News From A Parallel World

I saw the President’s statement, his latest, I think, defending the NSA program, Prism, and the government’s gathering of mass information on everyone in the country, stammering a bit and looking somewhat glassy-eyed but, then, he would, wouldn’t he, since we’re looking at the complete disaster now, the end of any real pretense.

Obama babbles about having a ‘conversation’ which according to him will involve ‘balancing’ two competing interests, one being your freedom, your birthright, your Constitution, and the other being your ‘security.’ We have to find that balance, Obama says, but he does not really mean ‘we.’ He means he and his friends, the army and the important people. The rest of us can go pound salt.

It is, like everything else in this man’s catastrophic presidency, a lie. Freedom and your rights under the 4th Amendment are not a counterweight to your security, where some mythical ‘balance’ need be found by the gang in charge, where you’ll have to give up some freedom, just a little bit, we’ll be really, really careful, in order to keep you safe.

Trust us, you dumb fucks.

Tonight, the President’s latest comic relief will appear on Charlie Rose, a perfect forum for pretentious claptrap. One of his mouthpieces, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, turned up on CBS’s Face The Nation yesterday, saying “I think that the American people can feel confident that we have those three branches looking,” in reference to the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, meaning that there’s plenty of ‘oversight’ by the ‘authorities.’

What McDonough was actually getting at was:

"The president is not saying, 'Trust me.' The president is saying, 'I want every member of Congress, on whose authority we are running this program, to be briefed on it, to come to the administration with questions and to also be accountable for it.'" So, what the President is saying is ‘Trust Diane Feinstein. and a secret court.’

In fact, as Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has been trying desperately to warn people about for at least six months, the army and the FBI are spying on everyone and 'oversight' amounts to 'you folks go right ahead.' The intelligence committees of the House and Senate have received ‘briefings’ on programs which cannot be verified; the rest of the Congress has not been told anything of substance, not even that their own phones are certainly tapped.

Congress, says Obama, authorized these programs, even if they have no idea what they are, and they’re legal because a secret court you’ll never know about says they’re legal. Where did we get these secret judges and secret proceedings? From Joseph Stalin; he’s not using them anymore.

The purported ‘legality’ of the campaign of massive surveillance is another classic case of lies and misdirection. The Democrats’ minority whip in the House, Steny Hoyer, actually explained to the press six days ago that the same massive surveillance which was illegal when George Bush did it is now legal! That’s right, it’s legal because we say it is.

A secondary but critical strategy used by Obama and his hacks is to ignore the Prism operation and focus on a quite different spy program which seizes what is called ‘metadata,’ that information which may be gleaned from capturing every e-mail and telephone call without also picking up, or at least sorting through, content. The use of ‘metadata’ is claimed to be a lot less intrusive since in theory no one is listening to your calls or reading your mail. Obama and his defenders purposely conflate the two programs as a means of confusing the public. But even metadata collection is a very dangerous program because it allows the agency to create a three-dimensional profile of every person. Vice President Joe Biden understood this when he was asked about a similar attempt under Bush in 2006:

"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. It doesn’t pass the Fourth Amendment test"

Obama himself, on Rose, from a PBS advance transcript:

"What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls, and the NSA cannot target your e-mails … and have not."

Let’s see, how can I put this? He’s lying. Maybe I should use euphemism, that’s what Obama often does. Kidnapping and torture is ‘extraordinary rendition.’ A death list is a ‘disposition matrix.’ But, no, this column is not a presidential press release.

One revealing exchange:

Rose: So I hear you saying, I have no problem with what NSA has been doing.

Obama: Well, let me — let me finish, because I don’t. So, what happens is that the FBI — if, in fact, it now wants to get content; if, in fact, it wants to start tapping that phone — it’s got to go to the FISA court with probable cause and ask for a warrant.

Rose: But has FISA court turned down any request?

Obama: The — because — the — first of all, Charlie, the number of requests are surprisingly small… number one. Number two, folks don’t go with a query unless they’ve got a pretty good suspicion.

Rose: Should this be transparent in some way?

Obama: It is transparent. That’s why we set up the FISA court.

To give Rose his due, he appears at least to be trying, but how can you hold the President to account when he refuses to answer a straight question?

The answers Obama didn’t give, the truth, is this:

The FBI has to go to the FISA court to get a warrant, but of course that doesn’t respond to your question. First, NSA, not the FBI, is running Prism, and they’re not relying on warrants because we don’t think they need any. Second, the Prism operation captures everything, all the words and music, your e-mails, your web searches, your social site conversations, and stores them as data for later retrieval. Third, NSA employees, some of whom are private contractors, can listen to any conversation they want to and you’ll never know about it. Fourth, no, Charlie, FISA has never turned down a request. I didn’t want to tell you that because it sounds bad. Instead I danced away with that vague reference to “the number of requests are (sic) surprisingly small,” which of course tells you nothing. What’s ‘surprisingly’ mean? Five hundred? Five hundred million? You’ll never know. Fifth, remember the last time I got vague with numbers? I said the number of civilian casualties from my remote control drone attacks have been ‘surprisingly small.’ The actual number is about 30,000 dead innocents, but we think that’s surprisingly small under the circumstances. Sixth, we set up the FISA court to avoid transparency. If we had to take our requests for warrants to a real court, then people could find out about it. With FISA, even the targets never know unless they get lucky.

Later on in the interview, Obama claims that the massive surveillance program has “interrupted” terrorist plots inside the U.S., citing specifically the case of Najibullah Zazi, who was arrested four years ago and charged with planning to hit the New York subway system with bombs. Interesting that Obama would use this example as support for the proposition that American should surrender our most basic freedom, the guarantees of the 4th Amendment since, first, Zazi was captured not because of the spy operations of the NSA or FBI but as a result of ordinary, good police work, the kind that does not require destruction of the Constitution.

It’s also interesting that the Zazi case is the only one the government can cite, not very surprising since it’s been well-documented that 14 of the known 22 ‘terrorist’ plots which the government has managed to short-circuit since 2001 were actually instigated by the FBI itself.

Any competent reading of the 4th Amendment should make clear that the government has no possible legal authority for conducting massive surveillance of its citizens. Any such program is against the law and should result in prison terms for those engaging in it, those who created it, and those who went along with it. That is not hyperbole. It is simply a fair application of American law.

But thus far, nobody has had standing, according to the courts, to bring the matter to a hearing. Why? Because, said the courts, no one was permitted to use classified information to show that they, themselves, were among a class of people harmed by the practice. Even if the proof existed, it was classified secret and, as such, could not be used in court. So several lawsuits seeking relief from the massive spying we know was going on got tossed from this technical deficit. Now, however, the government cannot defend its felonies by saying people do not know because we do know, we know that we’re all being tapped, our mail is being captured and stored, and we know it thanks to the guts of a real patriot, one Edward Snowden.

My security as an American, my country’s security lies in its adherence to its fundamental laws, its Bill of Rights. My security is endangered, is damaged, only if those rights are compromised. And right now we have a President, a Congress, and a mass media falling all over one another in the race to do exactly that.

The greatest threat to American security is not some ‘terrorist,’ mythical or not. If someone blows up a public gathering, it is a crime, an ugly crime which requires real law enforcement and criminal penalties. If someone blows up the public’s rights under the Constitution, it is a crime much graver because the rights taken away will not be given back. The President apparently does not know this.

All across the internet now there are arguments, plenty of commentary, rumors, charges, false stories, planted stories, the bleating of fools. A single man stood against the espionage establishment, giving up a cushy life, maybe any life at all, to do the right thing, and he’s catching hell from all sides.

It’s a real question in my mind, watching this circus, reading these comments, noting the insane, pompous excretions from columnists such as Toobin in the New Yorker and Brooks and Thomas J. Friedman in the New York Times, and those creeps at CNN and the useless wankers Mitchell, Maddow, Matthews, and O’Donnell on MSNBC: are Americans too stupid and careless to deserve democracy?

Judging by the posted remarks on numerous web sites, plenty of Americans think it’s just ducky if the government spies on them since they’re ‘not doing anything wrong.’ It’s as though the entire history, the struggle for liberty, the sacrifices, the courage of real people have come to naught because the public cares more about its television shows and what they can buy at the mall than about liberty or the lies of their President.

Those who say that spying doesn’t bother them are fools, of course, but in some cases they simply have no idea what it means, and they are not going to learn about it on any of the television networks. It’s a classic conceit of the ‘liberals’ that MSNBC and its talking heads are ‘good guys’ and trustworthy, so much smarter than those blockheads at Fox. The truth, however, is that there is no more truth on MSNBC than on Fox, just a different, slightly more sophisticated variety of lie. Why do you think Obama is taking his road show to PBS tonight?

Trust us, you dumb fucks.

Joseph Goebbels noted that it was the ideal situation to have what are ostensibly differing news sources operating within a single closed system. That’s what we’ve got in America, and we don’t even know it. There are people out there who think Obama would be a much better President if only the Republicans wouldn’t keep blocking everything he’s trying to do. Seriously.

Edward Snowden is vilified by both major parties, mostly by Democrats since they are the assholes in power. Were Bush still in office, the sharpest arrows would no doubt be coming from the other guys.

It’s a real lesson in reality, for those with the guts to learn from it. From Obama to the Congressional leaders to the ‘liberals’ writing in the ‘liberal’ magazines and newspapers to the ‘liberals’ pontificating on ‘liberal’ radio and television networks, there is a near-unanimity: Snowden is a “traitor” (Diane Feinstein) who ought to be “prosecuted” (Al Franken), and hit with the full authority of the law. Never mind that he has exposed a most alarming, systemic violation of law, the utter destruction of the Constitution by the U.S. army, in conspiracy with a president and a handful of legislative ‘leaders,’ it is the whistle blower who must be found and punished.

That’s what the story is in the United States now. The person who exposes the crime is to be punished; the perps go free. Do you know about Thomas Drake? Like Snowden, he was an insider who saw massive violations of the law. Unlike Snowden, he brought these crimes to the attention of his superiors. They went after him. They charged him with breaking every law they could dream up. They ruined his life. They finally couldn’t jail him but that was only by fluke.

You may want to read Drake’s excellent recounting of his own experience and his observations on what Snowden is facing, in the Guardian UK, June 12 edition, online. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/12/snowden-surveillance-subverting-constitution

Drake came across something inside the NSA in 2001, called ‘Stellar Wind,” which was plainly illegal. He talked to some NSA legal people. They told him that since the NSA was doing it, it was therefore legal. Oddly, this is the same rationale used a week ago by Diane Feinstein, the senior Senator from California and Steny Hoyer, that pathetic joke from Maryland.

Stellar Wind was blanket electronic surveillance. The only legal difference between that and Prism is that the NSA now uses the fiction that a ‘warrant’ has been issued, albeit by a secret court, and albeit for the mail and other personal data on hundreds of millions of people.

Any sane reading of the 4th Amendment makes obvious the impossibility of a legal mass surveillance, since the army, nor Obama, nor any of the rest of those criminals in power can meet its terms. How can a seeker of any warrant ‘describe with particularity’ the persons to be searched and the things to be seized? Where is the probable cause? Does the government believe that there is probable cause to believe that hundreds of millions of Americans are engaged in criminal or ‘terrorist’ activity?

I’m watching this parade, the politicians and talking heads, and columnists, and I’m thinking the whole thing is over. We have allowed, through our sloth, our inattention, our cupidity, however and by whatever terms one wishes to use, the ascendancy of an evil class in America. The idea that a free society can exist when its military captures all the communications of its citizens is beyond rational exposition. And yet we have Harry Reid telling Americans to “calm down.”

The disinformation brigade is out in force, too, agents of the government or just plain crazy, to suggest that Snowden is a ‘disturbed’ person, or a government ‘agent’ whose work is designed to scare us more than we already are. Truth is a hard act these days. Maybe it’s always been so.

On YouTube you can find the videos contrasting what Obama said while campaigning and what he says now about government spying on its people. In 2008, he said, "This administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide." I’ve never seen a civil libertarian turn so quickly into a mouthpiece for a police state. Makes me wonder who he really is, where he really comes from, what he really believed back when he was suckering me and millions like me into believing just one more time in this bankrupt system.

Trust us, you dumb fucks.

Not anymore.

http://www.amazon.com/News-From-A-Parallel-World/dp/1478194448

"As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air — however slight — lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.”

from The Douglas Letters : Selections from the Private Papers of Justice William O. Douglas (1987), edited by Melvin I. Urofsky and Philip E. Urofsky, p. 162.

In an odd coincidence, I recently watched some of the original Saturday Night Live shows on video out of Netflix. One of the show’s writers and occasional performers was, as you probably know, the man who is now the junior Senator from Minnesota. He’s also available wearing an ape costume in an entertaining Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd, Jamie Lee Curtis, movie called ‘Trading Places.’

Safe to say that in those days, Al Franken ingested an impressive range and quantity of illegal drugs. Also safe to say: had his telephone calls and personal communications been recorded for posterity, or for the enormous data center the government is presently constructing in Utah, there would now be available to anyone intent on blackmail or extortion a treasure trove of his seditious conversations and anti-government opinions.

It is a coincidence because today I read his comments on the disclosure –– although not to him; he says he’s known about it all along –– that the military’s spy apparatus, NSA, spies on everyone. He thinks it’s just peachy.

You know, Franken often played drooling loonies but I’d figured it was an act. It now looks as though he was just playing himself. Maybe all those years of drugs really did wax his brain.

The Senator’s statement ran like this:

“I can assure you this is not about spying on the American people. I have a high level of confidence that this is used to protect us and I know that it has been successful in preventing terrorism.”

A few years back, I floated a concept I called the Bonehead Baseline. My notion was that there existed a certain percentage of the population of the United States so utterly stupid it would vote to boil itself in oil if the mass media or the President suggested it. I pegged that percentage at about one-quarter.

I think now that I have overestimated the intelligence of Americans.

We all knew that there were creeps such as Mike Rogers (R-Mich) and Peter King (R-NY) who would sell the Constitution for a nickel and some good seats at the Super Bowl, but until Franken’s moronic statement I had not fully appreciated the level of stupid among ‘liberal Democrats.’ I mean, sure, Feinstein’s a jerk, and Harry Reid is a corrupt old bag of wind, but Al Franken?

What’s so troubling about Franken’s statement is not just that it’s bullshit. That’s what we get so much of anyhow these days, from every mass media outlet (MSNBC had Andrea Mitchell fawning over Feinstein) and the President and much of the Congress, but surely there were some intelligent people in the Senate, I mean apart from Ron Wyden (D-OR), had to be.

“I can assure you that this is not about spying on the American people.” So, what would you call it when secret agencies with undisclosed powers and budgets we can’t examine, have backdoor access to our entire field of communications such that our travel and behavior, our words and deeds, are in fact all tracked electronically and stored in a vast facility being built to house it? You call that “protecting me”?

“I know that it has been successful in preventing terrorism.” Excuse me, Senator, but you know no such thing, nor could you. You know only what you’ve been told by the secret police.

And what are the secret police telling Senator Franken? The general in charge of NSA –– you do know that the NSA is a military operation not under any civilian control, don’t you? –– Keith Alexander, told the Senate Appropriations Committee that the massive surveillance has ‘disrupted dozens of terrorist attacks.’

According to the unsigned Associated Press story, Alexander explicitly described... how the programs worked in collecting Americans’ phone records and tapping into their internet activity.

Vigorously defending the programs (he) said the public needs to know how the programs operate, amid growing concerns that government efforts to secure the nation are encroaching on Americans’ privacy and civil liberties.

“I want the American people to know that we’re trying to be transparent here, protect civil liberties and privacy, but also the security of the country. If we tell the terrorists every way that we’re going to track them, they will get through and Americans will die,” Alexander testified.

Since, for at least seven years that we know of, the military has been doing everything possible to conceal how the programs operate, in fact to conceal their very existence, it’s a little hard to buy the General’s ridiculous claims to ‘transparency.’ Of course, ‘transparency’ is one of the new buzz words used by politicians to conceal that they are doing precisely the opposite. Obama likes this word, too, as he prosecutes anyone who spills the beans about illegal activities and even war crimes, and classifies as ‘secret’ more documents than every U.S. President in history before him, combined.

“If we tell the terrorists every way that we’re going to track them...”

Let’s assume for the moment that there really are such creatures as “the terrorists.” It’s a fiction in real life, as you probably realize if you think it over. “The terrorists” amount to political and operational ‘enemies’ of the United States, largely confined to other regions of the world where they are fighting the attempts by the U.S. empire to control their countries and steal their resources. These are essentially nationalist wars.

There are also some people who would like to strike targets inside the U.S. Some of them are motivated by a desire to “get even” with America for its own terrorist actions in other places. Some are nasty types who think blowing up innocent people is justifiable –– I’m talking now about people not associated with Obama and his crew and the U.S. military.

It would be fair to say that there is general agreement among Americans of all political viewpoints that we would like to avert or prevent any such attacks in America. Regardless of someone’s rationale, we don’t want them setting off bombs in our country. If we can stop them from doing so, we ought to.

But what, exactly, are the threats of terrorism inside the United States? What forms of intelligence and police work is best able to stop these threats from becoming attacks?

What Alexander told the Senate sounds good until one applies a little logic to it, or until one insists on some details on how massive surveillance has protected Americans.

First, whatever actual ‘terrorists’ there may be who wish to cause death and destruction inside the U.S., have heard of the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, and the New York Times. They know about wiretapping and about GPS. They are not going to be sending other plotters e-mails or discussing their plans over the phone, know what I mean? Not unless they’re as fucking stupid as Al Franken.

So capturing and storing every communication of every American is probably not going to assist anyone is averting a ‘terrorist’ act.

The Associated Press story didn’t mention it for seven paragraphs, but finally got around to it. Alexander “did not give details on the terror plot he said had been disrupted.” They are all for 'transparency' but they're not going to tell you a thing. Trust us. Where have we heard that before?

Thus, Americans are supposed to take his word for it, NSA’s word for it, that its spy network, which directly destroys the Constitutional protections of the 4th Amendment under the guise of “protecting” us from “plots,” is just fine and we ought to, in the immortal advice of Harry Reid, “calm down.”

The lie that we have to surrender our freedom in order to be safe is the same lie dictators have told for centuries. It is never the truth but it depends for acceptance on the fear and cowardice of the people. Remember the ‘anthrax letters’ mailed to a handful of ‘left-oriented’ Senators in the wake of 9-11? Note the recent ‘ricin’ letters sent to Obama? Terrorists did not do these things. How do I know? Because terrorists know that Senators and the President do not open their own mail.

But Senators are easily frightened. They don’t mind surrendering your freedom in exchange for feeling a little bit more secure themselves behind the bullet-proof glass in their limousines.

So Al Franken cannot intelligently say to us that he “knows” that the Prism program has saved lives because he’s basing this only on claims made to him by the U.S. military, which in turn can’t tell him anything specific because it might jeopardize the secrecy necessary to protect his ass.

The “foiled plot” argument is being used by others, as well. Obama specifically mentioned two such plots, one of them being the 2009 subway bombing plot in New York. But as several investigative journalists have already noted, these were thwarted not by Prism or any other federal surveillance program but by ordinary, intelligent police work.

In fact, the Department of Homeland Security has secured nothing other than the largest budget of any domestic program and a bureaucratic future of unlimited expansion built on the fear of Americans.

We are at a dangerous crossing in the United States. Many of the people we have trusted to safeguard our democracy have fallen far short of their oaths. Some members of Congress, such as Peter King of New York, are clamoring for the prosecution of the journalist who broke the NSA spying story, Glenn Greenwald. Had anyone tried to prosecute the Washington Post for printing the Pentagon Papers, they’d have been laughed out of office. But times have changed.

Instead of being angered at the criminal acts exposed, our ‘leaders’ are angry that anyone exposed them. Today there are actually proposals to create yet another spy agency inside the NSA to guard against leaks. The government, which ought to be standing up for Americans rights under the Constitution, is instead searching for ways to prosecute those who exercise them too vigilantly.

And, meanwhile, the ‘debate’ is being framed as one of ‘balance’ between the right to privacy and the need for ‘security.’ Any time you hear this said, by anyone, in the newspaper or online or at a social gathering, you must flatten it. It is a false equation. Security is not increased or improved but endangered by incursions on privacy or other civil liberties. Wiretapping everyone does not make everyone more secure but less secure. Spying on the nation, ruining the constitution, wrecks America, it does not preserve it.

What the military has done is incredibly dangerous to a free society. The support it is getting from toads like Franken is alarming. Rights once surrendered can never be retrieved.

And there’s one more thing, one thing I don’t see mentioned anywhere but which may be the worst aspect of this entire affair.

When the military can spy on everyone, answerable only in theory to a small group which rubber-stamps what they do based only on assurances, the situation is inherently anti-democratic. There is nothing to stop the implementation of a dictatorship in whatever form the military wishes.

When the military can spy on everyone, it thereupon has access to everything said or written by everyone in public life, every member of the House and Senate, every person on a government regulatory body, every federal judge, every member of the cabinet. J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI for forty years as a big extortion and blackmail racket because he had wiretaps on some politicians and business leaders. What he did was nothing compared to the system already being implemented. And when the military can blackmail everybody in Congress and on the Supreme Court, just what kind of America do you think you’ll be living in, Senator Franken?

California Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein called him a traitor today, referring to Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old contract employee who leaked the NSA’s power point presentation, used by the agency to orient personnel, to the Guardian UK and to the Washington Post. Pretty rich coming from Feinstein, whose negligence and complicity in undermining the most fundamental freedoms of Americans places her right at the top of the list if we’re going to talk about traitors.

Feinstein told the media that she, as chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and her colleagues, have known of the full-scale surveillance and interception of the e-mails, private documents, telephone records and calls, and web searches of the entire American population for seven years now, that this had been approved under Section 215 of the Patriot Act by the secret court authorized to give such blanket approval, and that it was all therefore legal.

Senator Harry Reid, another Democrat whose time on planet earth evidently expired long ago but he just hasn’t gotten the word yet, told critics of the spy network to “calm down,” as though we are little children having a tantrum over what the adults, in their wisdom, have done.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The Fourth Amendment’s roots in English common law can be traced back at least four hundred years, where it was first recognized that the ruler’s power to invade one’s home or person ought not to be unlimited but should required just cause. By the mid-18th century, just prior to the American colonial revolution, a writer named John Entick, whose pamphlets angered the king, had his home forcibly entered by the king’s messenger, Nathan Carrington, on a warrant issued by the 2nd Earl of Halifax, one George Montagu-Dunk. Carrington was authorized to look for and seize writings which had offended the monarch. In the ensuing legal case, Entick was freed by ruling of Charles Pratt, First Earl of Camden, who held that the warrant lacked probable cause.

Whether that nitwit Feinstein understands it or not, the Fourth Amendment specifically prohibits the sort of police state policies she and her Senate colleagues have so carelessly approved. Searches and seizures require warrants. No warrants shall issue except with a showing of probable cause which would describe with particularity the places, persons, and things. That’s slightly different from the secret court which told NSA and its other secret police friends, essentially, go ahead and grab whatever you want.

The various arguments being offered now by Barack Obama and his crew, by Feinstein, and by National Intelligence Director James Clapper, who said the leak would cause “irreversible harm,” are collectively the sort of rhetoric one expects from 9th graders on the losing end of a school debate.

As for Clapper, he ought to be arrested and charged with perjury, at least with lying to a congressional committee. As Jody Westby reminds us in her excellent column in Forbes, On March 13, 2013, Clapper was asked by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper said, “No, sir.” Westby skipped the second part of that exchange, which went like this:

“Wyden: It does not?

“Clapper: Not wittingly. There are cases where they could, inadvertently perhaps, collect –– but not wittingly.”

A few days ago, Clapper claimed that “the only type of information acquired under the Court’s order is telephony metadata, such as telephone numbers dialed and length of calls.” This, too, is a lie.

As to his testimony in March, Clapper was asked, by a fawning Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC, “Senator Wyden made quite a lot out of your exchange with him last March during the hearings. Can you explain what you meant when you said that there was not data collection on millions of Americans?

“Clapper: First –– as I said, I have great respect for Senator Wyden. I thought, though in retrospect, I was asked –– ‘when are you going to start, stop beating your wife’ kind of question, which is meaning not –– answerable necessary by a simple yes or no. So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner by saying no.”

You get that? The ‘most truthful, least untruthful’ answer was a direct lie. A question about whether the government was spying on millions of America was on the order of a trick question. This is the man who runs the agency which is spying on everything you read and write, everything you say, and on your friends and neighbors.

Since without honest testimony from people inside the spy agency, especially its chief, Congress couldn’t do its oversight job even if it wanted to, Clapper’s lies are extremely important. The bastard ought to be in prison for this, alone. And, by the way, Clapper, my name is spelled R-A-Z-N-I-K-O-V, and you know where I live. You know where I live but I know what you are.

The real “harm’ these leaks cause are to the secrets the U.S. government wants to keep from its own people. Feinstein, appearing on television talk shows and in media interviews –– evidently, she’s been tapped to do this –– has claimed that the secret program has protected the nation by foiling ‘terrorist plots.’ Sadly, the two she referred to, including a 2009 plan to bomb the New York subway system, were actually broken by ordinary police work and had nothing to do with the police state mechanism she’s defending. There are other examples, she adds, lamely, but she can’t tell us about them because they’re secret.

Feinstein, Clapper, and Mike Rogers, House Intelligence Committee chairman, have made it a point to condemn news agencies and journalists who aided Snowden or others who disclose ‘secret’ information. Rogers, who once demanded the death penalty for Bradley Manning, said that journalist Glenn Greenwald, who helped break the story in the Guardian, “doesn’t have a clue how this thing works.”

Well, how does it work? Until Snowden, anyone protesting the massive spy operation as being illegal ran into a spectacular legal dead-end. Earlier this year, in the case of Amnesty International v. Clapper, the Supreme Court dismissed a suit against the mass collection of phone records on the grounds that the plaintiffs –– since the information was secret –– couldn’t prove what the program did or that they were personally subject to surveillance.

This madness in the legal thicket has been going on for some time now, with judges throwing out cases because those complaining about government malfeasance and even criminal behavior weren’t allowed to see or even produce documents proving it. In one case, where a plaintiff had actual proof, a federal court explained that he was not entitled to possess it and therefore it was inadmissible.

It is not just since 9-11 that this has been developing. The United States has been working its way toward a fair imitation of East Germany for quite a long time. For example, according to the new Atlantic Monthly piece by Bruce Schneier, ‘What We Don’t Know About Spying On Citizens: Scarier Than What We Know,’ the FBI has issued tens of thousands of what are called ‘National Security letters,’ which permit it to collect information on millions of people without a warrant, including from cloud-computer users, that it’s been intercepting cell phone data for 20 years, and that it can turn some powered-off cell phones into bugging devices. We know that the FBI initiated a program called Carnivore designed to capture everybody’s e-mail.

We also know that the NSA has a rather large inventory of domestic surveillance and data-mining programs with names such as Trailblazer, Stellar Wind, and Ragtime. We know NSA is building an enormous facility in Utah to store the data it’s collecting, a facility bigger than the Pentagon.

We know that when Congress made a half-assed attempt to rein-in the secret police by defunding the Total Information Awareness program in 2003, the TIA simply turned into several other operations under other names and kept right on going. We know that the Department of Homeland Security is collecting data on people and working with a newly-militarized urban police force to track dissidents. None of this has anything to do with national security or ‘terrorists,’ but it has everything to do with politics and controlling the people.

There have already been a number of documentary leaks showing that during the Occupy demonstrations, urban police forces took their orders from DHS, infiltrated dissenters with government agents, and collected names and information on anyone who participated. This is not what democracies do; this is what dictatorships do.

In the mid-1970s, when, unlike today, the Senate cared about things such as the Bill of Rights and asserting control over secret police operations, there was a committee which held hearings and demanded answers from people such as the CIA director. They got lied to, of course, but they exposed plenty of criminality, such as the COINTELPRO nightmare of the FBI, and they tried to prevent its continuation. They failed, of course, because in the end the secret police simply renamed things, hid things, and did the other things that thugs do and, after a while, the Congress was no longer comprised mainly of decent Senators, the media had been bought off, and the American people didn’t give a shit.

Now we’ve got the PRISM program, a data collection operation which has the capacity to pick up every e-mail you write, every web site you visit, every phone call you make. It is in short a total information gathering campaign run by NSA –– which is the military –– and which has managed to infiltrate or otherwise compromise civilian companies from Google to Microsoft to Facebook. The corporations thus far named, nine of them, have issued various phony denials, the kind of denial that doesn’t actually deny anything. Several companies proclaimed they had never heard of Prism, which fact doesn’t mean they didn’t hand over everything when asked; another favorite was the “no direct” assertion, which means only that a secondary source was inserted.

One example is Apple, which said it had never heard of Prism and “We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers and any agency requesting customer data must get a court order.” This, of course, doesn’t actually address the problem since, first, Prism has obtained a blanket order, evidently, which ‘legally authorizes wholesale access to records and, second, ‘direct’ can mean that the access is run through a secondary source. As Glenn Greenwald responded to it, “what this program allows is for them, either because the companies have given over access to their servers, as the NSA claims, or apparently the NSA has simply seized it, as the companies now claim –– the NSA is able to go in –– anyone at a monitor in an NSA facility can go in at any time and either read messages that are stored in Facebook or in real time surveil conversations and chats that take place on Skype and Gmail and all other forms of communication. It’s an incredibly invasive system of surveillance worldwide that has zero checks of any kind.”

The militarization of communications in the United States is extremely alarming, something which should deeply concern every citizen, yet we have idiots like Feinstein prattling on about how she’s known about it for years, a version of ‘trust me,’ and a President who insists that the amount of freedom we’ve had yanked from us without our consent really isn’t much considering how it keeps us ‘safe.’

Prism includes the content of communications, not just the metadata. Charitably, one may think that Feinstein and these other useless hacks are simply too stupid to understand the distinction, but it’s important. And the corporations are said by NSA to have jumped on board with nary a dissent. Microsoft, whose slogan is “your privacy is our priority,” was the first to sign up; then came Yahoo in 2008, Google, Facebook, and PalTalk in 2009, YouTube in 2010, Skype and AOL in 2011, and Apple, with Jobs dead, in 2012.

Despite the lies out of Google and that lot, Prism gives the U.S. military and other secret police agencies direct access to communications companies’ servers. In fact, the NSA document notes that it has the “assistance of communications providers in the US.”

Supporters of the Fisa Amendments Act, renewed in December, 2012, despite questions from the few Senators who continued to be troubled by it, argued that an important safeguard against abuse was that the NSA couldn’t obtain electronic communications without the consent of the telecom and internet companies that control the data. But Prism makes that unnecessary since it lets the agency directly and unilaterally seize such communications off the servers.

The document leaked to the Guardian made it clear that Prism hands over everything: e-mail, video, voice chat, file transfers, voice-over IP (Skype) chats, photos, and social networking details, and more. They also provide a scary glimpse into the mindset of the secret police. Prism, one document declared, was made necessary because FISA had shortcomings. Under Fisa, there had to be individual warrants. “Fisa was broken because it provided privacy protections to people who were not entitled to them... there were too many e-mail accounts to be practical to seek Fisas for all.”

Translated, this means, simply, we can’t adhere to the constitution anymore because it’s too hard to get warrants on everybody we want to spy on, there are just so many of them. Does that suggest anything to you? I’d say that if you want to spy on so many people that it overwhelms the warrant system, you may be spying on too many people.

Does the U.S. military think there are millions of prospective ‘terrorists’ in the U.S.? Does it think it has such an urgent need to spy on those millions that the time-honored and constitutionally required seeking of a court warrant is too slow?

Since 2001, twice as many people have been killed by an allergy to peanut butter than have died in ‘terrorist’ events. Of the 20 ‘terrorist’ plots foiled by the FBI and other agencies, as the New York Times recently revealed, 14 of them were actually instigated by the FBI itself.

Someone wants to turn America into a dictatorship, into a country where freedom is just another word which has no meaning, where people are brainwashed into thinking that they can’t be truly free because then ‘the terrorists’ would do bad things to them. Someone wants America to be Soviet Russia or Franco’s Spain, or Hitler’s Germany.

It doesn’t have to happen, but we’d better wake up fast. We’ve got the President and the major leaders of his party telling us that living in a police state is really not so bad, and we’ve got a large number of people, maybe even a majority, who think that if they, themselves, are ‘not doing anything wrong,’ we shouldn’t worry about any of this.

The framers knew better. Having lived through especially pernicious practices authorized by the crown, America’s colonists wanted nothing more to do with writes of assistance and general warrants. The Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776 expressly forbade the use of general warrants:

“That general warrants, whereby any officer or messenger may be commanded to search suspected places without evidence of a fact committed, or to seize any person or persons not named, or whose offense is not particularly described and supported by evidence, are grievous and oppressive and ought not to be granted.”

Article XIV of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, written by John Adams and enacted in 1780 as part of the Massachusetts Constitution, added the requirement that all searches must be “reasonable” and served as the basis for the language of the Fourth Amendment:

“Every subject has a right to be secure from all unreasonable searches and seizures of his person, his houses, his papers, and all his possessions. All warrants, therefore, are contrary to this right, if the cause or foundation of them be not previously supported by oath or affirmation; and if the order in the warrant to a civil officer, to make search in suspected places, or to arrest one or more suspected persons, or to seize their property, be not accompanied with a special designation of the persons or objects of search, arrest, or seizure; and no warrant ought to be issued but in cases, and with the formalities, prescribed by the laws.”

To the extent this is a democracy, it didn’t get that way by magic or because God made it happen due to our goodness, or because we’re mostly Caucasian and therefore better and more deserving. It got this way because the framers carefully constructed a Bill of Rights to protect us, to give us the tools to protect ourselves, from tyrants. If we don’t use them, we will lose them, and we will indeed find out what a dictatorship feels like.

“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. ” James Madison, June 29th. 1787, Debates in Federal Convention.

The founders warned us. Washington predicted that a standing army would kill democracy. Until the aftermath of World War Two, America did not have such a beast. Even then it was largely nascent, manifestly subservient to civilian authority.

Not anymore. There are lessons here as we watch the empire fall, but they will be forgotten by the next civilization which aspires to be free.

I think the founders were brilliant but they could not anticipate everything. It’s a popular viewpoint these days, a revisionist viewpoint, that all those guys, well, they owned slaves, they wouldn’t permit women to vote, nor those who didn’t own property. Yes, yes. It was not paradise. It never is.

But what the founders were serious about was the protection of a people from tyranny. They’d just fought out from under it themselves and they knew the kind of injustice a controlling government was capable of.

Over time, though, even with all the brilliance, the sacrifices, the campaigns and rallying toward freedom, even with a clever design, there was eventually the relentless ascendancy of tyrants, people who figured out how to manipulate the system designed to control them.

Money is a lot of it, and capitalism, but any economic theory runs aground on the shoals of human deficiencies. Communism works, if people are perfect. If people are perfect, anything works, even democracy.

The thing I like about democracy is that it takes human frailty and stupidity, greed and even violent proclivities into account. It knows people will do brutal things and tries to guard against that becoming the central fact of government.

In the United States, the standing army became the imbalance which tipped the scales, but I include in that the secret police, all the apparatus which gains its power from force. So long as the army and police are obedient to a benevolent civil authority, freedom is possible, may even flourish. When that is over it does not return.

There are many ways to talk about this. One way I like to do it is remind people that when violent acts are sustained, when the military and secret police can kill a president and other great leaders who are on the side of the people, when they can do that and get away with it, democracy is effectively dead.

We didn’t do anything about it when the criminals at the top in America murdered John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. They knew then that no one would stop them. You can’t let that happen and expect to be free.

The disclosures this week of spying so massive as to astonish, the fact of the FBI and NSA and, by obvious extension, the CIA and Homeland Security having backdoor access to every e-mail, every online search, every cell call, every tweet, have brought two responses. One, by civil libertarians or simply patriots, is outrage. The government has compromised your every thought. These documents, all of these elements of your communication, are captured electronically and stored for future use against you.

It is not as though people are sitting in little windowless rooms listening in on all your calls or reading your mail; they don’t need to. The police state simply stores it all and holds it until such time as your political dissent or involvement in anti-government organizing makes it useful to retrieve. This is fascism. It’s here.

The second response, from authoritarian minds like California Senator Diane Feinstein, is that this program is necessary to “keep us safe” from “terrorists.” Feinstein also managed to claim that since massive surveillance had been authorized by a secret court and in use for years that it is legal, the Constitution apparently having slipped her mind.

Also pretending that it means nothing is the President, Barack Obama, who is now officially the worst President in American history and maybe the last. One of his mouthpieces, Josh Earnest, and how perfect is that, said it was a “critical tool in protecting the nation,” evidently unaware that destroying the Bill of Rights removes the most critical tool for protecting what the nation claims to stand for.

Not every member of the Senate and House even knew of the existence of the operation, which was disclosed only to the intelligence committees of each house. One member of the Senate committee, Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, though unable to tell the people what was going on due to the secrecy agreements these members must abide by, stood on the floor of the Senate over a year ago and issued this warning:

"I have served on the Intelligence Committee for a decade, and I want to deliver a warning this afternoon: when the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.”

That day is here but it remains to be seen just how angry people are. Already, Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian UK journalist who broke both the Verizon and the PRISM scandal stories, is being tweeted by stupid people who say, well, so long as you’re not doing anything wrong it shouldn’t matter if the government reads your mail and tracks your internet usage; Greenwald replies, fine, then send me your access codes.

The very first leaks, that a hundred Associated Press writers had their phone logs intercepted by the FBI brought outrage from some media, but subsequent stories, which are far worse, don’t seem to be generating much heat. The local press featured denials by a range of carriers, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, and AT&*T, however these denials are, as one writer noted, word games. The government does not need “direct” access so long as it has indirect access, and it does.

The claims by Microsoft and AT&T are especially galling considering new evidence surfacing today which shows that Microsoft built a backdoor key into its operating system for NSA as early as 1999, two full years before the attack on the Twin Towers and before the Patriot Act could be used to justify it. AT&T, meanwhile, was caught in 2004 when an employee in San Francisco leaked news of a special room used by the government to capture phone calls in the Bay Area.

The most important aspect of this situation, though, is not finding much traction in the media or even on the web, and it is beyond alarming.

For the NSA and FBI and the rest of them to be capturing every phone call, every e-mail, every web search of everyone means not only that they are able to see what you’re doing and store evidence against you but that they are able to do that with respect to every elected politician in America, every journalist, every television news broadcaster, every law enforcement person, every judge.

Thus, the secret police are amassing the kind of blackmail treasure trove even J. Edgar Hoover never dreamed of. And as a result, the mass media is now completely compromised, as is the Congress, as is the federal court system.

I have my doubts whether most Americans understand what is happening. Too many are like the nitwit who says she has ‘done nothing wrong’ and, thus, should not object to having her entire personal life known by total strangers.

It seems quite clear to me that only one thing can possibly turn this around: the Congress of the United States of America must act and act quickly. Rescind the Patriot Act and pass emergency legislation which outlaws these police state activities. America can be protected when the government needs a warrant in a real court before it paws through your life; if it can do that without a warrant, ‘terrorism’ won’t matter. We will have surrendered everything which makes this country worth defending.

The photograph in the Chronicle shows a tuxedoed billionaire standing in front of a backdrop wall sporting the logos of Hilton and Mastercard. Beside him is his new bride.

Sean Parker, who is among those young, largely air headed assholes who scored big in Silicon Valley and display the arrogance and appetite of wild pigs at the trough. As has been said of others, he knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

Parker and his bride, one Alexandria Lenas, decided to get married in a really spectacular fashion, as befits America’s new royalty. They decided to celebrate their union by wrecking the fragile ecosystem of a portion of Big Sur.

What they did was not exactly legal, but money buys a lot in America these days. No doubt inspired by the criminals on Wall Street, Parker figured that he’d just have to pay a fee for it, some cash in the right pockets, and for a man sitting on billions of dollars he picked up pretty much accidentally cash is no problem at all.

Ordinary people, if they want to get married in nature, at the beach or among the redwoods, find a place which will accommodate them, take care not to cause damage, follow the rules, and honor both their environment and themselves. But Sean Parker and Alexandria Lenas are not ordinary people.

The couple chose a campground near the Ventana Inn & Spa, just south of Big Sur, on the California coastline. The coastline is protected under the California Coastal Commission; the Big Sur area consists of more than a dozen state parks and protected federal wilderness areas along the Santa Lucia Mountains. It is not permitted to roll into it with bulldozers, level the land, and construct whatever piece of shit monument to oneself some special prick thinks he might like for his wedding.

Yet, by the time the Coastal Commission staff learned what was going on, Parker’s hirelings were already a month into transforming a section of the Ventana property into his grotesque fantasy, constructing a stone bridge and fake castle walls, numerous rock stairways, fake ‘ruins’ of old cottages, a gateway and arch, various event ‘platforms,’ digging an artificial pond, and laying down an elevated dance floor.

The campground Parker trashed is adjacent to Post Creek, which is a spawning habitat for steelhead trout, a threatened species under the guidelines and protection of the federal government. According to the staff report to the Commission, “Steelhead populations require, among a variety of factors, the maintenance of low in-stream turbidity and water temperature, both of which are highly susceptible to degradation by (human) activities. Development resulting in erosion along waterways increases the sediment load in streams, which can smother eggs and occlude light necessary for aquatic flora photosynthesis and growth.”

The happy couple cut the original deal through Parker’s company, Neraida, and the private owners of the 170-acre campground, who are listed as a limited liability company. But use of the property is governed by the Coastal Act which created the Commission. And it turns out the owners of the campground were already in violation of their permit for never building a planned parking lot and for closing down the public campgrounds in 2007, which in combination effectively denies access to the general public, in express violation of the charter of the Coastal Commission.

If all of this sounds like the billionaire and his bride should have been stopped in their tracks by the law, you are not grasping how money works in America these days.

The Coastal Commission, advised of the blatant violations, allowed the nuptials to proceed at the ruined site on condition that the groom pony up $2.5 million bucks, small change for a man Forbes Magazine lists as a multi-billionaire. And the Commission, just to show there were no hard feelings, publicly thanked Parker for his cooperation.

There were other ‘conservationist’ interests to be bought off, too, although these were non-governmental. Though it refused comment on the Commission actions, one prominent group sent an e-mail which read, “Save the Redwoods League would like to congratulate the happy couple,” perhaps encouraged by the agreement that the happy couple would make a pitch for donations to the League to the wedding guests, a nice cross-section of filthy rich creeps and ‘progressive Democratic’ politicians, including Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom and the state’s highest law enforcement officer, Attorney General Kamala Harris, who trailed after the newlyweds like poodles, hoping for big money for future campaigns.

News of Harris’ attendance helps explain why she just hasn’t had the time to respond to all the e-mails asking her to investigate the murder of an unarmed man who was beaten to death by cops, including two CHP officers, in Kern County several weeks ago. She was probably too busy picking out a nice outfit. She refused to return the phone calls from the Chronicle writer, too.

Parker, who got rich off venture capital money and IPOs, had this to say about his deal with the Coastal Commission:

“We always dreamed of getting married in Big Sur, one of the most magical places on earth. In continuing my foundation’s mission, we are excited to support these important conservation-related projects for and with the local community.”

In other words, I’m paying off the Coastal Commission with the loose change in my pocket and nobody’s going to give me any grief because they all want cash in the future.

This is America, folks. This is what we’ve become.

Saw a brief excerpt someone posted on Facebook, this observation by Ralph Nader:

"We have the lowest minimum wage in the Western world. We have the greatest amount of consumer debt. We have the highest child poverty, the highest adult poverty, huge underemployment, a crumbling public works — but huge multi-billionaires and hugely profitable corporations.

“I say to the American people: What’s your breaking point? When are you going to stop making excuses for yourself?”

One critical characteristic of the Electric Age is that there are no longer any secrets. That’s bad news for the rich and powerful because the rich and powerful are those who count on secrecy to hide their crimes, which are generally monstrous.

The reason there are no more secrets is that disclosure is so easy and irrevocable. In the good old days, people like Lyndon Baines Johnson could bury secrets by having his friend Malcolm Wallace murder whoever proved to be inconvenient. Governments could lock them up, restrict access, and deny the rumors.

When the Warren Commission realized that they were covering up what happened to President Kennedy, as they certainly did, they declared hundreds of documents to be held under seal for seventy-five years, probably figuring that by 2039 they and the conspirators would all be dead and beyond anybody’s jurisdiction.

In the ‘sixties and ‘seventies, the Pentagon could assume that its own record of the Viet Nam war would remain in the files. Even after its own historical study was photocopied by Daniel Ellsberg, one of its authors, the military and the Nixon government thought they could avert its publication. And it was almost true, since every major public figure Ellsberg tried to give a copy to, including J. William Fulbright and George McGovern, refused to take it, believing that to do so would be against the law.

Lyndon Johnson is dead and beyond any legal proceeding, even though his old friend and co-conspirator, Billie Sol Estes, swore a deposition which recited a lot of names of people whose deaths LBJ had arranged.

The Warren Commission finding on Kennedy;’s assassination has been completely discredited but nobody truly guilty of the crime ever saw the inside of a jail cell, except for Jack Ruby and a couple of CIA boys such as E. Howard Hunt, locked up on other matters.

Ellsberg got the Pentagon Papers published because the New York Times was then a decent, independent newspaper, willing to take its responsibilities seriously, and its top guys ordered their offices ringed with armed guards to keep the government from physically disrupting publication.

We are in a new era now and, even as the government and private corporations have managed to buy off, threaten, and otherwise control the mass media, the internet makes secrets a relic of a dead age. In our time, today’s Ellsberg just decided to package several hundred thousand files and pass them over to an internet publisher, Julian Assange, and the governments of the world went batshit crazy.

Secrecy is no longer a serious, practical condition. What Bradley Manning and Wikileaks did together was nullify the restrictions which nearly stopped Ellsberg and knock holes in the walls the powerful have erected to hide their miserable deeds.

Of course, the U.S. government, like most governments, retains considerable power to not only cover up its crimes but to brainwash the population into thinking that some information should be withheld from them for their own good.

We see that everywhere now that Bradley Manning, this generation’s Ellsberg, is finally brought to trial.

It is a military trial. Evidence is restricted. So is access to it, as well as to the proceedings themselves. The government has managed to hold the trial in a ‘courtroom’ so small that only fifty spectators and limited press may attend. You’d think it was a trial of a drugstore robbery in Pocatello.

Amazingly enough, the government has refused thusfar to permit news agencies and other interested parties to seat a stenographer and thus obtain a record of what is actually said. Virtually every mainstream media outfit is complaining, so perhaps that will be changed, but the entire environment in which the trial is to take place, the physical restrictions, the generally arbitrary rules on evidence, more closely resembles a show trial in Stalin’s Russia than it does a fair trial in America.

Manning has been in custody for three years, the better part of it under conditions which international observers have described as torture and as violative of covenants to which the United States is a signatory. He has been tortured, psychologically tortured by experts, in order to break him down, to weaken him and make him more susceptible to emotional collapse.

The U.S. government realizes full well that it can no longer control information, though it is trying to figure out ways to do so and there are plenty of useless pricks like Joe Lieberman who sponsor bills granting the government a ‘kill switch’ to shut the internet down. Therefore, this government, nearly any government, now knows that it can keep a grip on secrets only by scaring the hell out of anyone tempted to disclose them.

The Manning trial and its three year preliminary is designed to intimidate anyone else who might get the itch to reveal what the nation’s rulers are up to. Meanwhile, Julian Assange is imprisoned inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, unable to leave without facing arrest, extradition to America, or the shortcut of assassination.

Meanwhile, also, the brainwashing is holding up, which must bring good cheer to Obama and the other wankers in Washington. Even the corporate media, which has recently learned it is the target of massive illegal spying by the government, repeats the empty slogans of the police state. Tuesday’s editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle is a perfect example.

Titled ‘The big leak,’ it begins this way:

“Manning is no hero. While working as an intelligence analyst outside of Baghdad, he used classified access to gather hundreds of thousands of documents and sent them, willy-nilly, to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. Was the public well-served by the release of that information? With some of the material, yes. But many of those releases were classified for a very good reason, and Manning and WikiLeaks endangered peoples’ lives by publishing it without thinking, without editing or otherwise showing restraint.

“So there is no question that Manning deserves punishment...”

Although the editorial also cites his treatment thusfar as "inhumane and excessive... The military has no excuse for subjecting Manning to this kind of treatment...” –– this is, remember, the Bay Area, where Manning and Assange have considerable popular support –– it does what virtually all of the mass media are doing in America, parroting the official story without seriously wondering if it’s true.

In fact, the truth is that Manning did not send the documents “willy-nilly” and WikiLeaks did not publish them “without thinking, without editing or otherwise showing restraint.” In fact, they exercised considerable thought and restraint, offering them to media giants such as the New York Times, which printed some of the documents, and inviting the Pentagon to assist in redacting them of any disclosures which might harm individuals.

The charge that the Manning material “endangered peoples’ lives” is a lie, and it’s central to the government’s censorship platform. The documents in fact revealed three significant things: that the United States was committing war crimes systematically; that the United States and other national governments were lying in their relations with one another; and that the United States was spying on diplomats at the United Nations and threatening various governments on behalf of corporate clients, e.g. Hillary Clinton trying to force France to accept Monsanto’s Frankenfoods or be punished as a consequence.

The first ‘document’ released via WikiLeaks was a short video of American troops in an Apache helicopter shooting a group of people walking along a street in Iraq and treating it like a sporting event. Survivors were butchered as they tried to crawl to safety. A passerby stopped his van and tried to assist the wounded; they shot him to death. Two of the dead were Reuters photographers.

That video triggered outrage in Washington, outrage at its disclosure and not at the crime depicted. Outrage at the man who had the integrity and the patriotism to risk everything in order to alert his country about what was being done in its name, not at the killers who are heard on the accompanying audio exulting at what they’d done.

The Chronicle editors are as wrong as they can be. Manning is a hero, a genuine hero. He put the well-being of his country ahead of his own security, health, and safety, even ahead of his own freedom. He is a hero. The Chronicle is not much of a newspaper.

The military will of course convict Manning in its kangaroo court. He has already pled guilty to a number of lesser charges, but they want him on a big one, that of “aiding the enemy,” which could lock him up for the rest of his life.

How is it that Bradley Manning “aided the enemy”? By exposing the lies of the American government and its diplomats? By exposing the murders committed routinely and with great joy by some of its soldiers? Other peoples and other countries already knew about these things. It is the American people who the American government wishes to keep in the dark.

Nobody’s lives were put at risk, the Chronicle’s idiotic claims to the contrary. What was put at risk was the grand charade of American foreign policy being sustained to fool the American people. It is that house of cards which Manning jeopardized, to the consternation and fury of its corrupted architects.

Maybe Americans are not ready to face these secrets. Maybe most Americans still cling to their fantasies about their country, the Land of the Free, where bluebirds sing on everyone’s window ledge and political leaders care about us. But maintaining the façade will get harder and harder. That’s the nature of the Electric Age. Eventually, when it becomes impossible to sustain, when the cognitive dissonance blows through public life like lawn furniture in a Florida hurricane, there will be hell to pay.

On that day, Bradley Manning will not only be a hero but be widely seen as one. On that day, there will be real criminals prosecuted and sent to prison for what they have done to their country.

[While waiting for that day, occupy your intellect with a book to which all eleven reviewers have awarded five stars: http://www.amazon.com/News-From-A-Parallel-World/dp/1478194448]

Something is happening in this world, something difficult, bitter, glorious, dangerous, brilliant, ecstatic, frightening, and revolutionary.

Governments everywhere are desperate to kill it, crush this flower before it is fully-formed, flatten it before anyone gets ideas, before the things governments fear most, the freedom of people, the higher human qualities, love, tenderness, kindness, generosity, can gain traction, because if that happens those fuckers running the planet off the edge of creation will be running for their miserable lives.

Something is happening.

I’m seeing and reading the dispatches from Turkey now. With a few exceptions, I’d bet that America’s network news (sic) programs are either ignoring the whole thing or distorting it so badly viewers can’t figure out what’s going on.

This is revolution, you know, and there are two sides here, and people are being forced to choose, often times before they’ve thought it out, before they think they’re ready.

What little I’ve seen in the western media on Turkey tries to describe what’s happening there as a conflict over the cutting of trees or a fight about an office building which the government wants to construct in a park. That’s like describing the 18th century American revolution as a tiff over the tax on tea.

First there were photos. Although several on the web which posters claimed to be from Turkey have since been identified as actually coming from Egypt a couple of years ago, there are plenty which are clearly valid, including a mass of people, thousands of people, marching across the Bosphorus Bridge.

I am thankful for a letter posted yesterday by Tarihinde Yayimlandi, which begins: “I am writing to let you know what is going on in Istanbul for the last five days. I personally have to write this because most of the media sources are shut down by the government and word of mouth and the internet are the only ways left for us to explain ourselves and call for help and support.”

The scene in one way reminded me of another, forty years ago, when a small group of people, mostly students, tried to prevent the University of California from tearing up a small park. Before the ‘People’s Park’ movement was beaten, the governor brought in National Guard troops to occupy Berkeley, one man was shot to death on a rooftop and another blinded by police, and helicopters sprayed tear gas everywhere, including into the apartment I lived in on College Avenue where my infant daughter ‘s eyes burned her for a crime she had not committed.

But what is going on in Turkey is not People’s Park, and it will not end that way.

Five days ago, a group of people gathered in Istanbul’s Gezi Park to try to prevent the demolition of the park and tearing out of hundred-year-old trees to facilitate construction of a shopping mall. They brought their children, erected tents and spent the night under the trees. With the morning came the bulldozers, and the people stood in front of the machines.

Turkish police hit the people with water cannon and pepper spray, and the crowd dispersed. But when evening came, they returned, and their numbers had grown. The government then shut down the metro, canceled the ferries, blocked the roads. The media, newspapers, radio, television, did not carry this news. Yet despite the blackout, despite the blockades and closures, the people came. They heard about it and they came. They found ways around the impediments. They walked, some of them for miles, but they got there.

The crowds were nonviolent. Police drove tanks over them, killing at least two. The Turkish police, as did their counterparts in Oakland, fired tear gas canisters directly into the crowd, striking people in the head. Several people have been hospitalized in critical condition. Several have been blinded. Yayimlandi writes:

“These people are my friends. They are my students, my relatives. They have no ‘hidden agenda’ as the state likes to say. Their agenda is out there. It is very clear. The whole country is being sold to corporations by the government, for the construction of malls, luxury condominiums, freeways, dams and nuclear plants. The government is looking for (and creating when necessary) any excuse to attack Syria against its people’s will.”

“People who are marching to the center of Istanbul are demanding their right to live freely and receive justice, protection and respect from the State. They demand to be involved in the decision-making processes about the city they live in. What they have received instead is excessive force and enormous amounts of tear gas shot straight into their faces. Three people lost their eyes.

“Yet they still march. Hundreds of thousands join them. Couple of more thousand passed the Bosporus Bridge on foot to support the people of Taksim.”

“No newspaper or TV channel was there to report the events. They were busy broadcasting news about Miss Turkey and ‘the strangest cat of the world.’”

“Schools, hospitals and even 5 star hotels around Taksim Square opened their doors to the injured. Doctors filled the classrooms and hotel rooms to provide first aid. Some police officers refused to spray innocent people with tear gas and quit their jobs. Around the square they placed jammers to prevent internet connection and 3G networks were blocked. Residents and businesses in the area provided free wireless network for the people on the streets. Restaurants offered food and water for free.

“People in Ankara and Izmir gathered on the streets to support the resistance in Istanbul.

“I am writing this letter so that you know what is going on in Istanbul. Mass media will not tell you any of this. Not in my country at least. Please post as many articles as you see on the Internet and spread the word.

“As I was posting articles that explained what is happening in Istanbul on my Facebook page last night someone asked me the following question:

“‘What are you hoping to gain by complaining about our country to foreigners?’

“This blog is my answer to her.

“By so called ‘complaining’ about my country I am hoping to gain:

“Freedom of expression and speech,

“Respect for human rights.

“Control over the decisions I make concerning my own body.

“The right to legally congregate in any part of the city without being considered a terrorist.

“But most of all by spreading the word to you, my friends who live in other parts of the world, I am hoping to get your awareness, support and help!”

For further info and things you can do for help please see Amnesty International’s Call for Urgent Help

There followed on this site an astonishing flood of messages, nearly all supportive, from everywhere on the earth. Words of solidarity from Iceland, Mexico, Iran, the United States, Ireland, Germany, South Africa.

Several people offered their own internet access, including user names, passwords, and servers.

I realize that I don’t know anything about Turkey, it’s governance, traditions, history, religion(s) or culture. The Turkish people may well want a society different from my own or from one I would choose for myself.

I know this, though. From all over the world tonight, across the boundaries of borders and governments, media blackouts, internet interference, there are voices rising in support of the people in Taksim Square. We are in this together. And it’s possible, just barely possible, that in a world where the powerful have engineered closed, brutal systems of oppression there may still be, after all, a way to overcome.

I write this column tonight inspired by the bravery of the people of Turkey, and of the writer of the blog whose words I’ve reprinted. Have heart. The world is in trouble, we all know that, but the last acts have not yet been written. And my hope is not in the lies of politicians willing to sell out the most hurting among us on behalf of their rich friends but in the truths told by ordinary people standing together in the face of it.

At some point in American politics, the owners turn you into their bitch. Either that or your small plane crashes, you go riding in a motorcade, you get maneuvered into a hotel kitchen in Los Angeles, take your pick. John Kerry’s alive, which speaks for itself.

The story goes like this. Election night, 2004. Everybody in politics knows that the presidential vote has just been hijacked. In fact, it’s so blatant even George Bush figured it out.

The way it was done, simple. The central vote tabulators in seven states have their tallies wired to a machine in Tennessee where a standard percentage is switched from Kerry to Bush. We know this for two reasons. First, some people have talked. Second, the exit polls gave it away.

The thing about exit polls is that they are sensationally accurate, so accurate that they universally used as protection against the very sort of theft that America experienced in 2004. When the methodology is sound, exit polls are always within one percent of the actual tally.

In 2004, the exit polls for 43 states was perfect. For the other seven, the announced results skewed between seven and eight percent from Kerry to Bush in each case. In six of those states it was enough to switch the electoral vote. In Pennsylvania, even a seven percent theft could not keep Kerry from taking it.

I knew it was a theft that night and I was not alone. Anyone familiar with politics on a practical level knew the outcome had been cooked because if you’re into politics you understand exit polls. It’s like a meteorologist knowing what a high pressure system means or a mathematician understanding Pi.

Anyway, the story is that Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, had a contentious conversation, the gist of which was Kerry saying he was going to let it go and Edwards screaming at him.

Kerry was signaling to the country’s owners that he was prepared to play ball. Edwards was signaling that he was not very reliable. The latter found himself snared in a classic honey trap and even prosecuted; the former got to be Secretary of State.

The Edwards tale is for another time. Sufficient to observe that at the time of his downfall he was unlikely to be nominated –– that was always going to be a contest between the two ‘acceptable’ candidates, Clinton and Obama –– but he had the kind of backing which might force the issue on selection of Attorney General.

Can you imagine how the bankers would have liked Edwards at the Justice Department? Not exactly the ‘too big to prosecute,’ let’s have dinner at the White House this week situation they’ve got now.

Kerry’s capitulation was, of course, disgusting, but that’s how empires operate. If you want a job near the top, you have to enjoy, or at least not object to, fellating some of the most evil pricks in creation.

A month ago, Kerry made headlines by lecturing the Iraqis for being insufficiently grateful for everything America had been doing for them. I’m not inventing this, it really happened. ‘Grateful’ was his word.

Yesterday, he was making news again, this time on the issue of arms dispersal. The New York Times article ran in the Chronicle with this headline: Kerry criticizes Russia’s ongoing weapons sales.

The piece had Kerry “strongly criticiz(ing) Russia’s pledge to send advanced antiaircraft weapons to Syria, saying that its actions threatened to disrupt efforts to negotiate a political settlement of the Syrian conflict and posed an unacceptable risk to Israel.”

First of all, I’m getting sick and tired of Israel dictating American foreign policy, aren’t you? Enough, already. Some people feel strongly that Israel’s policies are an unacceptable risk to peace. Some people also feel strongly that whether Assad stays in power in Syria is not Israel’s business, nor America’s.

Second, anybody else remember the press release from the State Department a few months back crowing about how in 2012 the United States broke all previous records in sales of military equipment and armaments to the rest of the world? We were bragging about it. And now John Kerry is lecturing the Russians for maybe passing along some antiaircraft weapons?

Third, the United States is not interested in a ‘political settlement’ in Syria. We are interested in overthrowing the government, clearing a fat opening for the World Bank and the IMF, and Assad’s head on a stick, in any order you like. Assad himself has proposed as the only precondition of settlement that the Syria people vote for it; the United States has rejected that out of hand.

You know why Russia wants to send and Syria wants to receive antiaircraft weapons? Because when the U.S. and its NATO fig leaf wanted to get rid of Ghaddafi and wreck Libya, it first dropped mercenaries into the country as ‘rebels,’ then used airplanes to bomb the crap out of the government’s troops while pretending it was ‘protecting’ civilians. And it looks like America’s setting up to do it all again.

Kerry thinks, and the New York Times agrees with him, that “Russia’s announcement last week that it would go ahead with the sale of sophisticated S-300 missiles to Syria (has) added a dangerous new dimension to the civil war in Syria, even as Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, have worked together to hold an international conference in hopes of finding a way to end the fighting.”

The Times thinks it’s a ‘dangerous new dimension’ for the Syrian government to be able to protect itself from the rockets and bombers dispatched by the U.S., NATO, and Israel.

As for the ‘international conference,’ the rest of the world is by now aware of how the U.S. manages them. For example, we were able to delay peace talks over the Viet Nam war long enough for Kissinger and Nixon to bomb North Vietnamese hospitals on Christmas Eve. Apparently, Kerry’s task is to pretend to negotiate until we’ve killed Assad and ruined his country.

I really don’t think I’ve become that sophisticated. I think the U.S. government has become that obvious. These people don’t seem to care how completely hollow their posturing looks to the world. What matters to them is how much the American people know and, judging by public awareness of events concerning Iraq, Afghanistan, Mexico and all of Latin America, and Libya and the rest of Africa, the American people don’t know anything.

Obama moves his Tuesday death list over to the Pentagon and tells us its a big improvement. He says the drone attacks will also be moving to the military, and that we’ll be more discerning in the future. The public raves.

Yesterday came news that the Pakistani Taliban, in response to the latest drone attack, which reportedly killed Waliur Rehman and at least four other unlucky bystanders, has withdrawn their offer of peace talks. The Associated Press, pissed off that Obama stole the e-mail records of more than a hundred journalists, is still parroting the party line: the news release said the dead extras were all “militants.” With all due respect, how the fuck would you people know?

Rehman was targeted because the U.S. blamed him for a 2009 attack in Afghanistan which killed seven CIA ‘employees.’ That sounds almost clean, doesn’t it? We kill children with errant missiles, they must have been ‘militants.’ We send people to run torture centers at Bagram and elsewhere, they’re ‘employees.’

America runs the world, that’s what we think. That’s the underlying premise for all of this stuff, for raining death from the sky and writing off victims as ‘militants,’ even when they’re children or people attending a wedding or funeral. That’s the unspoken premise of everything Kerry does, from lecturing Iraqis to lecturing the Russians. We can destroy anything we want. The victim then ought to be grateful because we’re “helping” them “rebuild.” We can bomb a country at will, destabilize its government, assassinate its leaders, but if they try to obtain the means to defend themselves we say they’re “adding a dangerous dimension,” which they have no right to do.

John Kerry is just doing his job. Had he been sworn-in as President in January, 2005, it’s now abundantly clear he would have done as he was told anyhow.

“He wasn’t a saint. He was just a normal person.” Alexander Schmorell was made a ‘saint’ by the Russian Orthodox church in 2012, but his old friend, Liselotte Furst-Ramdohr thinks that’s crazy.

Schmorell and Furst-Ramdohr, Christoph Probst, and Hans Scholl were central players in a resistance among German youth to the rising madness of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. Among themselves, they organized the White Rose, German youth who risked their lives inside Germany.

At the beginning, they distributed anonymous leaflets, mailing them to randomly-selected names in the phone books; later, they passed them out door-to-door. On February 8th and 15th, 1943, they plastered walls in Munich with anti-Hitler graffiti.

Then, on the 18th, Hans Scholl and his sister, Sophie, tried something even more daring. They took copies of their sixth, and final, leaflet to Munich University and left piles of them outside classrooms and in the central stairwell. As they reached the top of the stairs, however, they had some remaining. Sophie Scholl threw them off a balcony so that they would float down on students below.

Sophie was seen by a caretaker, who called the Gestapo. Hans Scholl had in his pocket a draft for leaflet number 7; he tried unsuccessfully to swallow it as the Gestapo closed in.

The Nazis tried them for treason, along with their friend, Christoph Probst. The three were executed by guillotine on February 22, 1943. Hands Scholl’s last words were, “Long live freedom!”

Schmorell tried to flee. Furst-Ramdohr found some new clothes for him and a fake passport, but his attempt to reach Switzerland failed because of heavy snowfall. He returned to Munich. Shortly after, he was recognized by a former girlfriend when he entered a bomb shelter. He was arrested and later executed.

Furst-Ramdohr was also arrested but, perhaps because she was at 29 already a war widow –– her husband had died on the Russian front –– her life was spared. She herself points out that on her release, the Nazis had her followed for a long time, probably hoping that she’d lead them to other conspirators.

At 99, Furst-Ramsdohr is still alive. She gave dancing lessons until age 86. Now, she lives alone in a small town outside Munich, dismissive of the praise latterly heaped upon her and the other members of the White Rose conspiracy by Germans interested in feeling better about themselves.

“At the time,” she notes, “they’d have had us all executed.”

As it happened, the final White Rose leaflet was smuggled out of Germany in spring of 1943 and fell into the hands of the Allies. It was reprinted. A million copies were then dropped over the country by Allied aircraft in the autumn of that year.

Furst-Ramdohr says that she and her friends couldn’t understand how the German people had fallen for the Nazi propaganda. “They must have been able to tell how bad things were,” she says. But when the war was over, the rest of the world heard Germans claim that they hadn’t really known about the ovens. They’d been silent as the German legislature, spurred by the Reichstag fire and other crimes which, it turned out, had been done by the government and the Nazis themselves, took away their civil rights, amended their constitution, drafted policies which were used to suppress any opposition.

We didn’t know, they said, to a world which didn’t believe them. “They must have been able to tell,” but they hadn’t wanted to. It was easier to pretend.

“Keep talking,” William Hurt says to Kathleen Turner in “Body Heat,” the brilliant film noir by Lawrence Kasden, “experience has shown that I can be convinced of anything.”

So, will it work, this long-delayed happy horse shit, this rhetorical tour de farce?

The nation, no doubt, pretended to watch. The media, evidently, pretended to parse it. The words and phrases are being examined for nuance, shading, emphasis.

It may even be that a large portion of the public, repeatedly lied to for five years now, will swallow once again the mellifluous cadence, the paternalistic patter, the slick packaging. Why not? Experience has shown that we can be convinced of anything.

For nearly four-and-a-half years, Barack Obama has been conducting the most bloodthirsty, belligerent, cold-hearted foreign policy in American history. You think I’m exaggerating, perhaps wildly exaggerating. After all, there’s Nixon to consider, and Lyndon Baines Johnson. If you want to go back in time, one might even make a case for Andrew Jackson, if you consider his genocidal war against Native Americans to be a foreign policy.

George Bush, the younger, was certainly bloodthirsty, belligerent, and cold-hearted, and if he ever faltered there were the creeps around him, Darth Vader and Wolfie, and little Elliot Abrams, the Prince of Darkness.

But Obama does his work with a dancer’s moves. He does not lurch around like Johnson, speeding through Texas in a Cadillac throwing beer cans out the window. He does not rant about the Jews, like Nixon, and throw in some Christmas bombing of hospitals just to prove his understanding of Jesus. He’s not showy, just ruthlessly efficient.

During his reign, America has hit more countries with missiles than at any other time in our history. We have also dispatched black ops characters, CIA killers and SEALS creeps, to murder local leaders in more territories and on every continent. We have done plenty of killing by remote control, obviating the need for risking the lives of Americans, which has kept the public sleeping and the press stupid, or maybe that should be the other way ‘round.

Obama is the first American President to personally write a death list, a list of human beings, none of whom he knows, to be assassinated on his orders. He probably doesn’t care for the term, though. ‘Death list’ sounds so much like Augusto Pinochet, doesn’t it? He calls it instead a ‘disposition matrix.’

There have been thousands of completely innocent people targeted and murdered by drones on his orders. We don’t have exact numbers because until today the United States has not even admitted we were doing it. And despite Obama’s speech, which one of his predecessors, Richard Nixon, would have called a limited, modified, hangout, we still don’t know.

The President told America that while he regretted having to kill people by remote control, the alternatives were morally worse. I’ve heard this argument from others, the claim that drones kill fewer people than, say a bombing run. “Neither conventional military action nor waiting for attacks to occur, offers moral safe harbor,” he said. I may be out of line here, but I’d say that anyone who blows the limbs off children by raining Hellfire missiles on their villages does not get to talk about morality. Not to me, not ever.

Then Obama explained that the wanton, psychopathic murder of thousands of innocents has been bothering him. He wants us to feel sorry for him. “For me, and for those in the chain of command, these deaths will haunt us as long as we live.” Yes, I’m sure they will. I’m sure that as he watches the NBA finals his enjoyment will be tarnished by images of death and destruction, of parents weeping over their dead children. Probably ruin the half-time show.

On Thursday, the administration released the names of four Americans Obama has killed, trying to soften the blow a little bit, get that out of the way first. One of these, the only one Obama admits to ordering murdered, was a man who spoke frequently about the need for a holy war against America. Under the new rules of Obama, the post-911 rules, the highly convenient new rules, we can kill people for talking if they say the wrong things.

Then we killed the man’s 16-year-old son, a strike Obama eerily claims was an accident. The odds of this being an accident are, well, equal to my odds of winning the U.S. Open this year.

Missing from Obama’s speech was any reference to the repeated use of what are called “double taps,” the targeting of not just a funeral procession or wedding, something numerous international reporters have documented as American practice, but hitting the first responders with another strike. This brutality, this particular use of calculated violence is against international law, which we claim to respect and follow, and is universally condemned.

The President got around to Guantanamo, too. Thing has become an embarrassment, all those inmates, maybe a hundred by now, on a hunger strike, and Obama’s decision to torture them further by force-feeding, jamming tubes down their throats. The process has been described in foreign media but not on MSNBC, where despite the occasional criticism the fake ‘left’ media is still kissing his ass.

It’s the fault of those damned Republicans, you know, who just wouldn’t let him close the place, except that he didn’t get into the details, how what he asked for was permission to bring them to a maximum security installation in Illinois. He promised to close the place on the campaign trail but evidently only to shift the prisoners to a different facility.

More than a hundred innocent men have been held for more than a decade, all of them tortured in violation of treaties to which the United States is a signatory, and Obama neglects to mention that these people have been adjudged innocent not only by the International Red Cross but by the Pentagon’s own investigation. The problem with releasing them is that he can’t figure out where to send them, and there are, according to an article in the Guardian UK, “classification concerns, security concerns, (and) the use of torture in interrogations.”

Recent public opinion surveys suggest that Obama can pull the tongues out of Guantanamo prisoners and a majority of Americans won’t give a damn. Nor are they interested in drones. So long as America’s wars are fought against people in other lands, Americans don’t much care. Right now, according to the Gallup Poll, only a third want to close Guantanamo and most never think about it.

A majority apparently buy Obama’s transparently false rationale that if we weren’t raining terror on people from the skies, we’d have to invade their countries or bomb them indiscriminately. Nowhere is anybody wondering whether we have the right to do any of this. Yemen has not attacked us, nor Somalia, nor Mali, nor Pakistan, nor Afghanistan.

Shifting the death lists from the CIA to the Pentagon is not exactly a reform, though we’re told that it is. Nor should we be becalmed by the soothing promises of transparency and no permanent war. We’ve heard these things before. They’re likely as true now as ever.

This President talks about terrorists but is himself responsible for more innocent deaths than any ‘terrorist’ leader whose name appears on his ‘disposition matrix.’ That is without serious dispute. Yet, as he more than once points to the flag and speaks of its meaning and enduring legacy, it never dawns on him, nor on the mass media, nor on the vast majority of people in America, that to anyone whose country, whose village or township, whose church or wedding reception or funeral procession, whose school is leveled by fire from the sky, it America which is the terrorist, America whom the rest of the world fears.

Obama is far too intelligent to believe what he’s preaching. He knows that America is not defending itself overseas, nor freedom, nor self-determination. He knows that we are sending troops to dozens of countries in Africa and the Middle East to secure oil reserves and natural gas pipelines, steal resources, establish military forward bases, and scare everybody into complying with our will. He knows this.

He made reference, briefly, to Mali. Mali is a country where there is a civil war. Much of that war is the product of an oppressive regime which ousted a democratic government and which is now fighting rebels who include people forced out of Libya by America’s bloody overthrow of Moammar Ghaddafi, which was itself done to get rid of a strong pan-African voice and a highly-successful economy in preparation for our own move into Africa. Obama knows this. Yet, he says that in Mali we are assisting the fight against al-Qaida, and not only do nearly all Americans listening to him believe it but nearly all journalists will report this uncritically.

One more thing. The President told us that “the future of terrorism” is homegrown, not elsewhere. Homegrown ‘extremists’ are the most dangerous threat we now face, he said, pointing to the Marathon bombing in Boston. This statement is the most alarming thing he said.

Placed in the context of all the other domestic changes Obama has overseen, from total electronic surveillance of the population to the construction of ‘detention centers,’ from the militarization of urban police forces to the inexplicably enormous purchases of bullets by Homeland Security, from the ‘new’ policy in which the military has authority inside the country in place of civilian authority to the NDAA and the assertion by Obama that the government may lock up without trial or even charges, indefinitely, any person deemed to be an ‘imminent threat,’ the definition of which is not only missing but possessed of a totalitarian vagueness, the 'future of terrorism' remark is chilling. He's bringing it all back home, folks.

We have heard for more than a year from crazy Senators such as Lindsey Graham saying that ‘the homeland is now part of the battlefield,’ which, when combined with the claims the government makes about what it has the right to do on any such ‘battlefield,’ ought to make any patriot’s blood run cold.

We are in trouble here, and Obama’s carefully prepared bullshit presentation scares me more than ever. And it ought to scare you, too.