Monthly Archives: August 2013

The subversives

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As the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington approaches, commemorating that historic gathering where Martin Luther King Jr gave his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech, it is important to recall the extent to which King was targeted by the government’s domestic spying apparatus.

The FBI operation against King is one of the most shameful episodes in the long history of our government’s persecution of dissenters. Fifty years later, Edward Snowden took enormous personal risk to expose the global reach of surveillance programmes overseen by President Barack Obama. His revelations continue to provoke worldwide condemnation of the US.

In a heavily redacted, classified FBI memo on January 4, 1956 – just a little more than a month after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger – the Mobile, Alabama, FBI office stated that an agent “had been assigned by [redacted] to find out all he could about Reverend Martin L King, coloured minister…to uncover all the derogatory information he could about King.”

The FBI at that time was run by its founding director, J Edgar Hoover. The far-reaching clandestine surveillance, infiltration and disruption operation Hoover ran was dubbed “Cointelpro”, for counterintelligence programme.

The FBI’s Cointelpro activities, along with illegal operations by agencies like the CIA, were thoroughly investigated in 1975 by the Church Committee. The Church committee reported that the FBI “conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of first amendment rights of speech and association.” Among Cointelpro’s perverse activities was an FBI effort to threaten Martin Luther King Jr with exposure of an alleged extramarital affair, including the suggestion, made by the FBI to King, that he avoid embarrassment by killing himself.

Following the Church committee, Congress imposed serious limitations on the FBI and other agencies, restricting domestic spying. Among the changes was the passage into law of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa). Fisa compelled the FBI and others in the government to go to a secret court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, in order to engage in domestic wiretapping.

Then came 11 September 2001, and the swift passage of the Patriot Act, granting broad, new powers of surveillance to intelligence agencies, including the FBI. Section 215 of that act is widely criticised, first for allowing the FBI to obtain records of what books people are signing out of the library.

But now, more than 10 years later, and thanks to the revelations that have come from the Snowden leaks, we see that the government has used this law to perform dragnet surveillance on all electronic communications, including telephone ‘metadata’, which can be analysed to reveal intimate details of our lives, legalising a truly Orwellian system of total surveillance.

In what is considered to be a litmus test of the potential to roll back the Obama administration’s domestic spy programmes, a bipartisan coalition of libertarian Republicans and progressive Democrats put forth an amendment to the latest defence authorisation bill.

The White House took seriously the potential that its power to spy might get trimmed by Congress. On the eve of the debate on the amendment, House members were lobbied by NSA Director General Keith B Alexander, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, as well as by hawkish members of the congressional intelligence committees.

The amendment was narrowly defeated. A full bill that would similarly shut down the NSA programme is currently in committee.

Martin Luther King Jr was a dissident, an organiser, a critic of US wars abroad and of poverty and racism at home. He was spied on, and his work was disrupted by the federal government.

Deeply concerned about the crackdown on dissent happening under Obama, scholar Cornel West wondered if “Brother Martin [King] would not be invited to the very march in his name.”

By: Amy Goodman

US Presumption

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By: Paul Craig Roberts, Former assistant secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal.

The new president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, is cast in Chavez’s mould.

Obama, who has betrayed democracy in America, unleashing execution on American citizens without due process of law and war without the consent of Congress, provoked Maduro’s response by suggesting that Maduro’s newly elected government might be fraudulent. Obviously, Obama is piqued that the millions of dollars his administration spent trying to elect an American puppet instead of Maduro failed to do the job.

If anyone has accurately summed up Washington, it is the Venezuelans. Who can forget Chevez standing at the podium of the UN General Assembly in New York City speaking of George W. Bush? Quoting from memory: “Right here, yesterday, at this very podium stood Satan himself, speaking as if he owned the world. You can still smell the sulphur.”

Hegemonic Washington threw countless amounts of money into the last Venezuelan election, doing its best to deliver the governance of that country to a Washington puppet called Henrique Capriles. Why isn’t this puppet arrested for treason? Why are not the Washington operatives against an independent country ordered to leave Venezuela immediately or arrested and tried for spying and high treason? Why allow any presence of Washington in Venezuela when it is clear that Washington’s intention is to make Venezuela a puppet state?

There was a time when the US left-wing and a no longer extant liberal media would have been all over the US for its illegal interference in the internal affairs of an independent country. But no more.

I think the American left-wing lost its confidence when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Chinese communists and Indian socialists turned capitalist. Everyone misread the situation, especially the ‘end of history’ idiots. The consequence is a world without strong protests of Washington’s and its puppet states’ war criminal military aggressions, murder, destruction of civil liberty and human rights, and transparent propaganda.

But hardly anyone cares. The western governments and Japan are all paid off and bought, and those that are not bought are begging to be bought because they want the money too. Truth, integrity, these are all dead-letter words. No one any longer knows what they mean.

George W Bush said, in Orwellian double-speak, they hate us for our freedom and democracy. They don’t hate us because we bomb them, invade them, kill them, destroy their way of life, culture, and infrastructure. They hate us because we are so good.

Washington and Israel present the world with unmistakable evil. I don’t need to stand at the UN podium after Bush or Obama.

Homeland Security has ‘crisis actors’ to help it deceive the public in its false flag operations. The Obama regime has drones with which to silence US citizens without due process of law.

Are Americans so completely ignorant that they believe this is all for ‘terrorists’ whose sparse numbers require the FBI to manufacture ‘terrorists’ in so-called ‘sting operations’ in order to justify the FBI’s $3 billion special fund from Congress to combat domestic terrorism?

This is the kind of country American has become. This is the kind of ‘security’ agencies it has, filling their pockets by destroying the lives of the innocent and downtrodden.