Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr
democracynow on Aug 5, 2013
www.democracynow.org – The Obama administration has announced it will keep 19 diplomatic posts in north Africa and the Middle East closed for up to a week, due to fears of a possible militant threat. On Sunday, Senator Saxby Chambliss, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the decision to close the embassies was based on information collected by the National Security Agency. “If we did not have these programs, we simply would not be able to listen in on the bad guys,” Chambliss said, in a direct reference to increasing debate over widespread spying of all Americans revealed by Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian. “Nobody has ever questioned or disputed that the U.S. government, like all governments around the world, ought to be eavesdropping and monitoring the conversations of people who pose an actual threat to the United States in terms of plotting terrorist attacks,” Greenwald says. Pointing to the recent revelations by leaker Edward Snowden that he has reported on, Greenwald explains, “Here we are in the midst of one of the most intense debates and sustained debates that we’ve had in a very long time in this country over the dangers of excess surveillance, and suddenly, an administration that has spent two years claiming that it has decimated al-Qaeda decides that there is this massive threat that involves the closing of embassies and consulates around the world. … The controversy is over the fact that they are sweeping up billions and billions of emails and telephone calls every single day from people around the world and in the United States who have absolutely nothing to do with terrorism.” Greenwald also discusses the NSA’s XKeyscore internet tracking program, Reuter’s report on the Drug Enforcement Agency spying on Americans, and the conviction of Army whistleblower Bradley Manning.
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Glenn Greenwald “FISA Report That Calls NSA Spying Unconstitutional & Illegal Kept From Congress
XRepublicTV on Aug 5, 2013
August 04, 2013 C-SPAN
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Fearing that Your Name Gets Put on a List of People to Be Watched
strugglevideomedia on Aug 5, 2013
Deborah Cohen speaks at the Hartford press conference on massive NSA spying.
see
XKeyscore: NSA tool collects ‘nearly everything a user does on the internet’ by Glenn Greenwald
The End of Freedom of the Press by Graham Peebles
Why the U.S. Executive Branch Is a Clear and Present Danger to Our Democracy by Fred Branfman
Dandelion Salad 
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A statement by a typical timid, frightened amerikan, by ms. cohen. If you are so timid that you fear having your name put on a list kept by the stasi state of amerika thenyou deserve what you have allowed to happen. I welcome being placed on their lists. I despise everything about the operations of our imperialist government and so-called representatives. I am not proud of my country. I am disgraced and embarrassed by it. I do not honor our forces. I do not respect anything about our government. I believe amerikans are the most illiterate, ignorant, abusive peoples on the planet. Put me on a list. Make me proud. amerika, land of the debt slave, home of the timid.
I think the establishment is deeply worried because it’s lost the propaganda war.
Who do we trust? The deity on the dollar?
The establishment laughs while you cower. If you believe they are worried then why do they continue on the path to a totalitarian regime with impunity? Without consideration of consequences? Because they know when they bring down the forces that bleed us most will run in fear.
I don’t cower my friend, and nor should you. You wanna believe they are worried. Sorry chasfa, I don’t buy it. These dumb-waiters don’t know any different, their mind-deficient comic-book brains all run in straight lines like a sterile GM landscape of inedible, toxic, syrup and cattle “corn.”
Just because Americans are cowed into zombied paralysis by their own corporatized government, doesn’t mean the rest of the world is going to carry the can. This Washington shower is a pathetic farce, not a force to be reckoned with. What are they going to do to those of us outside the States, who laugh back at them, from places where some vestige of civilized accountability still survives ~ send the nuclear Nazi doodlebug-drones back into Europe?
I don’t trust or believe any of these big bad clowns, even though they’re all dressed to decimate ~ the Pentagon brass are caricatures of themselves, imbecile toy soldiers gone to modified seed, engineered into a conditioned psychosis by fantasies of their own invulnerability.
Of course they’re worried. Why would you need to sport so many ostentatious decorations if you’re not actually a plastic celebratory vegetable from Walmart? Do we really need this impressive branded display of automated overkill? None of them have the courage to do the dirty work of facing the real enemy, who is themselves ~ & the computer controlled dupes of Wall St., a bought and sold judiciary and…and…well, Mickey the Modified Mouse and the Coca Cola diabetic coalition.
They should all get out more. In fact they should all just get out.
Now, please, not all Americans are “zombies”.
Obviously Lo, you could scarcely be included in that ridiculous generalization! I should have prefixed it with “some…” No offence intended.
The rest of the world is really no different, only US citizens are subjected to such a relentless onslaught of toxic consumer sludge, a suffocating cataract of poisonous products and disinformation.
Those that can resist will, I know.
I’m listening to Vandana Shiva talking to Marc David right now about the Deep Politics of Food, Women and Global Health on a live streaming event on Eating Psychology ~ the Big Picture.
She is oracular in her profoundly instructive analysis, a superb discussion ~ a very big picture, indeed.
Nice website and articles. Hopefully, more ‘crap’ can and will be exposed in this great country and the people hell bent on destroying it will have their day in court. I just hope I’m one of the jurist [edited].