June 17, 2013

Just Wondering

[size=12] Is Naomi Wolf working for the NSA?

by DAVE LINDORFF

I hate to do this, but I feel obligated to share, as the story unfolds, my creeping concern that the writer Naomi Wolf is not whom she purports to be, and that her motive in writing an article on her public Facebook page speculating about whether National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden might actually be still working for the NSA, could be to support the government's effort to destroy him.


After all, with Snowden under vicious attack by both the government and the corporate media, being wrongly accused of treason, or portrayed as a drop-out slacker, a narcissist, a loser hoping to gain fame and even a "cross-dressing" weirdo, what defender of liberty would pile on with publication of a work of absolutely fact-free speculation as to whether he might also be a kind of "double agent" put out there by the NSA in order to discourage real potential whistleblowers from even considering leaking information about government spying on Americans.


Because that is exactly what Wolf has done on her website (the first clause at the opening of this article is a direct quote from the lead in Wolf's Facebook piece, but with her name substituted for Snowden's).


What basis does she offer for her wild-eyed speculation that Snowden is perhaps "not who he purports to be"?


Well, first of all she notes darkly that US spy agencies "create false identities, build fake companies, influence real media with fake stories, create distractions or demonizations in the local news that advance US policies, bug (technologically) and harass the opposition, disrupt and infiltrate the meetings and communications of factions that the US does not wish to see in power." This, she says, touting her own now rather dated 2007 book The End of America, is "something you can't not see if you spend time around people who are senior in both the political establishment and the intelligence and state department establishments. You also can't avoid seeing it if you interview principled defectors from those systems, as I have done…"


Then, after having assuring us of how well-connected she is, she raises what she calls "red flags" about Snowden: She says he talks about the beautiful "pole-dancer" girlfriend he abandoned (actually he did that for her safety, Naomi), implying his repetition process might be so that the media have a justification to keep showing her sexy photo (as though our prurient media needs a justification to do such a thing).

The media keep saying he is in a "safe house" in Hong Kong, which according to Wolf cannot exist in the former British colony, now a part of China, "Unless you are with the one organization that can still get off the surveillance grid, because that org created it."


He's not surrounded by an army of attorneys the way Wikileaks' Julian Assange was when he traveled (and by the way, I recall that for a long time, after Wikileaks ran the Bradley Manning documents, including the horrific "Collateral Damage" war crime video, there were conspiracy theorists out there claiming baselessly that he was actually probably a Mossad asset this on the basis that he had not been sufficiently leaking damaging information about Israel's actions against Palestinians).


That's it, folks! All sheer wild speculation about Snowden, with not even one shred of actual evidence against him to suggest he's anything but what he says he is: a young man who was hired to do some really dirty work spying on Americans en masse, who decided that what was happening was the creation of a totalitarian system, and who had the courage of, instead of walking away from it, putting his life in jeopardy by publicly blowing the whistle.


I have nothing against trying to uncover conspiracies, particularly those orchestrated by a government like our own which we know has manufactured from whole cloth faked evidence to justify a war in Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, even to the point of torturing captives to get them to make up tales that would justify that fake evidence. But when someone with Wolf's reputation on the left sinks to this level of baseless and libelous accusations against a brave person who is under attack by that government, it cannot be allowed to pass.


Of course, I don't really think that Wolf is acting as an agent for the government (I could only speculate about that, and I won't). And if she were just thinking these idle thoughts, and maybe raising them in a playful discussion at home with a few friends over dinner, I would see nothing wrong in the exercise. But as a highly media-savvy public person, she's publishing them intentionally where they will be widely circulated: on her publicly accessible Facebook page. I have to conclude she has allowed her instinct for self-promotion and grandstanding in this case to let her do something truly treacherous and unconscionable: baselessly defaming and attacking the credibility of a brave whistleblower who is under official under attack.


As a long-time investigative reporter, I also dispute Wolf's self-serving claim that her own experience in dealing with whistleblowers shows them to be uniformly disorganized and inarticulate. In my experience, some are very disorganized and hard to follow because of their focus on the trees in their personal forest, but some whistleblowers are intensely organized and know exactly what they want to tell you as a journalist. They are also apt, organized or not, contrary to what Wolf says, to highlight the danger they are in, and that they may be putting the reporter in. Sometimes this may be simply to make sure you are interested and recognize the seriousness of what they have to say, and sometimes it is out of genuine fear for themselves and concern for the journalist's safety, and perhaps also to make sure you fully understand what you're getting into and that you will not cave and reveal their identity the moment you are put under pressure yourself.


Wolf, who always makes a point of mentioning she's a Yale grad and a Rhodes Scholar who studied at Oxford, should take care in assuming that someone with only a high school diploma speaking in whole sentences or paragraphs is probably reciting "talking points" from a script. Her assumption reeks of class-based stereotyping. I have met car mechanics, who besides working miracles on my old cars, can speak in multiple paragraphs about politics, often with more wisdom and insight than most of the ivy-league pundits on the tube.


As for Wolf's claim of there being "no safe houses" in Hong Kong, I just have to laugh. Having lived in Hong Kong for five years, I can assure her that there are myriad urban warrens all over Hong Kong where one could hide for decades undetected, as well as vast stretches of tropical wilderness in the New Territories where people can become lost for days, even with professional rescue teams looking for them. Wolf should stick to things she has actual knowledge about, instead of trashing good people on the basis of ignorant speculation and pretend savvy.


Unless and until someone comes up with a single hard fact seriously suggesting that Snowden is a fake, this kind of fantasizing should halt. Wolf should apologize for her self-aggrandizing tripe and make a generous donation from her book sales to the Snowden defense fund unless of course she has evidence that the Progressive Change Campaign Committee is an NSA or CIA front group.


DAVE LINDORFF is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).


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I am not convinced that Naomi Woolf is a fifth column spook - although for good order's sake I can't write the idea off completely.

My main thoughts on this whole affair is that people do look at these big events differently from each other. Most of us can see things two different ways, the cynical and the ultra-ultra cynical. Sadly, the intensely duplicitous world we now live in has made us far more paranoid than hitherto, and everything is open to several different interpretations.

The Swowden revelations seems to me to have triggered this syndrome more than most.

I suspect we're all going to have to get used to this Janus face sort of thinking from now on.

David Guyatt Wrote:I am not convinced that Naomi Woolf is a fifth column spook - although for good order's sake I can't write the idea off completely.

My main thoughts on this whole affair is that people do look at these big events differently from each other. Most of us can see things two different ways, the cynical and the ultra-ultra cynical. Sadly, the intensely duplicitous world we now live in has made us far more paranoid than hitherto, and everything is open to several different interpretations.

The Swowden revelations seems to me to have triggered this syndrome more than most.

I suspect we're all going to have to get used to this Janus face sort of thinking from now on.

No, I don't think it likely to remotely likely either David......she brought up some good points and questions; the article condemning hers did, as well.....we are left with an information vacuum and conundrum/mystery for now.
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Edward Snowden: the truth about US surveillance will emerge

In a live chat with Guardian readers, NSA whistleblower says US leaders cannot 'cover this up by jailing or murdering me'

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• The Guardian, Monday 17 June 2013 07.27 BST
  
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Snowden emphatically denied speculation that he had cut a deal with the Chinese government. Photograph: the Guardian

The NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has warned that the truth about the extent of surveillance carried out by US authorities would emerge, even if he was eventually silenced.
In a live Q&A with Guardian readers from a secret location in Hong Kong, Snowden hinted at more disclosures to come and that their publication could not be prevented by his arrest or more chillingly his death.
Answering a *question about whether he had more secret material, the 29-year-old former National Security Agency contractor wrote: "All I can say right now is the US government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or *murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped."
Snowden, who is hiding in a safe house in Hong Kong, where he remains free despite admitting to the biggest leak of US secrets in a generation, spent nearly two hours taking questions on the Guardian website. His discussed issues ranging from why he picked a Chinese-controlled territory as his hideout to his specific concerns about the Obama administration. He also clarified questions about his salary atBooz Allen Hamilton and the the extent of access he had as a contractor for the NSA.
With opinion in the US divided between those who see him as a traitor and those who view him as a hero, Snowden said he fled the country because he did not believe he had a chance of a fair trial.
"The US government, just as they did with other whistleblowers, immediately and predictably destroyed any possibility of a fair trial at home, openly declaring me guilty of treason and that the disclosure of secret, criminal, and even unconstitutional acts is an unforgivable crime. That's not justice, and it would be foolish to volunteer yourself to it if you can do more good outside of prison than in it," he said.
Snowden, whose leaked documents opened a debate about the balance between intrusive government surveillance versus security, does not regard himself as having committed a crime but instead as the person exposing alleged criminality on the part of the Obama administration.
In the Q&A session, Snowden said he had initially been encouraged by the public response. "Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history," he said.
Snowden emphatically denied speculation that he had cut a deal with the Chinese government, giving them classified documents in exchange for providing him with an eventual safe haven. In the most colourful quote of the interview, he said: "Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now."
He claimed that he had not revealed documents about US operations about legitimate military targets. Snowden said he had focused instead on operations that targeted civilian infrastructure: universities, hospitals and private businesses. "These nakedly, aggressively criminal acts are wrong no matter the target … Congress hasn't declared war on the countries the majority of them are our allies but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people."
Snowden, who spent a decade working with various defence contractors on secondment to the CIA and the NSA as a communications specialist, reiterated that he had delayed going public because of his hope that Barack Obama's election would mark a sea change but he had ended up disillusioned.
"Unfortunately, shortly after assuming power, he closed the door on investigating systemic violations of law, deepened and expanded several abusive programs, and refused to spend the political capital to end the kind of human rights violations like we see in Guantánamo, where men still sit without charge," he said.
During interviews in Hong Kong, Snowden expressed a desire once he had gone underground to speak directly to the public through a Q&A.
His choice of Hong Kong has left many puzzled, especially as he could have opted to fly direct to Iceland, which he said was his preferred asylum option and whose legislators have emerged as strong supporters of online freedom and whistleblowing.
Explaining his reasoning, Snowden said it had been risky for him to leave the US, as NSA employees have to declare foreign travel 30 days in advance. "Iceland could be pushed harder, quicker, before the public could have a chance to make their feelings known, and I would not put that past the current US administration," he said.
Snowden said he had chosen Hong Kong as a based because it provided a "cultural and legal framework to allow me to work without being immediately detained".
Addressing the backlash against him in the US, Snowden said much of it was predictable. He said: "It's important to bear in mind I'm being called a traitor by men like former vice president Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American."
Snowden also clarified a point about his salary, which he had put in an earlier interview at $200,000. His last employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, said he made $122,000 a year. Snowden, who held a number of posts in recent years, said $200,000 was a "salary high" and that he had taken a pay cut to work at Booz Allen.

Dave Lindorff wasn't serious about calling Naomi an NSA agent.He only substituted her name for Snowdens name in the first paragraph to give Naomi a little pinch of her own reality.How does that feel Naomi?

And,I can still remember during the height of OWS,Naomi coming out of a high class dinner party,wearing some nice $1,000 evening dress,and proceeding to get herself arrested.Great publicity,but you have to admit,rich dinner parties are not of the 99%.

Maybe it was just the martini's..........

AARON MATÉ: We turn now to the latest news in the NSA surveillance scandal. On Monday, both President Obama and whistleblower Edward Snowden gave extensive interviews on the surveillance programs Snowden exposed and Obama is now being forced to defend. Speaking to Charlie Rose on PBS, Obama drew a line between his surveillance efforts and those of the Bush administration. He also reaffirmed his insistence that no Americans' phone calls or emails are being directly monitored without court orders. AARON MATÉ: Obama's comments came as new poll numbers showed his approval rating has dipped 8 percent since the NSA disclosures emerged nearly two weeks ago. The drop was even higher among young voters, whose support for Obama fell 17 points. In his interview with PBS, President Obama was also asked about the potential extradition of whistleblower Edward Snowden. Obama referred questions to federal prosecutors but said Snowden faces "criminal investigationand possible extradition."
AMY GOODMAN: Well, after going public as the source behind the NSA disclosures just over a week ago, Edward Snowden remerged on Monday after several days of quiet. In an online chat with the British newspaper The Guardian, Snowden rejected what he called "smear" efforts to paint him as a spy for China, saying he's had no contact with the Chinese government. He also defended his leaking of classified NSA documents, saying he deliberately chose not to reveal, quote, "any US operations against legitimate military targets," unquote. He added, "I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals and private businesses because it is dangerous. These nakedly, aggressive criminal acts are wrong no matter the target," he wrote.
Snowden indicated he remains in Hong Kong after arriving there last month, but wouldn't confirm his exact location. He also stood by his controversial assertion that he hasas an NSA contractor, had the capability "to wiretap anyone" in the U.S. with a personal email address. In comments suggesting he may be concerned his life is in danger, Snowden said more leaks are on the way, no matter what happens to him. He said, quote, "All I can say right now is the US Government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped," he wrote.
In the latest of Snowden's disclosures, The Guardian of London reported on Sunday the U.S. and Britain spied on foreign diplomats at two international summits in London during 2009. Britain's NSA counterpart, the GCHQ, established fake Internet cafés to spy on foreign delegates' computer use, and the NSA shared information on the phone calls of Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev. The revelation came just as the G8 summit opened in Ireland, with President Obama in attendance and Britain again playing host.
All this comes as the Obama administration appears to be stepping up its effort to defend the surveillance program Snowen exposed. Before Obama's interview with PBS Monday, the National Security Agency disclosed it investigated less than 300 phone records seized in the broad collection of metadata last year. The agency also said the monitoring has foiled terror plots in the U.S. and 20 other countries, and vowed to release details this week. The head of the National Security Agency, General Keith Alexander, is appearing before the House Intelligence Committee today in a rare public hearing.
For more, we're going to Glenn Greenwald, the columnist for The Guardian of London who broke the NSA surveillance story earlier this month and a number of others since, including Snowden coming forward as the NSA whistleblower. He's back home in Brazil after returning from Hong Kong, where Edward Snowden is believed to remain. On Monday, Glenn Greenwald moderated Snowden's online chat with The Guardian.
Well, welcome back to Democracy Now!, Glenn. A lot has been happening. To say the least, you have been very busy. Talk about firstyou moderated the discussion yesterday. What most surprised you, or, I should say, what do you feel was most important about what Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower, wrote yesterday and was asked?
GLENN GREENWALD: I think the key thing is that he continuously emphasizes that the caricature being made of him, that he's some kind of a spy or setting out to destroy the United States, is completely inconsistent with his behavior. He could have released all sorts of extremely damaging, even crippling, documents, if that had been his intention. He could have sold those documents to foreign adversaries, if he wanted to enrich himself. None of those things were what he did. He instead very carefully vetted the documents that he turned over to us, and some to The Washington Post, and urged us that we then conduct our own review to make sure that the documents that end up being published are ones that are truly in the public interest. And I think what you see here is a person who was very disturbed by this massive surveillance apparatus built in the United States that spies not only on American citizens, but the world, with very little checks, very little oversight. And he's making clear that his intention is to inform his fellow citizens, even at the expense of his own liberty or even life. And I think that comes through very clearly.
AARON MATÉ: Well, Glenn, during his Guardian online chat, Snowden was asked to respond to the recent comments of former Vice President Dick Cheney. Speaking on Fox News, Cheney called Snowden a traitor who may be a Chinese spy. AARON MATÉ: Asked for his response, Edward Snowden told the Guardian readers, quote, "This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering [the Iraq War] that has killed over 4,400 [Americans] and maimed nearly 32,000 [Americans], as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American." Glenn, what is your assessment of the criticism of Edward Snowden from both the right, as personified by Cheney, but also from liberals, from supporters of President Obama?
GLENN GREENWALD: It's interesting, because the criticism completely converges. In fact, I recall very well during the Bush years of 2006, 2007, when their NSA scandal was really raging, that exactly the same arguments were being made about those of us who were writing about these programs and those who had leaked them and the journalists who had published them, that they were traitors, that they were endangering national security, that they were engaged in all sorts of attempts to harm the United States. And it's amazing because back then you heard from Democrats, none of whom was saying that, and yet now, under a Democratic president, of course, many of them are mimicking exactly those same beliefs. I mean, give Cheney at least some minimal credit that he's being consistent, horriblyconsistently horrible, but at least consistent, in contrast to these Democrats who, under Bush, were very ardent critics of the surveillance state, of secrecy, of the idea that journalists are criminals or leakers are criminals, who now have completely done a 180 reversal now that it's a Democrat in office. And I can tell you that, by far, the most vehement and vicious attacks on our reporting and the stories that we've been writing come not from Republicans, but from Democratic partisans, both in politics and in the media.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn, right now the G8 summit is taking place. Can you talk about the latest release from Ed Snowden about the U.S. and British governments using Internet cafés, phone taps, etc., to spy on G8G-20 delegates during the 2009 summit?
GLENN GREENWALD: Sure. I didn't actually participate in that story, but the reason it was significant is not because it shows that the United States and Britain are spying, say, on the Russian president, which I think everybody expects and probably a lot of people want. The significance is twofold. One is that they are spying very aggressively on their own allies, under the guise of inviting them to an economic summit. But I think the much bigger part of the story is it shows just how sophisticated and deceitful the eavesdropping capabilities are of Western governments, and specifically of their intelligence and surveillance agencies.
And so, this is what I think is really the critical aspect of all of these stories, which is, there are these extremely invasive capabilities being assembled by these governments that allow all kinds of deceitful spying, obviously ones that even trick the Russian government in the efforts to protect themselves from spying, and we ought to have as part of our debate an understanding of what these capabilities are, so that we can have a real discussion about the kind of limits that should be imposed on them. So, that's always what happens is, when these spying agencies create these capabilities, in the first instance, they direct them at other governments, they direct them at hostile countries, but they always end up creeping further and further toward domestic surveillance. And we ought to know what these capabilities are, so that we can anticipate them and plan for them and talk about ways to limit them and prevent abuse.
AARON MATÉ: Well, Glenn, I've read some criticism of Snowden and your reporting, drawing a distinction between exposing domestic surveillance and then blowing the whistle on foreign espionage, saying that they're separate, and that, in fact, talking about programs like this one that was uncovered in Britain, spying on foreign leaders, distracts from the issue of domestic spying.
GLENN GREENWALD: So, I think there's a continuum here. You know, the journalistic inquiry is: Is there a significant public interest, and does it outweigh whatever harm you might cause? And so, on the continuum of what's in the public interest, I think that at the very top end of that spectrum, in terms of public interest, is when a government engages in massive surveillance on its own citizens without suspicion or evidence of wrongdoing, which is what most of our stories have focused on. I think after that comes when the governments of the United States and its allies are spying on citizens of the world without suspicion. There is a huge loss to privacy, Internet freedom, liberty, when the NSA spies on innocent people who aren't Americans, who live in other countries, as well.
And then, I think at the far end of that continuum, on the other spectrum, is when governments spy on other governments. So I agree that the public interest there is less than it is when the NSA spies domestically, but it's not nonexistent. As I said, we need to know what these capabilities are, so that we can act before they start being applied domestically. But the vast bulk of our stories have been and will continue to be stories about how the NSA directs its surveillance at Americans and citizens around the world indiscriminately, without any evidence of wrongdoing, what Mr. Snowden yesterday called the largest, suspicionless surveillance program ever created in human history.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let's go to what President Obama said in the Charlie Rose interview, when he said he could say unequivocally that we're not listening to your phone calls. The NSAit says"The NSA cannot listen to your phone calls," Obama said. The NSA cannot target your emails, and have not, unless they get a subpoena. Can you talk about that?
GLENN GREENWALD: I'm staggered by how deceitful and misleading that claim is from President Obama. It's actually worse than just misleading and deceitful; it's just outright false. And this is the story that we're working on to publish next, which is an inside look at what the FISA court really does in terms of what it is called oversight, but is really an empty fig leaf, when it monitors the NSA.
Under the 2008 FISA law, which replaced the 30-year FISA law enacted in 1978, the principal change is that the United States no longer needs an individual warrant when it listens in on the telephone calls or reads the emails of American citizens when they communicate with people outside of the United States. It is true that when American citizens talk to other Americans on U.S. soil, exclusively domestic communications, the NSA legally is required to get an individualized warrant from the FISA court before they can listen to the content of those communications. But when an American citizen is talking to somebody outside of the United States who's not a U.S. citizen, and the target of those communications is the person outside of the United States, that is now completely legal for the NSA to eavesdrop on that call or read the email without going and getting a warrant. That is the whole point of that 2008 law. Remember, the Bush administration in 2005 got caught eavesdropping on the conversations of American citizens, the international conversations of American citizens, without a warrant. And what that 2008 law did is legalize that Bush program by eliminating the warrant requirement.
And so, every six months, the NSA goes to the FISA court, and they say, "Here are the procedures that we use for determining who is and is not a U.S. citizen, who is and is not on U.S. soil." The FISA court stamps thean approval stamp on those guidelines, and the NSA is then empowered to go around collecting whatever calls and whatever emails they want. They can force the telecoms and the Internet providers to give them whatever content they want, which often includes American citizens talking to these foreign targets, without any kind of a search warrant. So when President Obama says nobody is listening to your calls or reading your emails without first getting a search warrant, that is absolutely false. It is true that the NSA can't deliberately targetdeliberately target U.S. citizens for that kind of surveillance, but it is also the case that they are frequently engaging in surveillance of exactly that kind of invasive technique involving U.S. persons.
Let me just say one last thing. This is whyjust go to Google and read about thisRon Wyden and Mark Udall, two Democrats on the Intelligence Committee, have been repeatedly asking the NSA, "How many Americans' telephone calls and emails are you intercepting without warrants under this program?" And the NSA continuously tells them, "I'm sorry, we can't provide you with even a rough estimate. We don't have the technical capabilities to do that. It would take too much time and distract away from our core mission for us to assemble those statistics." So this idea that President Obama is promoting, that the NSA never listens to Americans' calls or reads their emails without warrants, is utterly false.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn, we have to break for just 30 seconds, but we want to come back and play another clip for you of President Obama speaking on Charlie Rose on PBS on Monday night. Glenn Greenwald, of course, is the award-winning journalist who has broken the NSA leaks story on Edward Snowden, who has come forward as the whistleblower who released a tremendous amount of information about the NSA and his role as a consultant working in an NSA office in Hawaii as a consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton. This is Democracy Now! We'll be back with Glenn Greenwald in just 30 seconds.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Glenn Greenwald. He is back in Brazil from Hong Kong, where he broke these major stories on the National Security Agency and what it is doing with our email, our phone calls and much more. Aaron?
AARON MATÉ: Well, Glenn, I want to go back to Obama's interview with Charlie Rose on Monday night. Obama dismissed fears the NSA's bulk collection of metadata could potentially be abused. AARON MATÉ: Glenn, so that's Obama saying that we have this trove, but it's not accessed, basically, unless there's probable cause. Your response?
GLENN GREENWALD: OK, first of all, the fact that there are legal constraints in place, as we've seen repeatedly throughout history, is completely meaningless if there's no meaningful and robust oversight. And there is nobody that looks over the NSA's shoulder and finds out whose metadata they are linking to the actual identity of the person, whose metadata they're investigating and putting together dossiers. It is completely within the discretion of the NSA, checked only by other executive branch agencies, to determine that.
Secondly, there is nothing easier in the world than linking these telephone numbers to any individual. Anybody could do that with very little effort. The American government, the NSA collects these massive databases that contains all sorts of information about people that enables a picture to be put together that is very invasive. So, whether or not there are rules that the NSA has adopted internally that say you can only do this if you have reasonable belief that the person has engaged in wrongdoing is completely independent of the fact that theas Obama himself says, there is massive potential for abuse inside an agency that is incredibly secretive and that has very few checks and mechanisms for limitations on that abuse. And that, I think, is the key point.
And this isyou know, we have had more debate in the last nine or 10 days over what the NSA is, what it does, than we have had in the last 10 years, and that's ultimately really what our journalism is intended to achieve, is to drag all of this out into the spotlight and make us understand what the NSA's capabilities are, what kinds of potential for abuse there is, and what the checks on that abuse are, or the lack thereof.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, I wanted to get your response to Republican Congressmember Peter King of New York. Speaking to CNN last week, he called for your prosecution over the reporting you've done on Edward Snowden's revelations. AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, your response?
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, first of all, I would defy anybody to go and look at anything that we reported and identify a single piece of information that even conceivably has harmed national security. The idea that we have somehow tipped off the terrorists to the fact that the U.S. government is monitoring their telephone calls and emails is completely idiotic. Any terrorist who's alive has known for many, many years that the U.S. government is eagerly attempting to do that. The only things that we've revealed are things to the American people that they didn't know about how their communications, not the communication of the terrorists, are being monitored.
Secondly, there's this thing in the United States. It's called the Constitution. And the First Amendment to it guarantees the right of freedom of the press. And what freedom of the press means, if it means anything, is the right to, as a journalist or even just as a citizen engaged in journalism, go in and investigate what your government is doing in the dark, and then use the mechanisms of the press to inform your fellow citizens about what it is that they're doing. That is the heart and soul of investigative journalism. So if you take Peter King at his word, that any time national security secrets are revealed, it would mean that any investigative journalist, by definition, is a felon and ought to be prosecuted and criminalized.
There was a column in The Washington Post by Marc Thiessen, who is the primary apologist and defender of the Bush'sof the Bush administration's torture regimehe was a Bush speech writeralso essentially saying that I committed felonies, and The Washington Post did, as well. It's incredible how menacing that is. If you're looking for threats to America's national security, you should look to the people who are calling for prosecutions in this case, not to the people, like Edward Snowden or myself, who are exposing it.
AMY GOODMAN: But, Glenn, are you afraid? Are you afraid for your safety, well, your privacy, etc.?
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I think if you look at what the U.S. government has been doing over the last five or six years, it would be irrational to just dismiss the concern that they may prosecute journalists. They've embraced theories that do criminalize journalism. They convened a grand jury in the WikiLeaks case, even though WikiLeaks did nothing more than report government secrets. They didn't steal them. They didn't play any role in obtaining them. They embraced a theory that James Rosen, the Washington bureau chief of Fox News, was a co-conspirator in felonies by talking to his source. So, of course there's a concern that these kindthat this kind of legal jeopardy will become real, but it's not a fear that will deter me in any way from continuing to report very, very aggressively on these stories.
AMY GOODMAN: Bradley Manning is being tried at Fort Meade. That's the headquarters of the National Security Agency. Can you talk about the significance of that and how they're related, Glenn?
GLENN GREENWALD: Sure. I mean, I think theyou know, the critical context for everything that has happened here, from Snowden's leaks to his decision to leave the United States and go to Hong Kong, the context of it is this incredibly vicious and unparalleled war on whistleblowers that the Obama administration has been waging. And, of course, that war on whistleblowers is as vividly apparent in the case of Bradley Manning as it is anywhere else. Here is somebody who didn't release any top-secret information. It was all secret and classified. There is zero evidence that any national security harm came from it. There's certainly no evidence that he intended any national security harm. He, too, could have sold that information or given it to a foreign government that was hostile to the United States. He didn't do that. His intent clearly was to blow the whistle. And yet he's almost certain to be in prison for the next two decades, probably, if the U.S. government has its way, for the rest of his life, at the age of 25. He was, as the U.N. found, subjected to very abusive detention practices. And so, when you say that Ed Snowden shouldn't have left the United States or anything like that, the context is that the U.S. government has proven that whistleblowers will be severely and harshly treated as a way of deterring and intimidating people from engaging in further disclosures.
AARON MATÉ: Glenn, the NSA has promised to come out this week with details on the plots that it says have been foiled by surveillance. Your assessment of what you've heard so far? We've heard talk of phone records being used to foil the subway bombing plot in 2009. And also, your assessment of the news that the NSA is saying that 300 phone records were searched last year?
GLENN GREENWALD: So, this is the playbook that the U.S. government has been using for I don't know how many decades to delegitimize any disclosure, going back to the Pentagon Papers, when they accused Daniel Ellsberg of helping the communists in Vietnam and jeopardizing and putting at risk the
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn, we have 10 seconds.
GLENN GREENWALD: the lives of American servicemembers. So, it's completely irrational. I think any of those claims should be very rigorously scrutinized, because they don't stand up to scrutiny.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn, do you have more pieces coming out?
GLENN GREENWALD: Yes, we do, including in the next couple days.

from Webster Tarbley h/t willyloman

Quote:The operations of secret intelligence agencies aiming at the manipulation of public opinion generally involve a combination of cynical deception with the pathetic gullibility of the targeted populations.


There is ample reason to believe that the case of Edward Joseph Snowden fits into this pattern. We are likely dealing here with a limited hangout operation, in which carefully selected and falsified documents and other materials are deliberately revealed by an insider who pretends to be a fugitive rebelling against the excesses of some oppressive or dangerous government agency.

But the revelations turn out to have been prepared with a view to shaping the public consciousness in a way which is advantageous to the intelligence agency involved. At the same time, gullible young people can be duped into supporting a personality cult of the leaker, more commonly referred to as a "whistleblower." A further variation on the theme can be the attempt of the sponsoring intelligence agency to introduce their chosen conduit, now posing as a defector, into the intelligence apparatus of a targeted foreign government. In this case, the leaker or whistleblower attains the status of a triple agent.

Any attempt to educate public opinion about the dynamics of limited hangout operations inevitably collides with the residue left in the minds of millions by recent successful examples of this technique. It will be hard for many to understand Snowden, precisely because they will insist on seeing him as the latest courageous example in a line of development which includes Daniel Ellsberg and Julian Assange, both still viewed by large swaths of naïve opinion as authentic challengers of oppressive government.

This is because the landmark limited hangout operation at the beginning of the current post-Cold War era was that of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon papers, which laid the groundwork for the CIA's Watergate attack on the Nixon administration, and more broadly, on the office of the presidency itself. More recently, we have had the case of Assange and Wikileaks. Using these two cases primarily, we can develop a simple typology of the limited hangout operation which can be of significant value to those striving to avoid the role of useful idiots amidst the current cascade of whistleblowers and limited hangout artists.

In this analysis, we should also recall that limited hangouts have been around for a very long time. In 1620 Fra Paolo Sarpi, the dominant figure of the Venetian intelligence establishment of his time, advised the Venetian senate that the best way to defeat anti-Venetian propaganda was indirectly. He recommended the method of saying something good about a person or institution while pretending to say something bad. An example might be criticizing a bloody dictator for beating his dog - the real dimensions of his crimes are thus totally underplayed.

Limited hangout artists are instant media darlings

The most obvious characteristic of the limited hangout operative is that he or she immediately becomes the darling of the controlled corporate media. In the case of Daniel Ellsberg, his doctored set of Pentagon papers were published by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and eventually by a consortium totaling seventeen corporate newspapers. These press organs successfully argued the case for publication all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where they prevailed against the Nixon administration.

Needless to say, surviving critics of the Warren Commission, and more recent veterans of the 9/11 truth movement, and know very well that this is emphatically not the treatment reserved for messengers whose revelations are genuinely unwelcome to the Wall Street centered US ruling class. These latter are more likely to be slandered, vilified and dragged through the mud, or, even more likely, passed over in complete silence and blacked out. In extreme cases, they can be kidnapped, renditioned or liquidated.

Cass Sunstein present at the creation of Wikileaks

As for Assange and Wikileaks, the autumn 2010 document dump was farmed out in advance to five of the most prestigious press organs in the world, including the New York Times, the London Guardian, El Pais of Madrid, Der Spiegel of Hamburg, and Le Monde of Paris. This was the Assange media cartel, made up of papers previously specialized in discrediting 9/11 critics and doubters. But even before the document dumps had begun, Wikileaks had received a preemptive endorsement from none other than the notorious totalitarian Cass Sunstein, later an official of the Obama White House, and today married to Samantha Power, the author of the military coup that overthrew Mubarak and currently Obama's pick for US ambassador to the United Nations. Sunstein is infamous for his thesis that government agencies should conduct covert operations using pseudo-independent agents of influence for the "cognitive infiltration of extremist groups" - meaning of those who reject in the establishment view of history and reality. Sunstein's article entitled "Brave New WikiWorld" was published in the Washington Post of February 24, 2007, and touted the capabilities of Wikileaks for the destabilization of China. Perhaps the point of Ed Snowden's presence in Hong Kong is to begin re-targeting these capabilities back towards the original anti-Chinese plan.

Snowden has already become a media celebrity of the first magnitude. His career was launched by the US left liberal Glenn Greenwald, now writing for the London Guardian, which expresses the viewpoints of the left wing of the British intelligence community. Thus, the current scandal is very much Made in England, and may benefit from inputs from the British GCHQ of Cheltenham, the Siamese twin of the NSA at Fort Meade, Maryland. During the days of his media debut, it was not uncommon to see a controlled press organ like CNN dedicating one third of every broadcast hour of air time to the birth, life, and miracles of Ed Snowden.

Another suspicious and tell-tale endorsement for Snowden comes from the former State Department public diplomacy asset Norman Solomon. Interviewed on RT, Solomon warmly embraced the Snowden Project and assured his viewers that the NSA material dished up by the Hong Kong defector used reliable and authentic. Solomon was notorious ten years ago as a determined enemy of 9/11 truth, acting as a border guard in favor of the Bush administration/neocon theory of terrorism.

Limited hangouts contain little that is new

Another important feature of the limited hangout operation if that the revelations often contain nothing new, but rather repackage old wine in new bottles. In the case of Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers, very little was revealed which was not already well known to a reader of Le Monde or the dispatches of Agence France Presse. Only those whose understanding of world affairs had been filtered through the Associated Press, CBS News, the New York Times, and the Washington Post found any of Ellsberg's material a surprise.

Of course, there was method in Ellsberg's madness. The Pentagon papers allegedly derived from an internal review of the decision-making processes leading to the Vietnam War, conducted after 1967-68 under the supervision of Morton Halperin and Leslie Gelb. Ellsberg, then a young RAND Corporation analyst and militant warmonger, was associated with this work. Upon examination, we find that the Pentagon papers tend to cover up such CIA crimes as the mass murder mandated under Operation Phoenix, and the massive CIA drug running associated with the proprietary airline Air America. Rather, when atrocities are in question, the US Army generally receives the blame. Politicians in general, and President John F. Kennedy in particular, are portrayed in a sinister light - one might say demonized. No insights whatever into the Kennedy assassination are offered. This was a smelly concoction, and it was not altogether excluded that the radicalized elements of the Vietnam era might have carried the day in denouncing the entire package as a rather obvious fabrication. But a clique around Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn loudly intervened to praise the quality of the exposé and to lionize Ellsberg personally as a new culture hero for the Silent Generation. From that moment on, the careers of Chomsky and Zinn soared. Pentagon papers skeptics, like the satirical comedian Mort Sahl, a supporter of the Jim Garrison investigation in New Orleans and a critic of the Warren Commission, faced the marginalization of their careers.

Notice also that the careers of Morton Halperin and Leslie Gelb positively thrived after they entrusted the Pentagon papers to Ellsberg, who revealed them. Ellsberg was put on trial in 1973, but all charges were dismissed after several months because of prosecutorial misconduct. Assange lived like a lord for many months in the palatial country house of an admirer in the East of England, and is now holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He spent about 10 days in jail in December 2010.

Assange first won credibility for Wikileaks with some chum in the form of a shocking film showing a massacre perpetrated by US forces in Iraq with the aid of drones. The massacre itself and the number of victims were already well known, so Assange was adding only the graphic emotional impact of witnessing the atrocity firsthand.

Limited hangouts reveal nothing about big issues like JFK, 9/11

Over the past century, there are certain large-scale covert operations which cast a long historical shadow, determining to some extent the framework in which subsequent events occur. These include the Sarajevo assassinations of 1914, the assassination of Rasputin in late 1916, Mussolini's 1922 march on Rome, Hitler's seizure of power in 1933, the assassination of French Foreign Minister Barthou in 1934, the assassination of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945, in 1963 Kennedy assassination, and 9/11. A common feature of the limited hangout operations is that they offer almost no insights into these landmark events.

In the Pentagon Papers, the Kennedy assassination is virtually a nonexistent event about which we learn nothing. As already noted, the principal supporters of Ellsberg were figures like Chomsky, whose hostility to JFK and profound disinterest in critiques of the Warren Commission were well-known. As for Assange, he rejects any further clarification of 9/11. In July 2010, Assange told Matthew Bell of the Belfast Telegraph: "I'm constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud." This is on top of Cass Sunstein's demand for active covert measures to suppress and disrupt inquiries into operations like 9/11. Snowden's key backers Glenn Greenwald and Norman Solomon have both compiled impressive records of evasion on 9/11 truth, with Greenwald specializing in the blowback theory.

The Damascus road conversions of limited hangout figures

Daniel Ellsberg started his career as a nuclear strategist of the Dr. Strangelove type working for the RAND Corporation. He worked in the Pentagon as an aide to US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. He then went to Vietnam, where he served as a State Department civilian assistant to CIA General Edward Lansdale. In 1967, he was back at RAND to begin the preparation of what would come to be known as the Pentagon papers. Ellsberg has claimed that his Damascus Road conversion from warmonger to peace angel occurred when he heard a speech from a prison-bound draft resister at Haverford College in August 1969. After a mental breakdown, Ellsberg began taking his classified documents to the office of Senator Edward Kennedy and ultimately to the New York Times. Persons who believe this fantastic story may be suffering from terminal gullibility.

In the case of Assange, it is harder to identify such a moment of conversion. Assange spent his childhood in the coils of MK Ultra, a complex of Anglo-American covert operations designed to investigate and implement mind control through the use of psychopharmaca and other means. Assange was a denizen of the Ann Hamilton-Byrne cult, in which little children that were subjected to aversive therapy involving LSD and other heavy-duty drugs. Assange spent his formative years as a wandering nomad with his mother incognito because of her involvement in a custody dispute. The deracinated Assange lived in 50 different towns and attended 37 different schools. By the age of 16, the young nihilist was active as a computer hacker using the screen name "Mendax," meaning quite simply "The Liar." (Assange's clone Snowden uses the more marketable codename of "Verax," the truth teller.) Some of Assange's first targets were Nortel and US Air Force offices in the Pentagon. Assange's chief mentor became John Young of Cryptome, who in 2007 denounced Wikileaks as a CIA front.

Snowden's story, as widely reported, goes like this: he dropped out of high school and also dropped out of a community college, but reportedly was nevertheless later able to command a salary of between $120,000 and $200,000 per year; he claims this is because he is a computer wizard. He enlisted in the US Army in May 2004, and allegedly hoped to join the special forces and contribute to the fight for freedom in Iraq. He then worked as a low-level security guard for the National Security Agency, and then went on to computer security at the CIA, including a posting under diplomatic cover in Switzerland. He moved on to work as a private contractor for the NSA at a US military base in Japan. His last official job was for the NSA at the Kunia Regional SIGINT Operations Center in Hawaii. In May 2013, he is alleged to have been granted medical leave from the NSA in Hawaii to get treatment for epilepsy. He fled to Hong Kong, and made his revelations with the help of Greenwald and a documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras. Snowden voted for the nominally anti-war, ultra-austerity "libertarian" presidential candidate Ron Paul, and gave several hundred dollars to Paul's campaign.

Snowden, like Ellsberg, thus started off as a warmonger but later became more concerned with the excesses of the Leviathan state. Like Assange, he was psychologically predisposed to the world of computers and cybernetics. The Damascus Road shift from militarist to civil libertarian remains unexplained and highly suspicious.

Snowden is also remarkable for the precision of his timing. His first revelations, open secrets though they were, came on June 5, precisely today when the rebel fortress of Qusayr was liberated by the Syrian army and Hezbollah. At this point, the British and French governments were screaming at Obama that it was high time to attack Syria. The appearance of Snowden's somewhat faded material in the London Guardian was the trigger for a firestorm of criticism against the Obama regime by the feckless US left liberals, who were thus unwittingly greasing the skids for a US slide into a general war in the Middle East. More recently, Snowden came forward with allegations that the US and the British had eavesdropped on participants in the meeting of the G-20 nations held in Britain four years ago. This obviously put Obama on the defensive just as Cameron and Hollande were twisting his arm to start the Syrian adventure. By attacking the British GCHQ at Cheltenham, Britain's equivalent to the NSA, perhaps Snowden was also seeking to obfuscate the obvious British sponsorship of his revelations.

Stories about Anglo Americans spying on high profile guests are as old as the hills, and have included a British frogman who attempted an underwater investigation of the Soviet cruiser that brought party leader N. S. Khrushchev for a visit in the 1950s. Snowden has also accused the NSA of hacking targets in China -- again, surely no surprise to experienced observers, but guaranteed to increase Sino-American tensions. As time passes, Snowden may emerge as more and more of a provocateur between Washington and Beijing.

Limited hangouts prepare large covert operations

Although, as we have seen, limited hangouts rarely illuminate the landmark covert operations which attempt to define an age, limited hangouts themselves do represent the preparation for future covert operations.

In the case of the Pentagon papers, this and other leaks during the Indo-Pakistani Tilt crisis were cited by Henry Kissinger in his demand that President Richard Nixon take countermeasures to restore the integrity of state secrets. Nixon foolishly authorized the creation of a White House anti-leak operation known as the Plumbers. The intelligence community made sure that the Plumbers operation was staffed by their own provocateurs, people who never were loyal to Nixon but rather took their orders from Langley. Here we find the already infamous CIA agent Howard Hunt, the CIA communications expert James McCord, and the FBI operative G. Gordon Liddy. These provocateurs took special pains to get arrested during an otherwise pointless break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the summer of 1972. Nixon could easily have disavowed the Plumbers and thrown this gaggle of agent provocateurs to the wolves, but he instead launched a cover up. Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, equipped with a top secret security clearance from the Office of Naval Intelligence, then began publicizing the story. The rest is history, and the lasting heritage has been a permanent weakening of the office of the presidency and the strengthening of the worst oligarchical tendencies.

Assange's Wikileaks document dump triggered numerous destabilizations and coups d'état across the globe. Not one US, British, or Israeli covert operation or politician was seriously damaged by this material. The list of those impacted instead bears a striking resemblance to the CIA enemies' list: the largest group of targets were Arab leaders slated for immediate ouster in the wave of "Arab Spring." Here we find Ben Ali of Tunisia, Qaddafi of Libya, Mubarak of Egypt, Saleh of Yemen, and Assad of Syria. The US wanted to replace Maliki with Allawi as prime minister of Iraq, so the former was targeted, as was the increasingly independent Karzai of Afghanistan. Perennial targets of the CIA included Rodriguez Kirchner of Argentina, Berlusconi of Italy, and Putin of Russia. Berlusconi soon fell victim to a coup organized through the European Central Bank, while his friend Putin was able to stave off a feeble attempt at color revolution in early 2012. Mildly satiric jabs at figures like Merkel of Germany and Sarkozy of France were included primarily as camouflage.

Assange thus had a hand in preparing one of the largest destabilization campaigns mounted by Anglo-American intelligence since 1968, or perhaps even 1848.

If the Snowden operation can help coerce the vacillating and reluctant Obama to attack Syria, our new autistic hero may claim credit for starting a general war in the Middle East, and perhaps even more. If Snowden can further poison relations between United States and China, the world historical significance of his provocations will be doubly assured. But none of this can occur unless he finds vast legions of eager dupes ready to fall for his act. We hope he won't.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/06/18/...angout-op/

Absent a some specific document or confession on the part of Snowden or retraction by Greenwald and/or the Gaurdian, proving that Snowden is or is not a manufactured leaker is not going to happen. The analysis by skeptics takes the form of asking why "that dog won't hunt." Scott Creighton's original pieces were like Yosemite Sam (cartoon character) blasting away with his shotgun. Naomi Wolf made a better case, once again around oddities, and only just less weak. Webster Tarpley provides outstanding context for what to look for arranged leak and says Snowden fits the pattern. All of this is like cosmologists providing evidence for how they think a black hole's environment will behave.

Creighton's blog post today is outstanding. It is actually a tightly reasoned piece -- no Yosemite Sam shotgun patterns. Snowden's leak provides the context for the government to "have that conversation" about the balance between security and privacy. CISPA will be the result.

It is well worth the read. Is it case closed? Hardly. Admittedly, his analysis is still looking for the signature of the black hole, so to speak. But he just might have found it.

http://willyloman.wordpress.com/2013/06/...yes-cispa/

Thank you for posting on this Lauren. This is a great interview that expands on his earlier article on the Snowden leak......

http://tarpley.net/2013/06/18/the-glenn-...o-crumble/

Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is openly accusing the nation's chief intelligence officer of lying to lawmakers in statements earlier this year. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, told a Senate hearing in March that the National Security Agency does not "wittingly" amass the personal data of millions of Americans. Speaking to CNN, Paul said Clapper lied outright.
After the recent NSA revelations emerged, Clapper said his answer was the "least untruthful" response he could provide at the time.

WikiLeaks plane 'ready' to bring Snowden to Iceland

AFP | Jun 21, 2013, 07.13 AM IST












REYKJAVIK: A chartered private jet is ready to bring US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden to Iceland from Hong Kong, a businessman connected to whistleblowing website WikiLeaks said on late Thursday.

"Everything is ready on our side and the plane could take off tomorrow," Icelandic businessman Olafur Sigurvinsson, head of WikiLeaks partner firm DataCell, told Channel2 television.

"We have really done all we can do. We have a plane and all the logistics in place. Now we are only awaiting a response from the (Icelandic) government," added the boss of Datacell, which handles donations to WikiLeaks.

The private jet belongs to a Chinese firm and has been chartered at a cost of more than $240,000 thanks to individual contributions received by Datacell, he said.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said on Wednesday he had been in contact with representatives of Snowden to discuss his possible bid for asylum in Iceland following his disclosure of US surveillance programmes.

Former US government contractor Snowden, who turns 30 on Friday, fled to Hong Kong on May 20. The United States has yet to file any formal extradition request after his bombshell leak of the National Security Agency programmes.

Iceland has said it held informal talks with an intermediary of Snowden over the possibility of seeking political asylum, but that he must present himself on Icelandic soil.

Snowden has expressed an interest in taking refuge in Iceland, saying it is a country that stands up for internet freedoms.

However, observers say Iceland's new centre-right coalition may be less willing to anger the United States than its leftist predecessor.

Interior Minister Hanna Kristjansdottir said Tuesday that the government did not feel bound by a 2010 resolution by parliament seeking to make the country a safe haven for journalists and whistleblowers from around the globe.

"The resolution is not a part of the laws that apply to asylum seekers," she told public broadcaster RUV.

Sigurvinsson said it was unlikely that Snowden would travel to Iceland without receiving a green light from the government in Reykjavik.

"It would be stupid to come here only to be extradited to the United States. In that case he'd be better off where he is," the businessman said.

Snowden has gone to ground in Hong Kong, surfacing to conduct media interviews from undisclosed locations.

Assange this week marked a year in refuge at the Ecuadoran embassy in London. Sweden wants to put him on trial for rape, but the WikiLeaks founder says the prosecution is politically motivated.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world...693314.cms