Tag Archives: Barack Obama

Jonathan Turley ~ Doublethinking Transparency: Obama Proclaims Secret NSA Program Entirely “Transparent” To A Secret Court

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Jonathan Turley’s blog June 18 2013

President_Barack_ObamaPresident Barack Obama assured the American people yesterday that the NSA warrantless surveillance programs are entirely “transparent.” He then promised to extradite and prosecute the man who told the public about it. None of that causes any pause for the White House or its supporters. It makes perfect sense. Indeed, it helps explain how Obama promised the “most transparent” Administration in history and proceeded to expand a secret security state. It turns out that “transparent” simply means something different with Obama, just as the noun “war” is left to his definition. It turns out that transparent means that the government can see it — and see us. Total transparency in our new fishbowl society.

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Stephen Lendman ~ The Chemical Weapons Hoax

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SteveLendmanBlog June 16 2013

Greater US intervention in Syria looms. Manufactured threats facilitate doing so. Replacing Assad with puppet leadership is planned. Independent governments aren’t tolerated. More on that below.

Fact: Washington bears full responsibility for Middle East/North Africa/Central Asian wars. Resource control is prioritized. So is imperial dominance to Russian and Chinese borders.

Fact: State terrorism is official US policy. Obama’s waging multiple direct and proxy wars. He’s doing so lawlessly. He’s ravaging humanity in the process.

Washington, its allies, and proxies use chemical and other illegal weapons. Permanent wars reflect longstanding US policy. Americans are deceived and lied to. Truth is verboten.

Unchallenged global dominance is sought. Washington demands total subservience. What we say goes is policy. All independent governments are targeted.

Plans call for installing subservient puppet regimes. Direct intervention in Syria looms. War on Iran is planned. Lebanon is targeted. So are other countries.

America and Israel are imperial partners. Both countries wage war on Syria. They actively arm Al Qaeda and Al Nusra fighters. Both groups are designated terrorist organizations.

They’re supplied chemical and other lethal weapons. They’re trained in their use. Pentagon contractors and US special forces are involved. So are CIA operatives. Training occurs in Turkey and Jordan. Perhaps in Israel.

Israeli forces are mobilized near Syria’s border. Libya 2.0 looms. Regional conflict is possible. So is WW III.

Fact: Alleging Syrian chemical weapons use replicates fabricated claims about Saddam’s nonexistent WMDs. It’s similar to false charges against all US enemies.

Big Lies launch wars. They’re pretexts for planned aggression. Repetition gets people to believe them. Manipulative deception is standard practice. False flags are commonly used.

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Amy Goodman ~ Terror Bytes: Edward Snowden And The Architecture Of Oppression

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NationOfChange June 13 2013

Edward Snowden revealed himself this week as the whistleblower responsible for perhaps the most significant release of secret government documents in U.S. history. The former CIA staffer and analyst for the private intelligence consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton spoke to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Barton Gellman in Hong Kong, providing convincing evidence that the U.S. government, primarily the National Security Agency, is conducting massive, unconstitutional surveillance globally, and perhaps most controversially, on almost all, if not all, U.S. citizens.

The chorus of establishment condemnation was swift and unrelenting. Jeffrey Toobin, legal pundit, quickly blogged that Snowden is “a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison.” New York Times columnists chimed in, with Thomas Friedman writing, “I don’t believe that Edward Snowden, the leaker of all this secret material, is some heroic whistle-blower.” His colleague David Brooks engaged in speculative psychoanalysis of Snowden, opining, “[t]hough obviously terrifically bright, he could not successfully work his way through the institution of high school. Then he failed to navigate his way through community college.”

Snowden’s educational path has attracted significant attention. U.S. senators oh-so-gently questioned NSA Director Gen. Keith B. Alexander and others at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, including liberal Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, echoing Brooks’ incredulity that someone with a GED could possibly hoodwink the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus. Alexander confessed, “In the IT arena, in the cyber arena, some of these people have skills to operate networks. That was his job for the most part; he had great skills in the area. The rest of it you’ve hit on the head. We do need to go back and look at the processes – where we went wrong.”

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Monty Pelerin ~ Why Things Will Get Worse — Much Worse

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Monty Pelerin’s World June 12 2013 (Thanks, A.L.)

It is easy to be upset about what is happening all around. The economy is being destroyed, deliberately, by insane economic policies. Incentives to work are being eliminated by punishing work. At the same time rewards are increasing for not working. Not surprisingly we get less of what we penalize (work) and more of what we subsidize (non-work).

As an economist I get sick over what I see happening to what was once a great engine of productivity, capital creation and improvements in standards of living.

After two centuries of progress that amazed the world, the conditions necessary for growth and productivity are steadily being removed. Their presence allowed the miracle of America. Their absence guarantees the decline. Carried to extreme, the US could become a second or third-world nation within a few decades. Virtually all changes in the last five to ten years point in this direction and these changes are accelerating.

As pained as the economic retrogression is, the loss of freedom is even more disturbing. It was free markets and free men that made America the dominant economic power and the beacon of freedom. Without freedom, no economic policy can succeed. Yet, just as economic policies seem designed to destroy rather than create, so too does the role of government as steadily destroys freedom with its expanded oppression and power. The absence of freedom is tyranny. The absence of freedom is also poverty.

Economic decline is difficult to convey, although data are useful. The decline of liberty, however, is not easily quantifiable and even more difficult to communicate. An email from Simon Black (I have no link to the text, the link included is to his website), expresses his concern regarding Leviathan government and its increasing oppression. It provides as good a qualitative measure of what is occurring to freedom in this country:

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Michael Snyder ~ Is Obama Starting A War With Syria Just To Distract Us From All The Scandals?

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The Economic Collapse blog June 13 2013

Well, isn’t that convenient?  At the moment when the Obama administration is feeling more heat then ever before, it starts another war.  Suddenly everyone in the mainstream media is talking all about Syria and not about the IRS scandal, Benghazi,NSA snooping or any of the other political scandals that have popped up in recent weeks.  As if on cue, Obama made headlines all over the globe on Thursday by claiming that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against the rebels “multiple times”, and that the U.S. was now ready to do more to assist the rebels.  That assistance is reportedly going to include “military support” for the rebels and a no-fly zone over at least part of Syria is being discussed.  Without a doubt, these are acts of war, and this conflict is not going to end until Assad has been ousted.  But Assad will not go quietly.  And all it would take is for Assad to fire a couple of missiles at Tel Aviv for a huge regional war to erupt in the Middle East.  And what happens if Russia or China decides to get involved in the conflict in Syria?  Obama is playing with fire, but he has shown again and again that he is willing to do virtually anything if it will benefit him politically.

As far as the Obama administration is concerned, there is no such thing as a coincidence.  The timing of this announcement regarding Syria was not an accident.  If Obama wanted to use chemical weapons as an excuse to go after Syria he could have done it weeks ago, or he could have waited several more months before taking action.  He chose to do it right now for a reason, and hopefully the American people will be able to see right through this.

So exactly what are we going to be doing for the Syrian rebels?  Well, we will definitely be arming them and training them.  And it is probably reasonable to assume that there will be American “advisers” on the ground inside Syria helping to organize the Syrian resistance.  In fact, according to Debka, a large U.S. Marine force has already been deployed to the Jordanian border with Syria.

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Michael Snyder ~ The Rest Of The World Is Absolutely Disgusted With Our Big Brother Spying Methods

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Economic Collapse blog June 12 2013

The rest of the world has found out that the U.S. government has been listening to their phone calls and watching what they do on the Internet and they do not like it one bit.  Outrage has been pouring in from all over the planet, and one member of the European Parliament is even comparing the NSA to the Stasi.  But instead of stepping back and reevaluating our Big Brother spying methods now that they have been revealed, Barack Obama and other leading members of Congress are defiantly declaring that there is nothing wrong with these methods and that no changes will be made.  The U.S. government is going to continue to invade the privacy of the citizens of the rest of the world as much as it possibly can, and our leaders don’t seem to really care what the international response is.  And make no mistake – the goal of the U.S. intelligence community is to literally know everything about everyone.  The chief technology officer of the CIA, Gus Hunt, made the following shocking admission back in March: “We fundamentally try to collect everything and hang onto it forever.”  He followed that statement up with this gem: “It is really very nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human-generated information.”  In other words, they want it all, and they nearly have the capacity to gather it all already.  So where does this end?  Will the U.S. intelligence community ever be happy until they have every piece of data on every single person on the entire planet?  Do we really want a government that collects “everything” and hangs on to it “forever”?

Thanks to Edward Snowden, the rest of the globe is starting to understand the extent to which the U.S. government has been spying on them.  Needless to say, a lot of people are extremely upset about this.

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Michael Snyder ~ How Has The U.S. Government Been Getting User Data From Major Internet Companies?

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The Economic Collapse blog June 10 2013

****Important Update**** Apparently the big Internet companies are not as “innocent” in all of this as they originally led us to believe. So this additional information changes some of the conclusions that I reached in my original article. It appears that some of the biggest Internet companies have been cooperating with the government in this data collection effort at least to a certain extent. The following is from an article in the New York Times that describes how the U.S. government has been getting user data from major Internet companies…

The companies that negotiated with the government include Google, which owns YouTube; Microsoft, which owns Hotmail and Skype; Yahoo; Facebook; AOL; Apple; and Paltalk, according to one of the people briefed on the discussions. The companies were legally required to share the data under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. People briefed on the discussions spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are prohibited by law from discussing the content of FISA requests or even acknowledging their existence.

In at least two cases, at Google and Facebook, one of the plans discussed was to build separate, secure portals, like a digital version of the secure physical rooms that have long existed for classified information, in some instances on company servers. Through these online rooms, the government would request data, companies would deposit it and the government would retrieve it, people briefed on the discussions said.

****End Of Update****

The U.S. government has been hacking in to the servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple and has been taking their user data without their knowledge or consent. According to the Washington Post, the information being stolen includes “audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs”. This program is known as PRISM, and it was first revealed by the Washington Post on Thursday. Since the story broke, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has admitted that PRISM exists and so has Barack Obama.

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Ben Fulford (June 10 2013) ~ Open Battle Raging Between Sabbatean Cabal And Military Industrial Complex

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Benjamin Fulford

The recent cabal controlled corporate media frenzy of “disclosure” about things like NSA eavesdropping, politically targeted IRS tax investigations and the Bilderberg meeting are signs of full blown panic. All these disclosures seemed to be timed to distract public attention from last week’s pentagon and US agency supported love fest summit meeting between US President Barak Obama and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

The erupting trade war between Europe and China and the posse of economic hit-men trying to ruin Japan’s economy are also signs of and intensifying battle over control of the world’s financial system and thus the future of our species.

The attacks on Japan’s economy are motivated by the fact the Abe government just announced $32 billion in economic assistance for Africa in a sign Japan is no longer handing its foreign currency to the cabal in order to finance Zionist wars. They are also motivated by the fact that Japan’s government has just begun to do the obvious and eliminate its “200% GDP debt” with the stroke of a pen. Well known mainstream economist Jeffery Sachs last week admitted to this writer, at a Japan Foreign Correspondent’s Club press conference, that there was no theoretical reason why Japan’s government could not just print yen, buy up all the outstanding Japanese government bonds and put them in the garbage. Sachs, who heads the Earth Institute at Columbia University, was also very enthusiastic about the big Japanese plans to modernize Africa saying they were very concrete, detailed and realistic. Of course the corporate propaganda media representatives, or more likely their bosses, did not want to let the world know that Japan’s government had made a decision to break free from Sabbatean debt slavery. Unlike tiny Iceland, Japan is the world’s third largest economy and its biggest creditor nation. Its’ breaking of ranks with the G7 debt-slavery cabal is truly historical.

The other big move in Asia that was under-reported was the resumption of negotiations between North Korea, Japan and South Korea. The goal supported by all parties, including China, Russia and the Pentagon, is regional peace.

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Alcuin Bramerton ~ Free America Versus The NSA, DHS & PRISM. The End-Time Fight To Restore The Fourth Amendment

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alcuinbramerton.blogspot.com June 9 2013 (Thanks, Alcuin)

Back in December 2007, before he was US President, Senator Barack Obama joined Senator Chris Dodd in threatening to filibuster the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Obama opposed provisions granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies which shared private client information with the government.

At that time Obama’s office issued this statement: “Granting such immunity undermines the constitutional protections Americans trust the Congress to protect. Senator Obama supports a filibuster of this bill ….”

A year later, in February 2008, supporting an amendment which he believed repealed retroactive immunity from FISA, Obama said: “We can give our intelligence and law enforcement community the powers they need to track down and take out terrorists without undermining our commitment to the rule of law, or our basic rights and liberties.”

Obama was rightly concerned that telecommunications companies might get away with sharing clients’ private information without legal scrutiny. Now, in June 2013, we learn that President Obama’s National Security Agency has compelled Verizon, the American broadband and telecommunications giant, to hand over all of its client data records.

Back in 2008, Obama wanted to track potential terrorist activity without undermining UScommitment to the rule of law, or US basic rights and liberties. Today, the Obama administration is actively undermining the US rule of law, US basic rights and US core liberties, ostensibly in the name of tracking “terrorists”.

There always needs to be a mature balance between security and liberty. The American tradition has long been to err on the side of liberty. America’s founders feared a government powerful enough to commit unreasonable searches and seizures and were careful to craft a constitution designed to protect citizens’ privacy.

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Julian Assange ~ On PRISM: US Justice System In ‘Calamitous’ Collapse

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RT June 8 2013

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (AFP Photo / Geoff Caddick)

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has slammed a recently exposed NSA mass-surveillance scheme as a “calamitous collapse in the rule of law.” Google, Facebook and other tech giants apparently involved have denied giving the NSA access to their servers.

Assange accused the US government of trying to “launder” its activities concerning the large-scale spying program PRISM. The system was made public after a leaked classified National Security Agency (NSA) document was revealed earlier this week.

“The US administration has the phone records of everyone in the United States and is receiving them daily from carriers to the National Security Agency under secret agreements. That’s what’s come out,” he said.

President Barack Obama earlier defended PRISM, saying it was a key part of the country’s counterterrorism efforts and that privacy was a necessary sacrifice for the sake of security. He also lashed out at the media, and those who leaked information on the massive spying program.

“If every step that we are taking to try to prevent a terrorist act is on the front page of the newspapers or any television, then presumably the people that are trying to do us harm are going to be able to get around our preventative measures,” Obama said.

Critics of the Obama Administration have accused it of an unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers – more government officials are being prosecuted for leaks under Obama than all previous administrations combined. News of PRISM comes just after reports that the Justice Department secretly obtained two months of AP reporters’ telephone records and tapped Fox News reporter James Rosen’s private email.

“Over the last 10 years, the US justice system has suffered from a collapse, a calamitous collapse, in the rule of law,” Assange said.

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Douglas J. Hagmann ~ DHS Insider: It’s About To Get Very Ugly

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Northeast Intelligence Network June 7 2013

Something quite unexpected happened just hours ago, in the dark of night, during a two-day layover in Washington, DC. My son and I are scheduled to take part in a seminar outside of Raleigh, North Carolina this weekend, so we combined our travels to include a side-trip to DC for a business meeting we had previously arranged. It was during this layover that something seemingly ripped from the pages of a spy novel took place.

While I was in the middle of a perfectly good and well needed sleep in the very early hours of this morning, I received a message. I cannot disclose how I received this message, at least not now. The discerning reader will understand why, which, by the way, would make a very interesting story alone. The message was extremely clear and precise. I was to meet my high level DHS insider at a very specific location in Washington, DC at a time when most “normal” people, except third-shift workers are still asleep. And, I was to come alone and make certain that I was not being followed, and I was to leave any cell phone or electronic device behind.

Seriously? I thought, as I was still trying to make sense of it all. Is all this really necessary? Is this really happening? I considered waking my son to accompany me, but opted to follow the instructions to the letter. Besides, I thought, he’s not the most affable middle-of-the-night person. I left a hastily written but detailed note in my hotel room before my departure in the event something happened. I looked at the digital clock on my rental car (my personal car would never survive our long distance trip). It was 3:20 a.m.

The meeting

I felt like I was part of a spy movie set in our nation’s capital. A chill rose up my spine as I waited in the dark of a chilly, misty and foggy pre-dawn morning. I was to meet with my DHS insider source at a time when most of the nation is asleep, at a place I could swear was featured in the movie All the President’s Men. No one and I mean no one knows I’m here, I thought, as I could see one of the most recognizable national landmarks in the distance.

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Jon Rappoport ~ The Unspoken Qualifications For President Of The United States

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www.nomorefakenews.com June 6 2013

An announcement: This is satire.

After writing about 150 million Americans going to Mexico, swimming back across the Rio Grande, applying for benefits as immigrants, and becoming instant millionaires…some people believed I was reporting (or misreporting) a fact.

But satire can be more real than reality. (Many things, as it turns out, are more real than reality.)

Television, for example.

Anyway, the period between the election of a president and his inauguration is a fascinating one, because that’s when the shiny new commander-in-chief learns the score.

He knows certain secrets already, but people of importance fill him in on the rest.

In President Obama’s case, he had questions.

On a fall afternoon in 2008, comfortably ensconced in a Virginia cave 600 feet below the Langley headquarters of the CIA, in a room that was soundproofed a dozen different ways, Obama sucked on a non-filtered Camel, sipped brandy, and said:

“Look, Mark, or whatever your real name is, I get the fact that I’m deliriously happy with Michelle. That’s been explained to me. We’re the perfect couple. I get the fact that I’m working for ‘the bankers,’ and I get that I’ll be launching a few military actions and stringing out operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. They already filled me in on that. But what about jobs?”

Mark, an Ivy League prunehead from an old Boston family, stood up and started pacing.

“Barack, the jobs thing is tricky. We don’t want jobs to come back. We want to make people believe they will come back and are coming back. We can manage the statistics on it. That’s no problem. But we need you to be the blue-sky guy for a bit. We need you to sell it. We need you to dazzle the rubes with a brand of bullshit that soars like music.”

“Well,” the new president said, “that’s what I do. That’s why I’m here. Don’t worry about it.”

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