Glenn says: When I made the choice to report aggressively on top-secret NSA programs, I knew that I would inevitably be the target of all sorts of personal attacks and smears. You don’t challenge the most powerful state on earth and expect to do so without being attacked. As a superb Guardian editorial noted today: “Those who leak official information will often be denounced, prosecuted or smeared. The more serious the leak, the fiercer the pursuit and the greater the punishment.
GUILTY OF WAR CRIMES: Professor Francis Boyle prosecutes and wins verdict: GUILTY
Former US Vice President Richard Cheney; former US Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld; former Counsel to Bush, Alberto Gonzales; former General Counsel to the Vice President, David Addington; former General Counsel to the Defense Secretary, William Haynes II; former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo have been found GUILTY OF WAR CRIMES.
Scroll down to the ABC interview that put John Kiriakou in jail. You be the Judge. He exposed Waterboarding as torture in 2007. He is now in Federal prison. John accepted a Plea Bargain and pled guilty to releasing a CIA agent’s name to a journalist and that journalist did not use the name in any article. The Question is why has no one actually doing the Waterboarding, or authorizing the use of Waterboarding not been charged? We have, as a Nation, lost our moral compass. Those authorizing and the lawyers that tried to justify Waterboarding as Not Torture should be put in jail, not the man who exposed it as Torture.
Now the people that initiated the Torture have been found GUILTY OF WAR CRIMES.
If they leave the U.S., they can be held for War Crimes
As for Section 702 of FISA, the Supreme Court has held that the Fourth Amendment does not protect foreigners from searches conducted abroad. But it has never recognized a foreign intelligence exception to the warrant requirement when foreign-targeted searches result in the collection of vast stores of citizens’ communications.
Americans reasonably expect that their movements, communications and decisions will not be recorded and analyzed by the government. A majority of the Supreme Court seems to agree. Last year, the court considered a case involving 28-day GPS surveillance. Justice Samuel Alito suggested that in most criminal investigations, long-term monitoring “impinges on expectations of privacy.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor recognized that following a person’s movements “reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.”
The FISC is supposed to operate as a check. But it is a secret court, notorious for its low rate of denial. From 1979 to 2002, it did not reject a single application. Over the past five years, out of nearly 8,600 applications, only two have been denied.
Congress has an opportunity to create more effective checks on executive power. It could withdraw Sections 215 and 702 and introduce new measures to regulate intelligence collection and analysis. There are many options.
James Madison put it best: “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
Friends, we need to gain control of Congress to do what is in the best interest of the citizens they represent. We are the government and they are our elected representatives. They represent us. If your member of Congress does not do what is right, then don’t re-elect them.
Demand that FISA law be changed, and the Un-Patriot Act must be rescinded.
This is a MUST READ Friends. In today’s the Guardian, guardian.co.uk. Thank you for releasing this to the public. The U.S. Congress must act to regain the freedoms lost by the American Citizens due to The Patriot Act, and other laws passed as the population was in fear of more 9/11’s/
By Ewen MacAskill, Julian Borger, Nick Hopkins, Nick Davies and James Ball
guardian.co.uk, Friday 21 June 2013
Britain’s spy agency GCHQ has secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world’s phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National Security Agency (NSA).
The sheer scale of the agency’s ambition is reflected in the titles of its two principal components: Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. This is all being carried out without any form of public acknowledgement or debate.
[Ed. Note: Friends, call your member of Congress today if you live in the U.S. Demand that this intrusion into our lives stops now. Are we in the U.S. living in a free country?]
Here’s the ABC interview that put John Kiriakou in jail. You be the Judge. He exposed Waterboarding as torture in 2007. He is now in Federal prison. John accepted a Plea Bargain and pled guilty to releasing a CIA agent’s name to a journalist and that journalist did not use the name in any article. The Question is why has no one actually doing the Waterboarding, or authorizing the use of Waterboarding not been charged? We have, as a Nation, lost our moral compass. Those authorizing and the lawyers that tried to justify Waterboarding as Not Torture should be put in jail, not the man who exposed it as Torture. Learn more about John Kiriakou from an interview with Alyona Minkovski and Jacob Soboroff of the HuffPost,hit this link.
You can write to John at this address: John Kiriakou 79637-083, P.O Box 1000, FCI Loretta, PA 15940. Get a copy of his book “The Reluctant Spy, My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror, by John Kiriakou withh Michael Ruby”. John is a dedicated American, believing in his Country and doing all in his power to protect America. So he gets rewarded by being prosecuted and jailed. FREE JOHN KIRIAKOU. Read his letter from prison here.
UPDATE: Today, Glenn Greenwald published an article in The Guardian (guardian.co.uk) entitled “On PRISM, Partisanship and Propaganda” It is A MUST READ. Link is here:
From Greenwald’s article:
“I don’t have to listen to your phone calls to know what you’re doing. If I know every single phone call you made, I’m able to determine every single person you talked to. I can get a pattern about your life that is very, very intrusive. . . . If it’s true that 200 million Americans’ phone calls were monitored – in terms of not listening to what they said, but to whom they spoke and who spoke to them – I don’t know, the Congress should investigative this.”
That was a quote from JOE BIDEN, 2006 commenting on Bush Adm. “not passing the 4th Amendment Test” So Joe, what do you say now? Here’s Biden in 2006 debates Obama in 2013 over NSA spying program
In the article, Greenwald points us to an interview with Chris Hayes, View it here
Greenwald also points us to a story by the Daily Beast writer Kirsten Powers “The Sickening Snowden Backlash” View it here
(END OF UPDATE)
Dear Friends: I became so wrapped up in what governments were doing in the name of “Protecting our Citizens”, that I could no longer do a daily blog on these events. It was making me a very bitter U.S. Citizen.
Since then, I’ve been avoiding Nightly News on TV. Getting most news from the web. Now I have a few bones to pick.
There are 41 Guantanamo “prisoners” on a hunger strike right now. Taken from Washington Post link below.
The hunger strike began in early February and grew steadily, as more and more detainees joined the protest. The initial catalyst was a decision by the guard force at Guantanamo Bay to search detainees’ Korans. The military said that detainees have used Korans to hide contraband, and that the searches were conducted by Muslim cultural advisers, not ordinary guards.
The prisoners objected and said the searches amounted to desecration.
Obama: Nobel Peace Prize Winner Becomes Drone Warrior-in-Chief, taken from ABC News
Since January 2009, the U.S. has launched at least 281 drone strikes in Pakistan alone, according to the New America Foundation, which has tracked them based on news reports and other sources. During the last five years of George W. Bush’s presidency — 2004-2008 — the group counted just 49. The government has not put out its own totals, which are also said to include strikes in Yemen and Somalia, other known havens for suspected terrorists.
And the last for today:
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“NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: ‘I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things'”> Thank you Glenn Greewald for your reporting and interviewing Mr. Snowden. Follow the story at guardian.co.uk
Out of Central Asia Now 