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.
Press release from Interfax Moscow
06/23 13:36 SNOWDEN’S ULTIMATE DESTINATION IS VENEZUELA WHERE HE WILL FLY TO FROM MOSCOW WITH STOPOVER IN HAVANA – SOURCE
It is an ancient Bloggtroll,
Pistoffeth two of three………
Noooo!! Not even Kibo is that cruel.
You could always have blamed Macky.
.
So, back to the topic.
“States that provide arms have responsibilities in terms of the eventual use of those arms to commit … war crimes or crimes against humanity,”
Paulo Pinheiro, chairman of the UN commission’s inquiry into rights violations in Syria.
Good to see stirings of life in the UN.
From: http://rt.com/news/syria-chemical-weapons-un-105/
.
@ phil 9 25pm
Thanks .
Is your experience part of the slippery slope?
http://mwcnews.net/focus/editorial/6315-israeli-settlers-terror.html
…………………………………………..
@ Village.r 10 26am
You might get away with your act with the occasional visitor to these threads. But I think most regular readers will be able to write your handbook by now.
It’s a good ploy.
Write several pieces broadly supportive of various truth and justice strands.
Groom occasional bright visitors who haven’t experienced yet how your team works.
Then sow discord and confusion by attacking individual regular contributers.
And it works. But only for a while.
Now, I think you owe me an answer in return for the two I gave you on this thread at 1 36am.
I’m not holding my breath but I’ll have a look this evening.
That narrative, “we’re the good guys”, is being dismantled by Western whistleblowers fleeing their now overtly criminal regimes for sanctuary elsewhere.
These are seminal moments, but I suspect the majority won’t notice until the avalanche finally engulfs them.
Didn’t need to be this way, were western media and institutions not so criminally corrupt.
To be fair though, it always ends like this.
On a more positive note, the criminals who have brought us to this sorry state have nowhere else to flee.
Cool, Kibo, cool.
It was an attempted coup, and poorly executed.
Having returned from a short period of self imposed exile (yes Dreolin a break is good and sorry for shouting at you Jon) I was a bit taken aback by the ongoing trolling wars here. I want to congratulate little sofia and kibo. I cannot think of a better response to the likes of villager and habakuk (may their sould rot in the dark). Once tuned in these threads can be seen as a unique, somewhat surreal, modern, artistic response to the propaganda wars. Well done.
And thanks to the trolls for unwittingly helping us break new ground. No, actually I hope karma hunts you down.
“Kibo Noh
23 Jun, 2013 – 11:21 am
” Now, I think you owe me an answer in return for the two I gave you on this thread at 1 36am.”
And the comment left at 1.36am was by one Sofia. Here is verbatim:
” Sofia Zabolotna-Habbercake
23 Jun, 2013 – 1:36 am
Herbie 12 38am
Spot on!
“Sophisticated propaganda is built upon a false underlying narrative, myth, or story.”
Even a fake 13.5yr old can get that. Thanks
……………………………………
@Villager 11 41pm
Let’s do a trade. I’ll answer two of your questions and you answer one of mine.
You ask, “But do you have the foggiest understanding of the limitations of thought, of knowledge and the ending of time?”
Well no. Not really. Nowhere near in fact. But I try hard enough to understand the world I find myself in and the people I encounter.
You say “what i’m supposed to be distracting you from i haven’t figured.”
This thread has a title, “Work for the UN.” Yes, you are distracting me from engaging with the subject of the thread.
So, you have my two answers. Now let me ask you my question.
Wh
When you answered my earlier question, “Isn’t it the false narratives and constant propaganda that needs to be challenged and dismantled, rather than the individuals who peddle them?” with a patronising “You poor soul, you really are so lost”, just what did you mean?
I have fallen for this kind of distraction with you before, just as I have with Dad.
I’ve also had this experience before of asking you a reasonable question and getting patronising insults instead of answers.
I would love just this once to receive a genuine and clear reply.
I know you don’t think much of me and you are welcome to remind me again, but please reply to my question.
………………………………………….
Macky 12 39am
I see you too are a student of the great William McGonnigle. But will you take care with that poetry! You might wake Kibo’s muse and you never know, he may launch into a nightmare version of “The Ancient Mariner” and clog the whole blog for weeks. Gods help us.
Goodnight all.”
—-
So there we have it. QED
The double-act slipped up unwittingly — couldn’t keep up with her schizophrenic self.
I have been pointing out this sock-puppeting for a few days now but no action has been taken.
Over to Jon now.
Jon, just thought i’d flag my post above.
Tony Press release from Interfax Moscow
06/23 13:36 SNOWDEN’S ULTIMATE DESTINATION IS VENEZUELA WHERE HE WILL FLY TO FROM MOSCOW WITH STOPOVER IN HAVANA – SOURCE
Three cheers for Edward and Julian. Out of the clutches of the Obomber thugs.
Venceremos!
I heard it on the radio. I bet it left a bitter taste in the state broadcaster’s mouth having to say it.
Also heard a lot about Gideon’s further tranche of AUSTERITY. What an evil bunch they are. Out with the lot of them.
What IS Villager on about?
Since the previous limerick I posted (by the great Robert Conquest) obviously delighted its addressee “Macky”, I thought I’d post another one (again, by Robert Conquest) in the hope that at least one of our other readers will appreciate it:
“The first man to fuck little Sophie
Has just won the Kraft-Ebing Trophy,
Plus ten thousand quid,
Which, for what the chap did,
Will be widely denounced as a low fee.”
Thanks Arbed for your excellent posts, as it looks like, the misinformation spread by the NSA and Governments has failed to derail Snowden and or his supporters worldwide, great news.
Our combined thanks should also go to Julian and Wikileaks for working non stop to help Edward leave HK and for negotiating an asylum for him in Ecuador.
Viva Ecuador!
When we buy computers we are not told that this implement, just as our mobiles, keep constant tabs on us, day and night.
More whistle blowers coming forward will have a marked correlation with the increase in encryption, so it is important to enable people, inform them of the option to keep important dates offline and keep our agencies busy with very little.
Has any of you heard much of the World bank whistle blower Karen Hudes. She is being harassed by the US courts and is of the opinion that the fed and Goldmann Sachs as well as other large banks are one large banking conglomerate hell bent on control of the markets.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oSiJQituAo
Phil, karma karma, self harmer.
I’m in London on the 3rd. but not for long, but you are welcome to come up here for a pub assault course and dog walking weekend here, who knows, we might even run into Komodo if he’s around and fancies a jar of ale.
The troll-in-chief is getting mucky again. Must have been rattled.
~~
‘Suspicious item’ found outside a mosque in Walsall.
Who would stoop that low? Silly question.
Flaming June
23 Jun, 2013 – 12:35 pm
What IS Villager on about?
——-
Very simple Mary. Sofia and Kibo are one and the same person. Hence they have been sock-puppeting as they say.
You use different names but one at a time and you quite rightly have never denied that you are Mary. I think you should come back in that name now — no need to wait till July.
Stay well and have a good day, hopefully with a laugh or two added.
One day i might share how i uncovered the Sofia-Kibo gloves.
Ha ha ha Habbakuk
Brilliant one! Touche! .
Why do people bother posting with persistent personas anyway? Don’t see any reason why a recognizable nym should outlive a particular topic. If everybody posted as a disembodied voice, there would be less spatting and pestering and more focus on the content. Genuine trolls would knock themselves out trying to figure out who’s who, and GCHQ databases would burgeon with relational crap that takes human intervention to sort out.
Having said that, now I’m going to kill this nym. Goodbye, cruel world.
Fecking hell is there a day that goes by without these ziofuckwits running to “sir”/Jon and telling on the others? The tag team of the cabalistic/Talmudic tossers are writing limericks promoting paedophilia, now.
===========
Snowden has upset Trowbridge big time! The puny Snowden is not staying put in one place to spy, unless he has picked up the package he was supposed to pick up and is on his way to hand it over to a covert CIA agent somewhere in the world!!???
However seriously must hand it to this guy, he has been playing the game just right, and seems to be staying one step ahead of the CIA all the way. The fact that en mass spying has not resulted in picking up Snowden calls for a new program of spying on the spies, which of course will mean to set up an outfit to spy on the spies, who are spying on people, and so forth. The plot is getting to be like the old Japanese gangster movies more and more by the minute.
Nevermind, 12.41pm
Thanks. All the news reports are saying the final destination is Venezuela but my money’s still on it being Ecuador – that was the first suggestion Assange made, even before Snowden’s identity was known. I’m also going on recent comments by Assange as to why he chose Ecuador himself in the first place. He said it was because of a “strong president in the region”. I don’t think you can extend that to Maduro – his election win was a much closer call than expected, contrasted with Correa’s runaway success during Ecuador’s elections in February. He’s firmly installed for another four years – that’s the kind of stability Snowden will be looking for.
PS. My earlier posts were wrong about the landing times (I was going by the flight times given in the South China Morning Post minus 8 hours to get GMT, but seems that’s not right somehow) – apparently Snowden’s still in the air, travelling with Wikileaks staffer Sarah Harrison and due to be met by diplomats from the “third country” in Moscow airport transit section, and accompanied by them from there.
Will be interesting to see if Washington goes all out to get Edward Snowden – as Reagan did with the PLF killers of Leon Klinghofer – or just let him disappear in Iceland or in some country in South America.
Obama could arrange for American fighters, particularly carrier-based ones, to intercept a flight to any of those places, and force it to land in the UK, Florida, or Puerto Rico.
Suspect Washington has warned Moscow of helping the leaker avoid justice, and remains to be seen if Putin still allows Aeroflot or other carriers take him out of Russia.
Doubt that Washington will go to the brink over it, but Snowden has caused the USA much more damage than Abu Abas’s killers.
Here’s a bit of confirmation that indicates the Wikileaks Grand Jury is set on “conspiracy to commit espionage” charges against Julian Assange(probably already in a sealed indictment):
This article is about the recently unsealed subpoenas for the Gmail accounts of ex-Wikileaks volunteers Smari McCarthy and Herbert Snorrson:
http://mashable.com/2013/06/22/google-wikileaks/
Key quote from the article: “The information seized is a vast trove of metadata going as far back as Nov. 1, 2009.” – That date is the one that US prosecutors in Bradley Manning’s trial have insisted on for the Garani video being sent to Wikileaks (despite clear evidence to the contrary that Bradley sent it in April 2010), because otherwise they can’t say Wikileaks’ tweet of 8 January 2010 about their receipt of an Afghani airstrike amounts to evidence of a conspiracy.
Washington will only get crazed about Snowden if he has some more dangerous beans to spill, which I doubt. They would not escort nor shoot his plane down, nor compromise themselves with China, Russia – nor Cuba, Ecuador nor Venezuela for that matter, because it isn’t worth it. They’ll figure they’ll get him sooner or later and have done enough to put other wannabe whistle-blowers off for the moment. In the meantime as with Assange he is imprisoned albeit not in Guantanamo nor anywhere in the US, but he is effectively behind bars and under control.
Damage limitation will be the name of the game. Washington is anxious to crush Assad then Iran. That will be higher priority than shutting up a whistleblower who has already done most of the damage he could ever do. Poking China or Russia with sharp sticks over Snowden will slow down Washington’s bloodlust for the crushing of Assad and Iran. They will think Russia and China will let them get on with Assad’s demise in the end.
Villager What I care to call myself is none of your business. Nor is it any business of ‘sweet Dreoilin’ who, if I remember correctly, leapt in following the chief troll to tell everybody who April Showers was when I changed my name and has reminded since. At the time I was attempting to escape from the troll’s unpleasant attentions. It is totally against my nature to be deceptive and I hated using a name other than my real name.
She even had to jump in on this thread. “Mummy Mummy it wasn’t him. Look. It was ‘Flaming June’.” I don’t know where the perceived animus arises as I can remember being supportive of her with family worries in the old days, when the EU bankers were shafting her country and when the Irish banks and economy crashed, etc. I actually share a common heritage. My father came from Limerick.
Anyway all of this is totally trivial and a diversion has successfully been created again by trolls. There are very important things going on in the real world.
There can be little doubt that Snowden has more damaging information about what happened to leakers like GCHQ/MI6 agent Gareth Williams and his GCHQ associate Gudrun Loftus.
Williams was involved in setting up CIA sleeper agents aka the Manhattan 11 as Russian spies, and was in the process of taking that information to Moscow when he was poisoned, it seems, by NSA hitmen – what Executive Director William KIng Harvey had established during his last days with CIA.
For more on them, read Bamford about its establishment in Beltsville, MD.
Williams went to Washington after the fiasco was settled by Putin, and he could well have been looking for fellow hacker Snowden who helped out in breaking into their lap tops to make himself more attractive to Moscow, and was obviously upset by his fate. He only became a loose cannon when NSA tried to get rid of him by joining him to the honey-trap that Ben Bishop had fallen for.
Suspect that what Snowden knows about the fate of serious NSA leakers is why Putin is so willing to help out, and he will disclose them if Washington goes bonkers over Snowden’s escape,
Consequently, Obama will not only let him escape, and be more supportive of Russia’s approach to the Syrian conflict for fear that Moscow will reveal more of what Snowden has stolen from NSA.
Krrrrpppp p 23 Jun, 2013 – 1:22 pm
“Why do people bother posting with persistent personas anyway…and GCHQ databases would burgeon with relational crap that takes human intervention to sort out.”
I doubt GCHQ relies on human intervention to track people who change their online name. They are probably a little more sophisticated than that.
Like others here I prefer to use my real name. Fear is a weapon. Not being afraid is the only response. People tend to rationalise their fear with concerns about tax or weed or some such thing. But that’s crap. Noone is innocent. Fight the fear. Grab your rollys there’s a meeting down the docks!
@Nevermind – sounds great. Please get my email off our mutual friend and drop me a line.
Good article exploring the Intelligence protection racket.
“The intelligence-security industry isn’t about protecting the United States or you, except for extraordinarily rare, virtually accidental occurrences. It’s about wealth and power. Yet every politician and every government functionary speaks reverently of the sacred mission and crucial importance of “intelligence” in the manner of a syphilitic preacher who clutches a tatty, moth-eaten doll of the Madonna, which he digitally manipulates by sticking his fingers in its orifices. Most people would find his behavior shockingly obscene, if they noticed it. But they don’t notice it, so mesmerized are they by the preacher with his phonily awestruck words about the holy of holies and the ungraspably noble purpose of his mission. Even as the suppurating sores on the preacher’s face ooze blood and pus, his audience can only gasp, “We must pay attention to what he says! He wants only the best for us! He’s trying to save us!””
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article35389.htm
“Fear is a weapon. Not being afraid is the only response”
________
The above, from Phil, is one of the sanest comments on this thread.
HK made a rather extraordinary statement in connection with the exit. Citing Manning, the US is now anti-dissident on the World stage. It’s quite a slap in the face.
Russia’s involvement shouldn’t include any self-righteous sniggering until Pussy Riot gets out of jail free.
What a great woman.A must watch.Copy left right and centre.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_-Ie6JQquM
“There are very important things going on in the real world.”
And certainly there is sufficient animosity. Keeping close alliances with supportive and non-enabling discussions without acrimony will get more important than ever. No need to fight with fellow dissidents.
From Flaming June :
“…following the chief troll to tell everybody who April Showers was when I changed my name and has reminded since.”
____________
On the assumption that “the chief troll” is a reference to me, I do plead guilty to having identified “April Showers” as Mary redux (is that the right Latin expression, Doug Scorgie?).
But, you see, it wasn’t difficult for someone as acute as I, or even for those less so: the name changed, but the person was easy to identify because the style (I shall remain polite!), the subjects, the general philosphy and even the frequency of the comments were unchanged from those of the Mary who left vowing never to return.
If this sounds as if I agree with KrrrpppP, who said earlier on that
“Why do people bother posting with persistent personas anyway? Don’t see any reason why a recognizable nym should outlive a particular topic.”
then you would be wrong. As someone else wrote, quite recently, keeping the same name does provide other readers with some history and context and thus makes it easier for them to evaluate comments from the same person but on different subjects.