Thursday, June 6, 2013
OBAMA'S NSA SPYING ON MILLIONS
White House, NSA and Verizon all decline comment;
disclosure comes in wake of media surveillance scandal
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order?CMP=ema_565
From CNN:
Former Vice President Al Gore tweeted: "Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?"
Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colorado, who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, issued a statement saying, "While I cannot corroborate the details of this particular report, this sort of widescale surveillance should concern all of us and is the kind of government overreach I've said Americans would find shocking."
Udall and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, who also serves on the Intelligence Committee, wrote a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder last year slamming the government's "secret interpretations of public laws."
"We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted section 215 of the Patriot Act," which deals with "business records," they wrote.
"As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn't know what its government thinks the law says."
Sen. Diane Feinstein, head of the Intelligence Committee, defended the massive surveillance.
************
Why should we believe the NSA isn't snooping on Tea Partiers while "countering terrorism."
IRS headquarters reported behind
the assault on Tea Party groups
White House, NSA and Verizon all decline comment;
disclosure comes in wake of media surveillance scandal
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order?CMP=ema_565
From CNN:
Former Vice President Al Gore tweeted: "Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?"
Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colorado, who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, issued a statement saying, "While I cannot corroborate the details of this particular report, this sort of widescale surveillance should concern all of us and is the kind of government overreach I've said Americans would find shocking."
Udall and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, who also serves on the Intelligence Committee, wrote a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder last year slamming the government's "secret interpretations of public laws."
"We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted section 215 of the Patriot Act," which deals with "business records," they wrote.
"As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn't know what its government thinks the law says."
Sen. Diane Feinstein, head of the Intelligence Committee, defended the massive surveillance.
************
Why should we believe the NSA isn't snooping on Tea Partiers while "countering terrorism."
IRS headquarters reported behind
the assault on Tea Party groups
Tuesday, June 4, 2013
Hackers expose UK official
as secret Bilderberg bigwig
From the Guardian's Charlie Skelton:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
http://www.conservatives.com/
http://apps.charitycommission.
as secret Bilderberg bigwig
From the Guardian's Charlie Skelton:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
http://www.conservatives.com/
http://apps.charitycommission.
Monday, June 3, 2013
Saturday, June 1, 2013
How the System ruined a reporter
who exposed CIA cocaine dealings
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for the Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. He talks about how the System attacked and ruined a good reporter who had riled the CIA.
http://consortiumnews.com/
Regret over Gary Webb’s Demise
June 1, 2013
Exclusive: For several decades, mainstream U.S. journalists have fled from the career-threatening label “liberal,” even to the point of destroying honest colleagues who got in the crosshairs of the Right. The story of the late Gary Webb and his Contra-cocaine revelations was a troubling case in point, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
ConsortiumNews
One of the Los Angeles Times reporters who joined in the orchestrated destruction of investigative journalist Gary Webb’s career has acknowledged that the newspaper’s assault – joined by the Washington Post and the New York Times – was a “tawdry exercise” amounting to “overkill,” which later contributed to Webb’s suicide.
This limited apology by former Los Angeles Times reporter Jesse Katz was made during a radio interview and comes as filming is about to start on “Kill the Messenger,” a movie about how, in 1996, Webb revived the scandal of the Reagan administration’s protection of cocaine traffickers involved in the CIA-backed Contra war against Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government.
Webb’s investigative series for the San Jose Mercury News traced some of the Contra cocaine to one of the most important early manufacturers of “crack” in Los Angeles. His articles aroused anger toward the CIA especially from African-American communities which bore the brunt of crack-related violence in the 1980s. That pressure, in turn, forced the U.S. government to begin providing answers as to why sporadic media and congressional investigations into the Cocaine-cocaine issue in the 1980s had been met with such hostility.
In December 1985, my Associated Press colleague Brian Barger and I had been the first reporters to disclose the problem of many Contra units getting involved with the drug trade as a means of raising money. Our story prompted then-freshman Sen. John Kerry to conduct an investigation which turned up more evidence implicating the Contras.
However, the Reagan administration engaged in what amounted to a P.R. counteroffensive against the troubling revelations. President Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department devoted much of its efforts to discrediting various witnesses while the CIA hid evidence that it possessed about some of the drug-tainted Contra operatives.
It also was part of the tenor of those times that many careerist journalists realized that offending Reagan and his dedicated team of propagandists was a fast route to the unemployment line. A high premium was placed on proving you weren’t “liberal.” So, many major outlets, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, fell in line and disparaged the stories.
By the late 1980s, the Contra-cocaine scandal was pretty much buried to the satisfaction of nearly all the powers-that-be in Official Washington. Which was where matters stood until 1996 when Webb uncovered some new leads regarding what happened to the Contra cocaine once it reached the United States.
Webb’s misfortune, however, was that by 1996 those of us who had pioneered the investigations into the Contra-cocaine story, the Iran-Contra Affair and other of Reagan’s national security scandals had been pushed to the sidelines of mainstream journalism. The journalists who aided in the cover-ups had advanced to higher levels of management.
Thus, Webb’s Contra-crack exposé was not treated as an opportunity to reexamine an under-reported dark chapter of recent U.S. history but as a threat to many promising careers. The right-wing media led the initial assault on Webb, but the Big Three – the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times – quickly followed.
The Overkill
Arguably, the Los Angeles Times had the most to lose because Webb’s investigation focused on crimes in the Times’ backyard. As journalist and author Nick Shou has reported, the Times’ editor Shelby Coffey “assigned a staggering 17 reporters to exploit any error in Webb’s reporting, including the most minute.”
A typical way of “discrediting” Webb was to exaggerate what his articles had claimed regarding the CIA’s role in the cocaine trafficking and then mocking him as a nutty conspiracy theorist. The pile-on by the Big Media against Webb was so intimidating that Webb’s editors at the San Jose Mercury News soon lost their nerve and forced him to resign in disgrace, an outcome that was seen as vindicating the relentless attacks against him.
Even a 1998 report by the CIA’s Inspector General – admitting that the CIA was well aware of the Contra-cocaine connection and systematically shielded these Cold War proxies from exposure and prosecution – didn’t resurrect Webb’s career. The CIA’s report was downplayed or ignored by the major U.S. news media. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Lost History.]
Webb’s life continued into a downward spiral, viewed as a cautionary tale about the consequences of “reckless” journalism. Webb could not find decent-paying work in his own profession.
As Shou has recounted, including in his book, Kill the Messenger (upon which the upcoming movie is partly based), Webb faced personal humiliation as well as professional ruin. Finally, as Shou wrote, in December 2004, on “the same day he was to vacate his just-sold home and move in with his mother,” Webb shot and killed himself with a revolver.
On May 22 on KPCC-FM 89.3′s AirTalk With Larry Mantle, former L.A. Times journalist Katz was pressed by callers to address his role in the destruction of Webb. Katz offered what could be viewed as a limited apology.
“As an L.A. Times reporter, we saw this series in the San Jose Mercury News and kind of wonder[ed] how legit it was and kind of put it under a microscope,” Katz said. “And we did it in a way that most of us who were involved in it, I think, would look back on that and say it was overkill. We had this huge team of people at the L.A. Times and kind of piled on to one lone muckraker up in Northern California.”
Katz added, “We really didn’t do anything to advance his work or illuminate much to the story, and it was a really kind of tawdry exercise. … And it ruined that reporter’s career.”
However, the L.A. Times – and the other major newspapers – have never apologized in any formal way for their treatment of Webb and, more generally, the Contra-cocaine story. Indeed, after Webb’s suicide the L.A. Times and the Washington Post ran mean-spirited obituaries.
As Shou noted in the L.A. Weekly, Webb had been reduced to near poverty by his inability to land a decent-paying job in his profession, ending up with only a part-time gig with an alternative weekly.
“But the pay couldn’t cover his mortgage and Webb had reached the end of his dwindling psychological resources,” Shou wrote. “Sadly, because Webb shot himself in the head twice — the first bullet simply went through his cheek — many falsely believe the CIA killed him. As Katz, if not the rest of the Times crew, knows, it wasn’t the CIA that helped load the gun that killed Gary Webb.”
**********
Newz from Limbo comments: Parry puts this in a right-left perspective, and some commenters then object based on their own ideological stances. However, the issue is that the CIA's influence in the media was such that it could stand around being innocent while someone whose reporting potentially threatened its budget was ruined by the System's media.
who exposed CIA cocaine dealings
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for the Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. He talks about how the System attacked and ruined a good reporter who had riled the CIA.
http://consortiumnews.com/
Regret over Gary Webb’s Demise
June 1, 2013
Exclusive: For several decades, mainstream U.S. journalists have fled from the career-threatening label “liberal,” even to the point of destroying honest colleagues who got in the crosshairs of the Right. The story of the late Gary Webb and his Contra-cocaine revelations was a troubling case in point, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
ConsortiumNews
One of the Los Angeles Times reporters who joined in the orchestrated destruction of investigative journalist Gary Webb’s career has acknowledged that the newspaper’s assault – joined by the Washington Post and the New York Times – was a “tawdry exercise” amounting to “overkill,” which later contributed to Webb’s suicide.
This limited apology by former Los Angeles Times reporter Jesse Katz was made during a radio interview and comes as filming is about to start on “Kill the Messenger,” a movie about how, in 1996, Webb revived the scandal of the Reagan administration’s protection of cocaine traffickers involved in the CIA-backed Contra war against Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government.
Webb’s investigative series for the San Jose Mercury News traced some of the Contra cocaine to one of the most important early manufacturers of “crack” in Los Angeles. His articles aroused anger toward the CIA especially from African-American communities which bore the brunt of crack-related violence in the 1980s. That pressure, in turn, forced the U.S. government to begin providing answers as to why sporadic media and congressional investigations into the Cocaine-cocaine issue in the 1980s had been met with such hostility.
In December 1985, my Associated Press colleague Brian Barger and I had been the first reporters to disclose the problem of many Contra units getting involved with the drug trade as a means of raising money. Our story prompted then-freshman Sen. John Kerry to conduct an investigation which turned up more evidence implicating the Contras.
However, the Reagan administration engaged in what amounted to a P.R. counteroffensive against the troubling revelations. President Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department devoted much of its efforts to discrediting various witnesses while the CIA hid evidence that it possessed about some of the drug-tainted Contra operatives.
It also was part of the tenor of those times that many careerist journalists realized that offending Reagan and his dedicated team of propagandists was a fast route to the unemployment line. A high premium was placed on proving you weren’t “liberal.” So, many major outlets, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, fell in line and disparaged the stories.
By the late 1980s, the Contra-cocaine scandal was pretty much buried to the satisfaction of nearly all the powers-that-be in Official Washington. Which was where matters stood until 1996 when Webb uncovered some new leads regarding what happened to the Contra cocaine once it reached the United States.
Webb’s misfortune, however, was that by 1996 those of us who had pioneered the investigations into the Contra-cocaine story, the Iran-Contra Affair and other of Reagan’s national security scandals had been pushed to the sidelines of mainstream journalism. The journalists who aided in the cover-ups had advanced to higher levels of management.
Thus, Webb’s Contra-crack exposé was not treated as an opportunity to reexamine an under-reported dark chapter of recent U.S. history but as a threat to many promising careers. The right-wing media led the initial assault on Webb, but the Big Three – the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times – quickly followed.
The Overkill
Arguably, the Los Angeles Times had the most to lose because Webb’s investigation focused on crimes in the Times’ backyard. As journalist and author Nick Shou has reported, the Times’ editor Shelby Coffey “assigned a staggering 17 reporters to exploit any error in Webb’s reporting, including the most minute.”
A typical way of “discrediting” Webb was to exaggerate what his articles had claimed regarding the CIA’s role in the cocaine trafficking and then mocking him as a nutty conspiracy theorist. The pile-on by the Big Media against Webb was so intimidating that Webb’s editors at the San Jose Mercury News soon lost their nerve and forced him to resign in disgrace, an outcome that was seen as vindicating the relentless attacks against him.
Even a 1998 report by the CIA’s Inspector General – admitting that the CIA was well aware of the Contra-cocaine connection and systematically shielded these Cold War proxies from exposure and prosecution – didn’t resurrect Webb’s career. The CIA’s report was downplayed or ignored by the major U.S. news media. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Lost History.]
Webb’s life continued into a downward spiral, viewed as a cautionary tale about the consequences of “reckless” journalism. Webb could not find decent-paying work in his own profession.
As Shou has recounted, including in his book, Kill the Messenger (upon which the upcoming movie is partly based), Webb faced personal humiliation as well as professional ruin. Finally, as Shou wrote, in December 2004, on “the same day he was to vacate his just-sold home and move in with his mother,” Webb shot and killed himself with a revolver.
On May 22 on KPCC-FM 89.3′s AirTalk With Larry Mantle, former L.A. Times journalist Katz was pressed by callers to address his role in the destruction of Webb. Katz offered what could be viewed as a limited apology.
“As an L.A. Times reporter, we saw this series in the San Jose Mercury News and kind of wonder[ed] how legit it was and kind of put it under a microscope,” Katz said. “And we did it in a way that most of us who were involved in it, I think, would look back on that and say it was overkill. We had this huge team of people at the L.A. Times and kind of piled on to one lone muckraker up in Northern California.”
Katz added, “We really didn’t do anything to advance his work or illuminate much to the story, and it was a really kind of tawdry exercise. … And it ruined that reporter’s career.”
However, the L.A. Times – and the other major newspapers – have never apologized in any formal way for their treatment of Webb and, more generally, the Contra-cocaine story. Indeed, after Webb’s suicide the L.A. Times and the Washington Post ran mean-spirited obituaries.
As Shou noted in the L.A. Weekly, Webb had been reduced to near poverty by his inability to land a decent-paying job in his profession, ending up with only a part-time gig with an alternative weekly.
“But the pay couldn’t cover his mortgage and Webb had reached the end of his dwindling psychological resources,” Shou wrote. “Sadly, because Webb shot himself in the head twice — the first bullet simply went through his cheek — many falsely believe the CIA killed him. As Katz, if not the rest of the Times crew, knows, it wasn’t the CIA that helped load the gun that killed Gary Webb.”
**********
Newz from Limbo comments: Parry puts this in a right-left perspective, and some commenters then object based on their own ideological stances. However, the issue is that the CIA's influence in the media was such that it could stand around being innocent while someone whose reporting potentially threatened its budget was ruined by the System's media.
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Nearly 1 million on terror lists
To get an idea of the scale, consider that the number on those lists is equivalent to about 3% of the U.S. population.
875,000/330,000,000 rounds off as 3%.
http://openchannel.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/05/22/18427431-too-much-terrorism-data-connecting-the-dots-may-be-getting-harder?lite
To get an idea of the scale, consider that the number on those lists is equivalent to about 3% of the U.S. population.
875,000/330,000,000 rounds off as 3%.
http://openchannel.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/05/22/18427431-too-much-terrorism-data-connecting-the-dots-may-be-getting-harder?lite
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Obama's war against free press and speech
Actions say loudly and clearly that the Obama administration frankly believes in press control. The idea is that federal operatives are protecting national security, though the heavy handed prosecutions of certain leakers, but not others, should have been an ominous tip-off that this administration was not above abusing power for political purposes.
Not only was necessary whistleblowing discouraged, but a chilling message was sent to government officials to avoid the "noncompliant" press. Yet, national security leaks that made Obama look good in the campaign season were given the federal brush-off.
But that wasn't enough. The feds, we now learn, have decided to deploy their national security anti-terrorism status to justify a sweeping raid on Associated Press phone records, and in a related development, we discover that federal gumshoes snooped on a Fox News reporter's emails in an attempt to run down the reporter's source.
There is a pattern here, as exemplified by the IRS targeting what were doubtless anti-Obama groups for special and annoying attention.
The White House spin is that the administration is large and complex, and that the president can't be expected to foresee all such indiscretions. However, the top man bears responsibility for the tone and tenor of his administration. Obama likes "good publicity," but appears to be amazingly dense about the good old-fashioned American way of a vigorous press and a robustly candid citizenry.
Selected quotes:
"The feds have charged intelligence analyst Stephen Jin-Woo Kim with disclosing classified information to Fox reporter James Rosen," says a Wall Street Journal editorial. "That's not a surprise considering that this Administration has prosecuted more national-security cases than any in recent history.
"The shock is that as part of its probe the Administration sought and obtained a warrant to search Mr. Rosen's personal email account. And it justified such a sweeping secret search by telling the judge that Mr. Rosen was part of the conspiracy merely because he acted like a journalist."
************
"The unfolding IRS scandal is a symptom, not the disease.For decades, campaign-finance reform zealots have sought to limit core political speech through spending limits and disclosure requirements. More recently, they have claimed that it is wrong and dangerous for tax-exempt entities to engage in political speech," write two former Justice Department officials.
"Journalists, First Amendment watchdogs and government transparency advocates reacted with outrage Monday to the revelation that the Justice Department had investigated the newsgathering activities of a Fox News reporter as a potential crime in a probe of classified leaks."
*************
A journalist 'co-conspirator'
http://online.wsj.com/article/
Outrage over spying on reporter
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
The IRS threat to free speech
http://stream.wsj.com/story/
Counter-terrorist crackdown on news organization
http://openchannel.nbcnews.
Patriot-Act mentality targets 'un-American' reporters
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/under-sweeping-subpoenas-justice-department-obtained-ap-phone-records-in-leak-investigation/2013/05/13/11d1bb82-bc11-11e2-89c9-3be8095fe767_story.html
Actions say loudly and clearly that the Obama administration frankly believes in press control. The idea is that federal operatives are protecting national security, though the heavy handed prosecutions of certain leakers, but not others, should have been an ominous tip-off that this administration was not above abusing power for political purposes.
Not only was necessary whistleblowing discouraged, but a chilling message was sent to government officials to avoid the "noncompliant" press. Yet, national security leaks that made Obama look good in the campaign season were given the federal brush-off.
But that wasn't enough. The feds, we now learn, have decided to deploy their national security anti-terrorism status to justify a sweeping raid on Associated Press phone records, and in a related development, we discover that federal gumshoes snooped on a Fox News reporter's emails in an attempt to run down the reporter's source.
There is a pattern here, as exemplified by the IRS targeting what were doubtless anti-Obama groups for special and annoying attention.
The White House spin is that the administration is large and complex, and that the president can't be expected to foresee all such indiscretions. However, the top man bears responsibility for the tone and tenor of his administration. Obama likes "good publicity," but appears to be amazingly dense about the good old-fashioned American way of a vigorous press and a robustly candid citizenry.
Selected quotes:
"The feds have charged intelligence analyst Stephen Jin-Woo Kim with disclosing classified information to Fox reporter James Rosen," says a Wall Street Journal editorial. "That's not a surprise considering that this Administration has prosecuted more national-security cases than any in recent history.
"The shock is that as part of its probe the Administration sought and obtained a warrant to search Mr. Rosen's personal email account. And it justified such a sweeping secret search by telling the judge that Mr. Rosen was part of the conspiracy merely because he acted like a journalist."
************
"The unfolding IRS scandal is a symptom, not the disease.For decades, campaign-finance reform zealots have sought to limit core political speech through spending limits and disclosure requirements. More recently, they have claimed that it is wrong and dangerous for tax-exempt entities to engage in political speech," write two former Justice Department officials.
"Journalists, First Amendment watchdogs and government transparency advocates reacted with outrage Monday to the revelation that the Justice Department had investigated the newsgathering activities of a Fox News reporter as a potential crime in a probe of classified leaks."
*************
A journalist 'co-conspirator'
http://online.wsj.com/article/
Outrage over spying on reporter
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
The IRS threat to free speech
http://stream.wsj.com/story/
Counter-terrorist crackdown on news organization
http://openchannel.nbcnews.
Patriot-Act mentality targets 'un-American' reporters
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/under-sweeping-subpoenas-justice-department-obtained-ap-phone-records-in-leak-investigation/2013/05/13/11d1bb82-bc11-11e2-89c9-3be8095fe767_story.html
THE POLITICAL NATURE OF THE NO-FLY LIST
is underscored by the fact that dangerous persons who had "cooperated" with the federal anti-terror investigators had flown unsupervised on airliners in American airspace.
The feds pointed out that though these "former" bad guys had slipped through the cracks, nothing had gone wrong (yet).
This demonstrates the arbitrary nature of the no-fly list. If there is to be such a list, there must exist a right of appeal in federal court, with the right to examine evidence. The feds say the "derogatory information" is too secret. However, they are pulling a fast one, because many lawyers are able to obtain necessary security classifications in order to properly assist the aggrieved person on the federal blacklist.
http://wncy.com/news/articles/2013/may/16/government-watchdog-cites-past-flaw-in-us-no-fly-list/
http://www.gadling.com/2013/
http://townhall.com/video/
is underscored by the fact that dangerous persons who had "cooperated" with the federal anti-terror investigators had flown unsupervised on airliners in American airspace.
The feds pointed out that though these "former" bad guys had slipped through the cracks, nothing had gone wrong (yet).
This demonstrates the arbitrary nature of the no-fly list. If there is to be such a list, there must exist a right of appeal in federal court, with the right to examine evidence. The feds say the "derogatory information" is too secret. However, they are pulling a fast one, because many lawyers are able to obtain necessary security classifications in order to properly assist the aggrieved person on the federal blacklist.
http://wncy.com/news/articles/2013/may/16/government-watchdog-cites-past-flaw-in-us-no-fly-list/
http://www.gadling.com/2013/
http://townhall.com/video/
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