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.
Lost another post because of spam control, but it won’t stop me because it was about the LA Times article about Michael Hastings investigation of Jill Kelley’s suit against Mossad agent Paula Broadwell – what would have blown her compromising DCI General David Petraeus for the Israelis sky high.
little wonder that the Mossad disposed of Hastings when he, like Jorg Haider, started to revive what it thought it had already disposed of.
Now the question Is:
Is the whole furore over Snowden just a diversion to help distract the media and the public away from the Mossad’s assassination of Hastings because he threatened to destroy a lot in Washington, especially the CIA?
“David Petraeus”
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/03/petraeus-tv-remote/
“But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government and technology officials and outside experts show that, while Prism has attracted the recent attention, the program actually is a relatively small part of a much more expansive and intrusive eavesdropping effort.”
http://www.newser.com/article/da6u8j780/what-makes-prism-work-national-security-agencys-megadata-collection-from-internet-pipeline.html
You will have to type in capitals for him to read/hear the message. Anyone debating Jayne Mansfield and her naked pics is in all probabilities afflicted with hearing loss and eyesight troubles.
Palestinian children tortured, used as shields by Israel: U.N
By Stephanie Nebehay
Thu Jun 20, 2013 12:35pm EDT
GENEVA (Reuters) – A United Nations human rights body accused Israeli forces on Thursday of mistreating Palestinian children, including by torturing those in custody and using others as human shields.
Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, captured by Israel in the 1967 war, are routinely denied registration of their birth and access to health care, decent schools and clean water, the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child said.
“Palestinian children arrested by (Israeli) military and police are systematically subject to degrading treatment, and often to acts of torture, are interrogated in Hebrew, a language they did not understand, and sign confessions in Hebrew in order to be released,” it said in a report.11
/..
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/20/us-palestinian-israel-children-idUSBRE95J0UJ20130620
Terrible.
Sorry I should have checked back. Now that I have, avoiding the usual garbage, I see that the UN Report on Israel’s abuse and ill treatment of Palestinian children had already been posted.
Liam Fox was the after dinner speaker at a Surrey Conservatives gathering tonight. I am afraid I did not have enough courage to gatecrash it carrying a placard saying ‘Where’s Werritty?’.
It was £45 for a ticket or £400 for a table for 10.
A snip in Austerity Great Britain 2013.
THANKS, FEDUP, I’LL KEEP IT IN MIND
IN REGARD TO HASTINGS’ HORRIFIC DEMISE AND THE GUARDIAN, I NOTICE IT HAS NO ACCOUNT OF IT. TOO BUSY POSTING SNOWDEN’S STUFF.
AND FOR THE MEDIA, THERE IS A REVETTING ACCOUNT ABOUT CNN’S HOWARD KURTZ, MOVING TO FOX NEWS.
I’ve just been reading through some of Edward Snowden’s responses to Guardian readers’ comments about him being considered a traitor because of his revelations. This made me laugh.
“Further, it’s important to bear in mind I’m being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-nsa-files-whistleblower#block-51bf34b5e4b0d3c14258337e
“”We can neither confirm nor deny FBI investigative activity,” Ari Dekofsky, a spokeswoman for the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, told U.S. News. “Sometimes that can change, sometimes it can never change.”
http://www.usnews.com/news/newsgram/articles/2013/06/20/wikileaks-journalist-michael-hastings-under-fbi-investigation-before-death
Yeah, we know….policy. What did Snowden say about policy…”it’s like a ratchet that only loosens’
Dare I say it? We are all Hastings, now.
” During the weeks before he was killed in a car crash in Los Angeles, reporter Michael Hastings was researching a story about a privacy lawsuit brought by Florida socialite Jill Kelley against the Department of Defense and the FBI.
Hastings, 33, was scheduled to meet with a representative of Kelley next week in Los Angeles to discuss the case, according to a person close to Kelley. Hastings wrote for Rolling Stone and the website BuzzFeed.
Kelley alleges that military officials and the FBI leaked her name to the media to discredit her after she reported receiving a stream of emails that were traced to Paula Broadwell, a biographer of former CIA director David H. Petraeus, according to a lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., on June 3.”
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-michael-hastings-jill-kelly-case-20130620,0,2559316.story
Ah, yes the Petraeus/McChrystal Junta. I think that originated in Honduras.
Trowbridge, I am convinced Snowden is a genuine whistleblower. The Guardian gets a lot of criticism but since Glenn Greenwald joined it is starting to seem more like the Guardian of old. I’ve written to the editor and thanked him.
She certainly had a radical, Left-wing jihadist history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Kelley
“Jill Kelley was born Gilberte Khawam in Beirut, Lebanon[6] on June 3, 1975. Kelley’s family includes her identical twin sister, Natalie Khawam,[7] a brother, David Khawam, and sister, Caroline.[8] Jill’s parents [9] are Lebanese-American Maronite Catholics who immigrated to the United States from Jounieh, Lebanon in the mid-1970s.[10] Kelley grew up in suburban Philadelphia, where her parents owned a restaurant. Kelley lived in the Philadelphia area until her mid-20s.[11] Kelley attended Arcadia University.[8]
Kelley is married to cancer surgeon Dr. Scott Kelley, and the two live with their three children in Tampa, Florida.[10] Jill Kelley put her medical studies on hold at one point to have a baby.[12] Since moving to Tampa, Kelley has devoted considerable time to community service, both to the local homeless as well as to the large community of servicemen and women in the Tampa area.[13]
In March 2011, she received the Joint Chief of Staff Award for public service for “building positive relationships between the military and the Tampa community”.[14
Trowbridge; You have my respect, and I think you’ve forgotten more than critics will ever learn.
‘no foul-play suspected.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-no-foul-play-suspected-in-michael-hastings-death-lapd-saysd-20130620,0,7630869.story
Flaming June
20 Jun, 2013 – 7:10 am John Pilger. Powerful words Mary Thank-you. I have cast them into the big pond and I will say those words on the radio show.
[Throwing] ..Edward Snowden into that mix because he, too, is an admirer of WikiLeaks. And Hastings’ last article was about the evils of the NSA – which ended with the tantalising line, “Perhaps more information will soon be forthcoming.” Glenn Greenwald Tweeted a link to the piece after Hastings’ death. Of such connections are conspiracy theories made.
In the minds of the highly imaginative, that is.
So what is WikiLeaks trying to say with this Tweet? Is it simply priming us for a revelation about why Hastings was being investigated? Or is it trying to imply that there’s some link between Hastings contacting Jennifer Robinson and the journalist’s death? If so, we might have – in the words of Michael Moynihan – a peg for yet another kind of truther.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100222652/wikileaks-says-michael-hastings-contacted-it-just-before-his-death-are-they-implying-he-was-murdered/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/20/fisa-court-nsa-without-warrant
So sick of those,like bawbag Hague,who parrot the old line “if you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to fear”
Shite.
Exactly what the Nazis and Stasi said-and look where that ended up…
The more i think about this issue the more my mind moves towards the blackmail potential.All these Govt spook agencies and the corporate leviathans are moving beyond the assessing of criminal behaviour into moral judgement.A most worrying development.
e.g.Say I’m having an affair.It’s not illegal but i still want to hide it.These Govt and corporate snoops are validating,therefore,their idea that what is not illegal may still be “wrong”.
Very worrying the turn from potential criminal investigation/snooping into the complex but legal arena of moral matters.
Like i said,dead wrong and very worrying.
I see it all as basically a blackmailers charter and find it extremely sinister.
We all should be very worried about this.Anyone who isn’t is a fool.
History has taught us this repeatedly.
Eric Schmidt of Google is the latest in a long line of crazed authoritarian idiots hammering this line.
Well Eric,i guess the only thing you have to hide is your tax.
What a complete hypocrite and sinister fool.
Mark
there certainly seems to be something in that about Hastings contacting Wikileaks
He claims to have been under observation for almost two years, but contacting Wikileaks, Bastards wont have that
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2345332/Paranoid-Michael-Hastings-told-WikiLeaks-lawyer-investigated-FBI-hours-deadly-car-crash.html
“Michael’s journalistic roots were in the 1970s, in gonzo writers like Hunter S. Thompson who flung their bodies at the story, and often got hurt. He had been badly hurt once: His fiancée was killed in Baghdad in January 2007, when he was a Newsweek reporter there, and her death was still utterly raw to him when he published his first book, I Lost My Love in Baghdad.”
HST lives….huzzah link to follow next post.
”
He cared about his image — he worked out hard, looked good in clothes and in pictures, and enjoyed it — but he always cared more about the story. One day last fall, he had a furious exchange with a spokesman for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. His impulse, and mine, was to print the back-and-forth, the crucial exchange of which was:
Reines: Why do you bother to ask questions you’ve already decided you know the answers to?
Hastings: Why don’t you give answers that aren’t bullshit for a change?
But there was a problem: Michael had not exactly conducted himself as well-mannered professional in the exchange. “You will look,” I pointed out to him, “like an asshole.”
“Everyone knows I’m an asshole,” he said. “The point is that they’re assholes.”
http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/missing-michael-hastings
Nothing I love more than a shite-kicking iconoclast.
Excuse me chaps, but finally got the time for some late replies, as I don’ want to appear to be rude !
@Komodo; “Macky, that is discriminatory against gorillas in bikinis.”
Maybe, but at least I spared everybody the G-String version !
@Sofia; “I have to admit, even in my wildest nightmares that wouldn’t be Dad.”
Seems there are things about your father that you are still yet to discover, poor child !
@Hubbu-Clown; “I, for example, would much prefer the company of Caligula’s horse to yours
Neigh! Neigh!”
Yet another of your peculiar predilections ?;
http://www.kmkz.ro/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/la-vache-qui-rit-kamikaze.jpg
@Villager; “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’.”
My only shame is that when I first encountered you, with all your talk of Krishnamurti, I took you seriously.
Jives
OK. So you’ve decided to have your affair. Much better not to in public unless you are one of those whose main pleasure in the affair is annoying the sensibilities of others. What moral path do you want to go down?
1/ Catholic. Don’t worry Jesus understands, not like the big daddy God upstairs. That’ll be allright you’ll find.
2/ Atheist. Humans are the same as cows. Their lower nature is controlled by hormones which are part of the automated body functions over which the mind has no control.
3/ Shi’a. It’s a temporary marriage
4/ Protestant. This is going to hurt someone, better crank up the lying strength mode to full power.
5/ Sunni. Convert these desires into a combined sexual/spiritual bond which has the potential to survive the death barrier into the next life.
Take your pick and stand by it. The pooper snoopers are there to remind you of your decision, but your decision will probably change with time. My problem is that I don’t always want to be reminded of my own stupidity/weaknesses. But that’s not a problem with being judged, that’s a problem with being reminded, when I’d prefer to move on.
@Cryptonym
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.”
@Villager
Yes Cryptonym agree
Thank you btoh for your kind words. I accept the award and wish to dedicate it to Edward Snowden and the people who post regularly on this blog.
Watched QT last night mainly to see how Russell Brand stood up to the four right wingers, Boris, Jowell, Davey, and Mad Mel Phillips. Quite well.
Melanie Phillips was allowed to have a rant against Iran (destruction of Israel, creating a nuclear bomb, etc) and some prophesy about Shia Muslims bringing about the Apocalypse and the creation of a Shia Messiah. She made the audience angry. It is obvious that people are more aware of the lies they are being fed by the media.
Then ar the end of this segment, this question came from a lady in the audience. It was answered by Boris and swiftly squelched by Dimblebore. Quoted here from a Medialens contributor.
‘Pertinent Israel-related question from audience member quickly trampled over and left behind ignored
Posted by nadimhanbury on June 20, 2013, 11:42 pm, in reply to “Mad Mel….living up to her name and losing it…Iran wiping Israel off the map and all! (nm)”
At the end of the section discussing Syria (and Iran), an audience member very eloquently and politely was (regrettably no doubt) allowed to ask: (sic)
“With the new Iranian president assuring greater transparency of its nuclear programme, dont you think the international community should demand the same of Israel?”
Over to Boris, who knows the score, and he talks for a minute or so just about Iran, then “we have to move on”!
Worth watching for the unspoken pro Zionist teamwork evident between Dimbo and Boris. Brand was looking as if he wanted to speak, but unfortunately didn’t jump in.
About 10 mins from the end, right at the end of discussion of a parliamentary vote on arming Syrian opposition.
Biased in the extreme, as usual on the subject of Israel.’
The Phillips rant is at on 35mins 45secs the player.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b02zc9l5/Question_Time_20_06_2013/
Other subjects discussed, apart from arming Syrian rebels, were drug decriminalisation and the high cost of rents in London.
Archbishop Takes Bung Investigation Shock Horror
Sentamu to resign after he laundered cash for Russian expats?
No, not really, sorry. Wrong chief druid:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/20/yona-metzger-interrogated-israels-chief-rabbi-suspected-of-fraud_n_3473175.html