon which had moored on The Thames the fatal night to get rid of Kelly, it could have gotten a Las Vegas hitman to kill Ivens who an FBI agent then killed in a stakeout, and then it got agents who knew of the auto wiring which killed Haider to do in Hastings.
We live in a world suffering from crackpot realism aka cognitive dissonance.
Craig ran a blog-post on the fate and deportation from Cambodia of Gottfrid Swartholm Warg the Pirate Bay founder. The details of his arrest were alarming.
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2012/09/gottfrid-svartholm-warg-charged-again-in-sweden/
Unfortunately he, and another Swede, have been found guilty. He has been sentenced to two years in prison, a long time for a young man who has arguably done little wrong.
http://www.thelocal.se/48616/20130620/
Poor Trowbridge. Still hasn’t worked out how to use the intergoogle as a mass dissemination means for half-baked, fruit-pie ramblings.
Listen up, old-fella :
1. Type up your kooky comment using notepad or similar text editor. Select the text you wrote in the editor and copy to clipboard.
2. Go to Craig’s blog and hit “refresh”. Make sure you’re on the right thread this time.
3. Quickly paste your comment in the big white box (no jokes please) and enter your answer to Jon’s mathematical brain-teaser. Press “Submit Comment”.
4. Select previous tab titled “Naked Jane Mansfield pics”, right click and select “close”.
4. Go to window and look out, discreetly, for any sign of suspicious activity that might be NSA related eg pizza van.
5. Make a cup of tea and think about Jane Mansfield.
Hope that helps.
6. Double check that you didn’t enter a number twice.
7. Turn on tellie, watch Matlock.
8. Press backspace several times and retype tellie.
@ Komodo:
Terribly sorry, I hadn’t realised that you’d already posted that link to the Reuters article on the abuse of Palestinian children BEFORE your post at 14h49.
Could you just indicate exactly when you posted it previously?
Thanks!
Flaming June informs us as follows :
“I always say that Her Maj becomes very animated around horses.”
_____________
No problem with that, surely?
She probably prefers the company of horses to that of a lot of the human beings she meets.
I can sympathize with her.
I, for example, would much prefer the company of Caligula’s horse to yours
Neigh! Neigh!
How they Hide things. Here’s a graph showing the public’s perception of Iraqi deaths. Shocking
http://medialens.org/images/stories/ComRes_graphic_Melanie_Patrick_revised.jpg
Dreoilin
“We are all potential suspects now..”
Or, in regard to mass spying, we are all potential victims of being framed.
Suhayl
Just thinking about the guano mountain covered in millions of creatures like HalfCockRoach who resides ibidem.
If the cockroaches/trolls weren’t constantly eating the truth/ incisive comments the mountain of truth would get too big for the cave.
In this perfect, balanced symbiosis/co-existence between satire and sentimentality, if there were no truth-seekers, trolls would find no food.
Thanks, Jemand, but seems simpler just to write the post here, and then hope for the best with the CAPTCHA number to defeat the spam.
Hope you get the hang of cruising now through the internet, so that you can soon write something relevant to what is being discussed here.
I have it reliably that ‘Sofia Zabolotna-Habbercake’ and ‘Kibo Noh’ are sock-puppets. Watch one of them gloves fall away soon enough.
@BrianFujisan 5:33 pm
What a simple but powerful graphic!
Doesn’t it just show how effective the propaganda has been.
That image needs to adorn the sides of buses and tube stations.
http://medialens.org/images/stories/ComRes_graphic_Melanie_Patrick_revised.jpg
“Macky
20 Jun, 2013 – 3:08 pm
“but I just can’t imagine the chief troll as a “her” myself.)”
Sure you can;
http://www.picturevip.com/x/clean/images/2013/06/18/cxJX8.jpg
(If I were a betting man, I lay odds that the Habbu-Clown is of a similar inclination !)”
——
Macky, i’m surprised that you have no shame in letting people into your deep inner imaginings. But then even great students of history can have bad taste. And, of course, you are conditioned by the Internet Age where ‘everything goes’.
I wish to nominate the KingofWelshNoir for some sort of award for the delightful phrase “where there is a chasm between the cruel things the west does and the way they are laundered and perfumed by such organs as the BBC.”
🙂
Yes Cryptonym agree, very well articulated. Thanks for highlighting. Let’s call it the ZOOKD award. Where’s Glenn?