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.
Former UNOCAL charge hand is taking himself far too seriously these days. His capitulation and his “requirements” have already been met. The flag pole has been shortened so that the Taliban flag is not seen from without the high walled compound, and the the name plate; “Emirate of Afghanistan” has been removed from the outside wall and fixed to the inner walls of the compound.
US clearly has “won” his war too, as US has won every other war that its military has fought!
BBC London News have just interviewed the Tommy Robinson/EDL character about their forthcoming planned march in Woolwich. Was this a subtle way of giving them airtime and publicity? Geller is coming from the US to speak.
This is a report on the plans from another source .
http://www.london24.com/news/crime/call_to_ban_right_wing_speakers_from_edl_woolwich_march_1_2246357
and the Independent on Vaz’s objections.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/rightwing-american-speakers-planning-to-join-the-edls-woolwich-march-should-be-banned-from-entering-the-country-8668686.html
Elise Jordan, Journalist and widow of Hastings strikes back, but about NYT’s words about McChrystal?
Where is her statement wrt her husband’s odd ‘accident”? Why was he speeding at 4:30 am on city streets; someone with a safe driving record?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/19/michael-hastings-wife_n_3469095.html
Good grief, people, read this. Plans to undermine Greenwald included:
http://www.thenation.com/article/174851/strange-case-barrett-brown#axzz2Ws0B2bYh
Embedded center-story is this highlighted in RED, folks; nothing to see here. Move along.
STORY: Car Experts on Michael Hastings’ Crash: No Reason to Suspect Foul Play
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/michael-hastings-crash-site-memorialized-573315
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HBGary
“In 2010, Aaron Barr, CEO of HBGary Federal, alleged that he could exploit social media to gather information about hackers.[3]
In early 2011, Barr claimed to have used his techniques to infiltrate Anonymous,[3][12][13] partly by using IRC, Facebook, Twitter, and by social engineering.[3][14] His e-mails depict his intention to release information on the identities of Anonymous members at the B-Sides conference and to sell it to possible clients,[3][15] including the FBI.[16] In the e-mails, Barr explained that he identified his list of suspected Anonymous “members” by tracing connections through social media, while his main programmer criticized this methodology.[3][17] In a communiqué, Anonymous denied association with the individuals that Barr named.[18][third-party source needed]”
Technicolour; It seems the paranoia about the intentions of sock-puppets has some justification.
Flaming June (16h10)is angry with the BBC :
“Quite Mike. Not a peep on this atrocity from the BBC. I can only find it reported in the Independent and the NYT”
__________
Had this happened in the UK, do you think French radio and television would be peeping about it?
And how many French newspapers would mention it?
@ Flaming June aka Mary :
“BBC London News have just interviewed the Tommy Robinson/EDL character about their forthcoming planned march in Woolwich. Was this a subtle way of giving them airtime and publicity?”
__________
No.
What is so strange about a radio station serving London reporting on something that will take place in London?
Had the report not been made, you’d probably be suspecting the BBC of trying to ignore or suppress mention of the event.
Ben, tried to post this but the site crashed. I don’t think we’re allowed to be paranoid anymore. It’s mostly real. Only reading Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail recently has cheered me any. On which note, Matt Taibbi, I realise, is a good thing, in the Hunter tradition, not a rip, as I erroneously assumed.
But trolls, chah 🙂
“We are in touch with Snowden frequently, and we are involved in the process of brokering his asylum in Iceland,” Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said on a Wednesday press conference call.”
http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/06/19/assange-wikileaks-brokering-asylum-for-snowden/
Tech; If you liked F&L on Campaign trail, you should read (Great Shark hunt, I think) where he ran for Sheriff in Aspen Colorado. It’s a hoot.
He lost of course, but created a furor with his campaign platform.
One of the planks was to change the name Aspen to ‘FAT CITY’ to stave off the developers.
He shaved his head so he could refer to the other candidate as ‘My long-haired opponent’.
As per usual the troll attempts two diversions.
1. The main point is that a pregnant MUSLIM woman was attacked in Paris which was a cruel, racist and SERIOUS matter.
The BBC is quite capable of reporting TRIVIAL stories from France.
ie Monsieur Depardieu is drunk in charge of a scooter.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23001269
2. BBC London News is a TV station not a radio station as anyone who lived in the UK would know. The main point is that the racists of the EDL are bent on creating hate and friction against Muslims and Geller will aid the process.
See Craig’s posts on Geller ref Breivik.
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2011/07/who-funded-breivik/
and three others:
Why the Mainstream Media is Doomed
by craig on Jul 26th 2011
Laziness. Sloth will kill the mainstream media. All those well-paid journalists resting their fat bottoms on padded office chairs will become extinct as a breed, victims of their own inability to raise a sweat, just like the poor old dodo. On Saturday, when I posted on Brevik’s links to Pamela Geller, a google advanced search […]
Is Anders Breivik in This Photograph?
by craig on Jul 25th 2011
This 2009 rally in Oslo was attended by Breivik’s heroine, Pamela Geller. On Saturday I posted about the comments Breivik made on Geller’s Atlas Shrugs website. There is a fuller analysis on the impact of the Tea Party on Breivik’s thinking here. It turns out that Breivik also references Geller’s Atlas Shrugs blog and a […]
Norwegian Killer Linked to Tea Party and EDL
by craig on Jul 23rd 2011
Anders Behring Breivik posted links to the Atlas Shrugs website of the Tea Party’s Pamela Geller. Here you can see him under the name of Anders Behring (his middle name) posting links to Geller’s “Atlas Shrugs” site. That cache page is bing translated from Norwegian. Here is a video of Pamela Geller addressing the Tennessee […]
But of course, the troll would be unaware of these posts being absent from this blog then unless……
Technicolour, that is alarming, especially the report on one jerk wanting to render Abdelbaset al Megrahi, who was dying from cancer, after he was released from prison on compassionate grounds (rather than let him face a retrial in which he would certainly have been acquitted). Today nobody thinks al Megrahi had anything to do with the Lockerbie plane crash of Pan Am 103 but there are a lot who would want you to think that, like David Cameron and Ed Miliband, for example.
Ben, and he nearly won – except the other two parties leagued against him. me, I think his promise to ‘only take mescaline when not on duty’ pretty funny, but kind of wish he’d got to stand on a more angry & serious note as he was promising to do in F&LOTCT.
John Goss: actually I found the hounding & persecution of a good journalist doing an arguably vital job (and the persecution of his mother) rather more unsettling – it is actually happening as I type? but it shows the calibre, I agree.
and Geller is being invited to address the EDL rally in Woolwich next week. Oh brave new world. I’m posting this because it’s clever, courageous, stirring and funny (if a bit mean to the EDL members who haven’t had a chance to think it through: still, it might help them too): Mitch Benn ‘There are things worth rioting about right now’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9oSoOeKtVQ
@ Flaming June aka Mary
You’re being as dishonest as usual, but also sillier than usual.
Let’s look at your latest offering.
1/. “As per usual the troll attempts two diversions.”
Wrong. These are two posts in response to two posts of yours which, as usual, have nothing to do with the subject of this thread (Dreoilin – please note and add to your list of O/Ts!)
2/. “The main point is that a pregnant MUSLIM woman was attacked in Paris which was a cruel, racist and SERIOUS matter.”
If that was the point, why did you not just leave it at that? What did your dig at the BBC and the British press add to your point?
3/. “BBC London News is a TV station not a radio station as anyone who lived in the UK would know. The main point is that the racists of the EDL are bent on creating hate and friction against Muslims and Geller will aid the process.”
So that’s your “MAIN POINT”, is it? In which case, you expressed it in a singularly curious way in your post at 18h42 which, I would recall, read as follows :
“BBC London News have just interviewed the Tommy Robinson/EDL character about their forthcoming planned march in Woolwich. Was this a subtle way of giving them airtime and publicity? Geller is coming from the US to speak”
I had the impression that your “main point” was to suggest that the BBC was deliberately giving the EDL airtime and publicity.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You must really decide what your “main point” is when you’re posting and once you have done so, state it clearly and resist the temptation to garnish it with silly little digs reflecting your usual obsessions.
“Technicolour, that is alarming, especially the report on one jerk wanting to render Abdelbaset al Megrahi, who was dying from cancer, after he was released from prison on compassionate grounds (rather than let him face a retrial in which he would certainly have been acquitted). Today nobody thinks al Megrahi had anything to do with the Lockerbie plane crash of Pan Am 103 but there are a lot who would want you to think that, like David Cameron and Ed Miliband, for example.”
I did a bit of research into this and there is little doubt in my mind that Megrahi was guilty as hell. However it seems that the Lockerbie bombing probably wasn’t one of the things he was guilty of.
I think there should be a public enquiry. It’s looking like another case of the Scottish legal system being rotten to the core. The Crown Office is entirely politically motivated and with moves afoot to undermine hundreds of years of Scottish legal tradition by removing the necessity for corroboration we could well end up with some Scottish Julian Assanges.
Ex kibbutznik Rachel Johnson reviews old times at the Kibbutz with brother Boris. She wears blinkers.
She should have tried the diet in Gaza to compare it with what Ottolenghi offers.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-2305291/Holidays-Israel-Rachel-Johnson-returns-land-brother-Boris-kibbutz-workers.html
‘But first, there was something I could do this March I couldn’t in 1984 – explore the Golan Heights, which was then a, um, lively war zone.
The Golan is calmer now, though its status is still in dispute (I discovered it depends who you ask). White Jeeps of the UN still buzz about and there are several Israeli Defence Force army bases, not to mention lines of tank emplacements, but don’t let that put you off.’
Not quite so calm at the moment eh Rachel?
And not a mention of checkpoints, settlements, separation walls, the Palestinian men, women and children. Perhaps they were all invisible.
~~
If the troll even thinks that I am going to engage in one of his pointless circular exchanges, he has another think coming. He can go hang.
Meanwhile…La vita per i Palestinesi non è buona.
Mary, with all best wishes, perhaps you should either address him, politely, as I’m sure you would like to be addressed, or ignore him altogether. No-one would mind, either way.
Trigger happy and accountable to nobody.
From Le Monde, Google Translate
http://www.lemonde.fr/proche-orient/article/2013/06/21/jerusalem-un-garde-tue-un-visiteur-juif-au-mur-des-lamentations_3433998_3218.html
A private Israeli security guard killed, Friday, June 21, an Israeli Jewish visitor to the Wall of Lamentation of Jerusalem, taking him for a Palestinian militant, police said.
The Visitor “for some unknown reason, shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ [God is the greatest, in Arabic],” said a spokesman for the police. “A security guard drew his weapon and fired several shots at the suspect, who died of his injuries.”
The incident occurred shortly before 8 am, while the square in front of the wall was filled with faithful for the morning prayer on the eve of Shabbat, the weekly day of rest for the Jews. The security guard told the police investigators that he thought the man, aged 46, was trying to take something from his pocket and shouted “Allah Akbar” and he was about of the attack, according to public radio. The radio added that the police had found nothing suspicious on the body of the victim.
FRENCH PARENTS
The police, who announced the opening of an investigation, said the circumstances of the incident were not yet clear. “We look at the past of the officer who opened fire and motives” of the man killed by the keeper. “This is a very odd behavior,” said the spokesman Micky Rosenfeld police.
“Well-known figure” of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, according to his knowledge, the victim worked as a volunteer at a soup kitchen organized by the Chabad Hasidic movement. “He lives here alone, his parents are in France,” said David Dahan, without specifying whether it also has the French nationality.
According to the private channel 10, witnesses assured that the guard had shot between seven and ten bullets, and that the shooting was unjustified, the target seemed to be a harmless eccentric with psychiatric problems. Citing witnesses, the Ynet website reported that there had been no warning shots or attempt to control, and the guard shot him directly in the chest.
The rabbi of the Western Wall has expressed deep sorrow over the incident. “Whatever the circumstances, it is a tragedy,” he said. This wall is the most important of Judaism, the last vestige of the Second Temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD Shrine. It is located beneath the Temple Mount, the third holiest site in Islam, making the site one of the most sensitive places in Jerusalem, with frequent clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security forces.
Maariv Friday identified several cases of killings in recent months by members of private security companies in a country where the number of weapons in circulation is very important. “Three months ago, a security guard for 52 years has been accused of having shot and killed his wife […] In the same month, there was another shocking incident in Haifa Bay (north) when…………
You must be joking Technicolour. Days ago I was being called an old biddy by him and there were similar insults previously.
Thanks Mary for the data on the Golan, and also the poor Muslim woman in Paris. Fact that the West seems to have found its new untermensch in Muslims, has never been so starkly evident. The poor woman is kicked in the stomach and her unborn infant murdered in the way of stopping the “Muslim infestation”. This is born by the fact that no one gives a shit about such a inhuman and barbaric conduct of the so called “civilised” Europeans, the mejdia is pretty much neutral about it all.
Also address the ziofuckwits any which way you like, this notion of tolerating these crazy tweets is the stuff of the masochism, you don’t have to tolerate these tossers if you don’t wish to do so!
Strange isn’t it that the leader of the English Defence League isn’t English but Irish. Stranger too that ‘Tommy Robinson’ isn’t his real name. Strange that the BBC didn’t think to ask why he uses a false name; stranger still that the EDL mostly carry Zionist ‘Star of David’ flags, the personal sign and seal of the Rothschild family, adopted as the flag of the Zionist terrorist’s religious supremacist failed state. It’s a funny old world as they say.
I wonder if there are many membership overlaps between the armed forces or police officers and the EDL’s followers, as there were with the BNP membership, where also there were some intriguing overlaps too with middling trade union officialdom at factory shop/steward level and in cushy make-work jobs in major defence contractor sites dotted around the country.
No. I’m not joking, Mary. I think either you could address the points or ignore them.
Sorry, that sounds as though the points were all valid. I just think that addressing ‘the troll’, as you put it, is in danger of perpetuating a dynamic.
http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2013/06/19/podcast-show-112-nsa-whistleblower-goes-on-record-reveals-new-information-names-culprits/
Here’s the transcript;
“Tice: Okay. They went after — and I know this because I had my hands literally on the paperwork for these sort of things — they went after high-ranking military officers; they went after members of Congress, both Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence committees and on the armed services committees and some of the — and judicial. But they went after other ones, too. They went after lawyers and law firms. All kinds of–heaps of lawyers and law firms.
They went after judges. One of the judges is now sitting on the Supreme Court that I had his wiretap information in my hand. Two are former FISA court judges.
They went after State Department officials. They went after people in the executive service that were part of the White House–their own people. They went after antiwar groups.
They went after U.S. international — U.S. companies that that do international business, you know, business around the world. They went after U.S. banking firms and financial firms that do international business.
They went after NGOs that — like the Red Cross, people like that that go overseas and do humanitarian work. They went after a few antiwar civil rights groups.
So, you know, don’t tell me that there’s no abuse, because I’ve had this stuff in my hand and looked at it…
Interviewer: Now Russ, the targeting of the people that you just mentioned, top military leaders, members of Congress, intelligence community leaders and the — oh, I’m sorry, it was intelligence committees, let me correct that — not intelligence community, and then executive branch appointees. This creates the basis, and the potential for massive blackmail.
Tice: Absolutely! And remember we talked about that before, that I was worried that the intelligence community now has sway over what is going on.
Now here’s the big one. I haven’t given you any names. This was is summer of 2004. One of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a bunch of numbers associated with, with a 40-something-year-old wannabe senator from Illinois. You wouldn’t happen to know where that guy lives right now, would you? It’s a big white house in Washington, DC. That’s who they went after. And that’s the president of the United States now.”
Stranger too that ‘Tommy Robinson’ isn’t his real name.
He explains that this is because of death threats.
Strange that the BBC didn’t think to ask why he uses a false name;
Yes, but covered on Andrew Neill’s show, of all places
stranger still that the EDL mostly carry Zionist ‘Star of David’ flags,
Certainly not ‘mostly’. – or proof please. See Vice piece on EDL in Walthamstow.
the personal sign and seal of the Rothschild family, adopted as the flag of the Zionist terrorist’s religious supremacist failed state.
Well? What?
It’s a funny old world as they say.
Hmmm.
The state then, with its Friends is encouraging, protecting and probably financing these and dog knows how many other extremist groups of varied sorts, giving tacit backing for their agendas of hate and division: muslims today, who next I wonder. Straitened days too for the armed forces, that sinkhole of public funds, the chancellor seems to have spotted that the MoD has stealthily become one of the largest buy-to-let landlords in the country, but doesn’t seem too bothered at this racketeering and plundering of the defence budget, or its part in further fuelling of the explosive housing bubble. The last crash of 2008 it seems now was only a preliminary, mild in comparision to what must inevitably follow.
Did Dreoilin bow out of comments? I saw she said ‘gone’ or something. We want her back.
” Mary. I think either you could address the points or ignore them.”
To be fair Tech, I think that’s a false choice. When a comedian does stand-up it’s necessary to answer the hecklers. It’s a no-win for Mary, a win-win for the troll.