Dave Emory’s entire lifetime of work is available on a flash drive that can be obtained here. (The flash drive includes the anti-fascist books available on this site.)
Listen: MP3
CORRECTION: On Side 1, Mort Sahl’s autobiography is mistakenly referred to as “Homeland.” The correct title is Heartland.
Introduction: In this program, we explore “L’Affaire Snowden” as a step toward bringing about the end of The New Deal, in effect fulfilling the 1934 coup attempt against Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
We also underscore the seditious, neo-secessionist nature of the forces embodied in Eddie the Friendly Spook.
Excerpting some of Snowden’s 2009 online musings–crafted during the same time period in which he decided to leak NSA documents–gives us insight into his true nature. We’ve mentioned Snowden’s embrace of the gold standard, belief that we should eliminate Social Security and deep affinity for Ron Paul. Perhaps examining his actual pronouncements will prove educational.
EXAMPLE: “. . . Snowden wrote that the elderly ‘wouldn’t be fucking helpless if you weren’t sending them fucking checks to sit on their ass and lay in hospitals all day.’ ”
Snowden is a nasty little fascist and people should carefully consider the rest of his behavior in the context of his ideological pronouncements.
After examining Eddie Snowden, Unplugged, we take a look at some of Citizen Greenwald’s political utterances. (“Citizen Greenwald” is our nickname for Glenn Greenwald, whom we strongly suspect is a spook, just like Snowden.)
We have discussed Citizen Greenwald’s legal work, in which he spent years running legal interference for Nazi murderers and doing most of the work pro bono. One of his legal victories involved aiding two white supremacists who had attacked two Latino day laborers.
In the past, Citizen Greenwald has had some deeply inflammatory things to say in the past concerning “illegal immigrants.” We wonder if his stated views on the evils of illegal immigration might be related to his work defending the attackers of the day laborers.
In his intemperate remarks about immigrants (which he later unconvincingly recanted), Greenwald also defended former Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo, a fellow traveler of some notorious white supremacists.
Tancredo’s associates include Don Black, David Duke associate and creator of the Stormfront website. Black is among the numerous white supremacist and Nazi associates of Edward Snowden’s Presidential candidate of choice, Ron Paul. Tancredo’s fellow travelers also include members of the neo-Confederate movement and the League of the South, also networking elements of Ron Paul.
Following discussion of Tancredo, we examine more of the same neo-Confederate, neo-secessionist elements that are part and parcel to the Snowden milieu.
A very important story highlights what we feel is a major thrust of the psy-op for which Edward Snowden–the Peach Fuzz Fascist–is fronting. A right-wing libertarian political milieu is working to have states cut-off electricity to the NSA, this in response to the Snowden disclosures.
As the authors of the story note: “The bill is rooted in a theory that, in James Madison’s words, would “speedily put an end to the Union itself.” More immediately, it could empower conservative state lawmakers to cut off Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security, to frustrate civil rights enforcement or even to prevent federal law enforcement from investigating criminals.”
Advanced by the Tenth Amendment Center, the legislation; “poses a serious threat to that liberal touchstone, a federal regulatory and welfare state equal to the problems of growing corporate power and poverty.”
Not surprisingly, the Tenth Amendment Center heavily overlaps elements associated with the League of the South and the neo-Confederate movement. Those elements, in turn, are inextricably linked with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the“Paulistinian Libertarian Organization” and The Peach Fuzz Fascist himself [Snowden]. As noted above, Citizen Greenwald has defended birds of the same feather.
Next, we note the RNC’s intent to support the move against the NSA, using it as a vehicle for further undermining the Obama administration. (In FTR #762, we examined the Snowden actions as a destabilization operation against the Obama administration.)
Much of the program further highlights the profound links between WikiLeaks and the Snowden “op.”
We also discuss Snowden’s allegations of NSA spying on Siemens, itself deeply connected to German intelligence, as well as Snowden’s attack on the Five Eyes alliance, to which Angela Merkel is seeking admission.
Program Highlights Include: Tom Tancredo’s links to the Tea Party; Citizen Greenwald’s positive outlook on Ron Paul; WikiLeaks’ journalist James Ball’s assistance to the cementing of the Snowden/Greenwald/Poitras connection; Ball’s break with WikiLeaks over Julian Assange’s association with Joran Jermas; Jermas’ son Johannes Wahlstrom’s role as a defense witness for Julian Assange; WikiLeaks’ possible role in moving Snowden from Hawaii to Hong Kong; further indications that Assange may have belonged to the Santikitenan Park Association (also known as “The Family”), an intelligence-connected, fascist mind-control cult; Snowden’s assertion that BND (German intelligence) has access to the NSA’s X Key Score database; Siemens’ development of the control systems attacked by the Stuxnet worm.
1a. Excerpting some of Snowden’s 2009 online musings–crafted during the same time period in which he decided to leak NSA documents–gives us insight into his true nature. We’ve mentioned Snowden’s embrace of the gold standard, belief that we should eliminate Social Security and deep affinity for Ron Paul. Perhaps examining his actual pronouncements will prove educational.
EXAMPLE: “. . . Snowden wrote that the elderly ‘wouldn’t be fucking helpless if you weren’t sending them fucking checks to sit on their ass and lay in hospitals all day.’ ”
Yeah, if ONLY those 75 and 80-year-olds lying in hospital beds would get up and find jobs like everybody else, right Eddie? Snowden is a nasty little fascist and people should carefully consider the rest of his behavior in the context of his ideological pronouncements.
[Snowden is posting under the moniker “The TrueHOOHA”] At the time the stimulus bill was being debated, Snowden also condemned Obama’s economic policies as part of a deliberate scheme “to devalue the currency absolutely as fast as theoretically possible.” (He favored Ron Paul’s call for the United States to return to the gold standard.) The social dislocations of the financial collapse bothered him not at all. “Almost everyone was self-employed prior to 1900,” he asserted. “Why is 12% employment [sic] so terrifying?” In another chat-room exchange, Snowden debated the merits of Social Security:
<TheTrueHOOHA> save money? cut this social security bullshit
<User 11> hahahayes
<User 18> Yeah! Fuck old people!
<User 11> social security is bullshit
<User 11> let’s just toss old people out in the street
<User 18> Old people could move in with [User11].
<User 11> NOOO
<User 11> they smell funny
<TheTrueHOOHA> Somehow, our society managed to make it hundreds of years without social security just fine . . . .
<TheTrueHOOHA> Magically the world changed after the new deal, and old people became made of glass.
Later in the same session, Snowden wrote that the elderly “wouldn’t be fucking helpless if you weren’t sending them fucking checks to sit on their ass and lay in hospitals all day.”
1b. Citizen Greenwald has also given qualified political support to Ron Paul. The “Paulistinian Libertarian Organization” is at the foundation of the Snowden milieu and operation.
. . . . Greenwald had identified a vehicle for a political realignment: the presidential candidacy of the old libertarian warhorse Ron Paul. In November 2007, Greenwald called Paul “as vigilant a defender of America’s constitutional freedoms ... as any national figure in some time.” . . . . Still, he believed Paul to be a rare truth-teller, prepared to buck a corrupt bipartisan consensus.
This portrayal required highly selective political reasoning, not to mention a basic ignorance of U.S. history. Paul, a longtime supporter of the John Birch Society, is a quintessential paleoconservative, holding prejudices and instincts that predate the post–World War II conservative movement founded by William F. Buckley Jr. and others. Paleoconservatives, in their hatred of centralized government and consequent isolationism, regard U.S. history as a long series of catastrophes, starting with the defeat of the Confederacy. . . .
2a. We have discussed Citizen Greenwald’s legal work, in which he spent years running legal interference for Nazi murderers and doing most of the work pro bono. One of his legal victories involved aiding two white supremacists who had attacked two Latino day laborers.
In the past, Citizen Greenwald has had some deeply inflammatory things to say in the past concerning “illegal immigrants.” We wonder if his stated views on the evils of illegal immigration might be related to his work defending the attackers of the day laborers.
. . . . Greenwald’s other clients included the neo-Nazi National Alliance, who were implicated in an especially horrible crime. Two white supremacists on Long Island had picked up a pair of unsuspecting Mexican day laborers, lured them into an abandoned warehouse, and then clubbed them with a crowbar and stabbed them repeatedly. The day laborers managed to escape, and when they recovered from their injuries, they sued the National Alliance and other hate groups, alleging that they had inspired the attackers. . . .
. . . . On certain issues, though, his [Greenwald’s] prose was suffused with right-wing conceits and catchphrases. One example was immigration, on which Greenwald then held surprisingly hard-line views. “The parade of evils caused by illegal immigration is widely known,” Greenwald wrote in 2005. The facts, to him, were indisputable: “illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” Defending the nativist congressman Tom Tancredo from charges of racism, Greenwald wrote of “unmanageably endless hordes of people [who] pour over the border in numbers far too large to assimilate, and who consequently have no need, motivation or ability to assimilate.” Those hordes, Greenwald wrote, posed a threat to “middle-class suburban voters.” . . . .
2b. In his intemperate remarks about immigrants (which he later unconvincingly recanted), Greenwald also defended former Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo, a fellow traveler of some notorious white supremacists.
Tancredo’s associates include Don Black, David Duke associate and creator of the Stormfront website. Black is among the numerous white supremacist and Nazi associates of Edward Snowden’s Presidential candidate of choice, Ron Paul. Tancredo’s fellow travelers also include members of the neo-Confederate movement and the League of the South, also networking elements of Ron Paul.
. . . . The former Republican congressman from Colorado, known for his biting anti-immigration rhetoric and campaign ads suggesting Latino immigrants are rapists and drug dealers, is scheduled to be the luncheon speaker at next month’s annual conference for the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC). [Tancredo wound up canceling–D.E.] The theme of the conference? “Multiculturalism – the Death of America.”
Sharing the dais with Tancredo will be a rogue’s gallery of the racist right, including James Edwards, who hosts the white nationalist Political Cesspool radio show; Don Black, the former Klansman best known for creating Stormfront.org, the first major Internet hate site; and Leonard Wilson, a longtime segregationist and Alabama commander for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a neo-Confederate group that, like Tancredo, staunchly opposes immigration.
For those who have watched Tancredo go through endless contortions to distance himself from his racist friends, speaking at a CCC conference seems to be a turning point. The time has passed to apologize for the company he keeps.
And what company it is.
Tancredo was already honorary chairman of Youth for Western Civilization (YWC), an ultraconservative student group that has actively cultivated relationships with white nationalist organizations such as the racist League of the South (LOS), whose leader Michael Hill recently penned an essay describing how white people are endowed with a “God-ordained superiority” and professing that it was a “monumental lie” that all men are created equal. In 2006, Tancredo delivered an anti-immigrant speech and sang “Dixie” at a barbecue advertised by the South Carolina chapter of the LOS. . . . .
2c. Tancredo is also an associate of the Tea Party.
. . . . Tancredo stood smiling at the crowd and waving before starting off his speech with “I’m Tom Tancredo and I drive a Harley!” He quickly moved on from the topic of motorcycles, however, to get to his main target: immigrants.
He stated that many of the people who voted Obama into office “can’t even spell the word vote or even speak English,” which brought loud applause from the crowd. He said that it was a good thing that McCain didn’t win the election otherwise we would be see him and Rep. Gutierrez receive awards from NCLR for introducing and implementing an amnesty bill. He went on to talk about the “cult of multiculturalism” which is “aided by leftists.”
He issued a warning to the crowd that “our culture is at stake” and that our culture “is based on Judeo-Christian values whether people like it or not!” Near the end of his speech Tancredo announced to the crowd that he was going to be working with Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA (an anti-immigrant group with strong ties to white nationalists) at their breakout session on Friday. He encouraged people to attend the session and thanked Roy Beck and NumbersUSA for all their good work. . . .
3a. A very important story highlights what we feel is a major thrust of the psy-op for which Edward Snowden–the Peach Fuzz Fascist–is fronting. A right-wing libertarian political milieu is working to have states cut-off electricity to the NSA, this in response to the Snowden disclosures.
As the authors of the story note: “The bill is rooted in a theory that, in James Madison’s words, would “speedily put an end to the Union itself.” More immediately, it could empower conservative state lawmakers to cut off Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security, to frustrate civil rights enforcement or even to prevent federal law enforcement from investigating criminals.”
Advanced by the Tenth Amendment Center, the legislation; “poses a serious threat to that liberal touchstone, a federal regulatory and welfare state equal to the problems of growing corporate power and poverty.”
. . . . What does the NSA need if it wants to spy on you? Even before legal permission, there’s the basics: electricity to run its computers and water to feed the servers that stores the reams of data they acquire. Enterprising state legislators in six states have seized upon this almost-too-obvious insight, and used it to draft legislation that would quite literally turn off the NSA’s lights in their states.
This might seem like a good idea to NSA critics unhappy with President Obama’s reform proposals, but the constitutional theory it depends on is profoundly dangerous. It poses a serious threat to that liberal touchstone, a federal regulatory and welfare state equal to the problems of growing corporate power and poverty.
Ultimately, this proposal to depower the NSA reveals that there’s only so much that can be accomplished by right-left coalitions. Unless each side can agree to abandon tactics that threaten the other’s sacred cows, the members of these coalitions must constantly be on guard against the man standing behind them waiting to stick a knife in their back.
Turning Off The Lights
Each of the six states (Kansas, Indiana, Missouri, Washington, Oklahoma, and California) base their proposals on model legislation developed by the OffNow coalition, a group organized by the radically libertarian Tenth Amendment Center. So too will legislators in the next three states (Michigan, Arizona, and Utah) that plan to propose lights-off legislation. So OffNow, and by extension the Tenth Amendment center, is more-or-less running the show here.
How does the legislation work? Basically, it prohibits any state entity and many corporations from:
Provid[ing] services, or participat[ing] or assist[ing] in any way with the providing of services to a federal agency, federal agent, or corporation providing services to the federal government which is involved in the collection of electronic data or metadata of any person(s) pursuant to any action not based on a warrant that particularly describes the person(s), place(s) and thing(s) to be searched or seized.
Elsewhere, the legislation provides that any corporation “that provides services to or on behalf of this state” which violates this prohibition “shall be forever ineligible to act on behalf of, or provide services to, this state or any political subdivision of this state.” So if a state’s utilities — electricity, water, sewage and so forth — are owned by the state, they are forbidden from providing any service to the NSA. And if a state’s utilities are privately owned, they must choose between cutting off service to the NSA or permanently losing their ability to do business with the state.
In most states, this would be largely symbolic: the NSA doesn’t have installations everywhere. But bothWashington and Utah house significant NSA facilities, and it would actually be quite painful for the agency to move them.
. . .
The Power To Destroy
The bill is rooted in a theory that, in James Madison’s words, would “speedily put an end to the Union itself.” More immediately, it could empower conservative state lawmakers to cut off Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security, to frustrate civil rights enforcement or even to prevent federal law enforcement from investigating criminals.
The Tenth Amendment Center is one of the leading proponents of “nullification,” an unconstitutional theory which claims that states can unilaterally invalidate federal laws simply by passing their own law claiming that the federal provision is invalid. Yet their proposal to cut of water and power to the NSA rests on a slightly different constitutional theory than pure nullification. Under something known as the “anti-commandeering doctrine,” the Supreme Court generally does not permit the federal government to command a state to take a particular action. Thus, for example, if the federal government wants to criminalize marijuana, then it can order federal agents to arrest marijuana users, or it can encourage states to prosecute marijuana users by offering them federal funds if they do so, but it cannot simply order a state to prosecute someone the state does not wish to prosecute. Washington and Colorado get to have their own drug laws and their police force is under no obligation to enforce federal law.
Apply this rule to the NSA, and it follows that the federal government cannot force a state to have its own domestic spying program, or to loan its own agents to the NSA. If the federal government wants to engage in surveillance, it must use its own money and its own officers to do so unless a state voluntarily agrees to provide assistance.
But what if a state orders its state-owned power company to deny electricity to the NSA? Or if the state refuses to contract with any company that also provides basic services to the federal government? On the surface, these decisions seem to be covered by the anti-commandeering doctrine as well. Why should the federal government be allowed to direct the state’s business relations any more than it directs its police force?
Chief Justice John Marshall provided a really good answer to this question nearly two centuries ago. In the landmark case of McCulloch v. Maryland, the state of Maryland attempted to tax a federally chartered bank. Marshall wrote for a unanimous Court to explain why state taxation of federal entities was not allowed. “[T]he power to tax involves the power to destroy,” he explained, and “the power to destroy may defeat and render useless the power to create” the bank that the U.S. Constitution entrusted to the federal government. More recent Supreme Court decisions have explained that states may not enact laws that “stand . . . as an obstacle to the accomplishment and execution of the full purposes and objectives of Congress.”
If the power to tax includes the power to destroy, so too does the power to cut off water, power and other essential services to a federal agency such as the NSA. Federal offices could not possibly manage the kind of record keeping and communications necessary to operate in a modern society without access to electricity. Indeed, the OffNow coalition’s website is quite explicit about the fact that they believe that the power to cut off utilities is the power to destroy the NSA’s ability to operate — the NSA’s “massive supercomputers monitoring your personal information are water-cooled. They can’t function without the resources to keep them at operating temperature. That water is scheduled to be provided by the Jordan Valley River Conservancy District, ‘a political subdivision of the state of Utah.’”
This tactic, of using state power to prevent the federal government from operating, should trouble progressives regardless of how they feel about the NSA’s surveillance program. If Utah can cut of water or electricity to the NSA, what’s to prevent Texas from cutting off power to federal agencies that provide health care to poor people, or North Carolina from turning the lights off on federal voting rights attorneys challenging theircomprehensive voter suppression law?
Burning It Down
Don’t doubt for a minute that, if the Tenth Amendment Center succeeds in establishing a precedent for nullification-via-power-outages, they will immediately deploy this and similar tactics to implement other parts of their sweeping libertarian agency. Some of their other initiatives include bills purporting to nullify federal gun laws and the Affordable Care Act, as well as a truly surreal proposal to undermine the Federal Reserve by requiring citizens to pay their state taxes in gold or silver.
Nor are these the least of the Tenth Amendment Center’s ambitions. A resolution introduced in the New Hampshire legislature and pushed by the Center lays out an expansive list of potential federal laws that it objects to on constitutional grounds — one of them is “prohibitions of type or quantity of arms or ammunition” — and then claims that the Constitution shall become null and void if the federal government enacts any of the laws the resolution deems objectionable, and “all powers previously delegated to the United States of America by the Constitution for the United States shall revert to the several States individually.”
The Tenth Amendment Center, in other words, is not simply distrustful of centralized power. They fear the federal government with such pathological intensity that they’ve actually suggested dissolving the Union in its entirety if Congress, the President or the federal judiciary takes any action that violates their idiosyncratic view of the Constitution. Their position on states’ rights makes John C. Calhoun look like a moderate.
So however attractive reining in the NSA this way might seem, it’s a Trojan Horse: a legal strategy that has the potential to bring down the major federal accomplishments liberals most deeply cherish. Good thing the depower bills are unlikely to pass in any state. Regardless, however, this incident tells us something important about the various proposals for a left-libertarian alliance to rein the security state you see bandied about.
Realistically, that’s the alliance you’d need you take serious, nationwide action on spying outside of the executive branch; see the vote count on Rep. Justin Amash (R‑MI)’s just-barely defeated bill to end NSA metadata collection. It’s the same coalition that could help accomplish worthy goals like reforming federal drug laws or racist prison sentencing guidelines.
On issues like those — where the policy fix is legally simple, and the goals are fully shared — the left-libertarian alliance has the potential to do a lot of good. But the state-level drive to turn off the NSA’s lights demonstrates the limits of this marriage. Lawmaking necessarily sets precedents. In some cases, those precedents come from the judiciary — giving official sanction to tactics once acknowledged to be unconstitutional. But the mere act of enacting a law and getting away with it can normalize radical tactics as well. Hidden provisions of a law or the legal theory behind it can change the country as surely as the legislation’s intended end. . . .
3b. Not surprisingly, the Tenth Amendment Center heavily overlaps elements associated with the League of the South and the neo-Confederate movement. Those elements, in turn, are inextricably linked with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the“Paulistinian Libertarian Organization” and The Peach Fuzz Fascist himself [Snowden]. As noted above, Citizen Greenwald has defended birds of the same feather.
On the eve of a Nullification Now! conference in Jacksonville, Fla., last week, the Tenth Amendment Center issued a warning: The Southern Poverty Law Center was sending someone to report that “those of us who want political decentralization as the Constitution requires [are] ‘dangerous.’” Then, when the conference began, every speaker repeated the warning. Someone from the SPLC was there, they said.
And you know what? We were.
We were there when Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes warned that the federal government was laying the groundwork to freely kill American citizens. We were there when John Bush, who runs the Foundation for a Free Society in Austin, Texas, stoked the audience’s already inflamed fears that a one-world government was coming in the form of a U.N. plan for sustainable growth. We were there when Doug Tjaden, director of the Sound Money Center, called for the nullification of the Federal Reserve. “Nullification of any federal law will only have long lasting effect if we take away the bankers’ ability to buy back our liberty,” he said with a thump of his fist on the podium.
Roughly 100 people attended the conference organized by the Los Angeles-based Tenth Amendment Center, a group focused on how to weaken the reach of the federal government through nullification. Their central idea—that each state has the constitutional right to invalidate and disregard virtually any federal law—relies on a spurious interpretation of the Tenth Amendment, which reserves to the states and the people any power not explicitly given to the federal government, and flies in the face of more than two centuries of jurisprudence.
Much of the conference seemed to be focused on distancing the movement from those members of the extreme right that tend to be the most attracted to the nullification concept.
That’s hard to do when the League of the South (LOS) has a table at the event, which it did. It was attended by Michael Tubbs, a former Green Beret demolitions expert who, in 1987, robbed two fellow soldiers of their M‑16 rifles during a routine exercise at Fort Bragg, N.C., in the name of the Ku Klux Klan. Tubbs is president of the Florida chapter of the LOS, which envisions a second Southern secession and holds to a distinctly white supremacist ideology.
There were also representatives from groups advocating for the legalization of raw milk—to limit the government’s regulatory power to ensure food safety—and for the Oath Keepers, a group that peddles antigovernment “Patriot” paranoia about federal tyranny.
The force behind much of that paranoia is Rhodes, a former Army paratrooper and Yale-educated lawyer who founded Oath Keepers. Rhodes cautioned that the recent killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical, U.S.-born Muslim cleric who had been designated by the U.S. government as a global terrorist, was merely a preview of what will eventually befall Americans citizens at home. Assassination? Kidnapping? Internment? All will be possible in the tyrannical future the far right fears is unavoidable. “I’m not being paranoid. I’m just connecting the dots,” Rhodes said. “It will be done at home. Mark my words.” . . . .
. . . . The highlight of the day was Thomas E. Woods Jr., the author of Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century. He argued that nullification was the principle tool of the northern abolitionists who combated slavery—a fact, he said, the progressive left conveniently dismisses.
Woods couldn’t avoid calling out the SPLC “agent provocateur” in the audience. To do so, he somewhat mockingly employed Godwin’s Law to dismiss any criticism of nullification. Godwin’s Law states, essentially, that as any discussion progresses, the odds increase that someone will eventually invoke Hitler. Woods warned that the SPLC and others would seek to marginalize nullification by creating negative associations.
Woods was once a member of the LOS and remains a senior fellow at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, a conservative think tank in Auburn, Ala., that views social justice as destructive. Who needs Hitler when paranoid antigovernment figures, hair-trigger Aryan militants and an academic extremist are there to glad-hand the audience?
3c. Furthering their goal of destabilizing the Obama administration, the GOP plans on holding hearings on the NSA in order to generate political capital.
“The New, Snowden-Loving Republican Party” by David Weigel; Slate; 1/24/2014.
Benjy Sarlin has a nice read on the other news emerging from the RNC meeting. Supporters of Ron Paul, chiefly Nevada’s Diana Orrock, were able to sell the whole committee on a resolution “renouncing” the NSA’s data collection programs. As of today, the RNC “encourages Republican law makers to call for a special committee to investigate, report, and reveal to the public the extent of this domestic spying” and “calls upon Republican lawmakers to immediately take action to halt current unconstitutional surveillance programs and provide a full public accounting of the NSA’s data collection programs.” It basically endorses Rep. Justin Amash’s legislation in the House.
Andrew Kaczynski commemorates the occasion with a flashback to the August 2006 RNC attack on the “liberal judge” who ruled against another NSA program, and was “praised by Dems.” Not long after that, one of the party’s endangered moderates, Connecticut Rep. Nancy Johnson, attacked her Democratic opponent for daring to oppose the program.
So it’s taken seven-odd years for the GOP to come fully around and realize the groovy politics of civil liberties, but that should have been obvious even before Snowden.
3d. In FTR #762, we examined the Snowden actions as a destabilization operation against the Obama administration. Going into his State of the Union address, that effort appears to have drawn a considerable amount of political blood.
President Obama will pronounce on the state of the union for the fifth time on Tuesday, and never during his time in office has the state of the economy been better — yet rarely has he gotten such low marks from the public for his handling of it. . . .
. . . . Economically speaking, said Scott A. Anderson, chief economist at Bank of the West, “the state of the union is the best we have seen in years.”
Mr. Obama and his speechwriter could not phrase it better, or simpler. Yet taking credit is complicated, given the clear evidence in national polls that most Americans are not in a mood to give him any.
Mr. Obama’s ratings for his handling of the economy, never high since his first months in office, slipped throughout 2013 in national polls. As he began this year, nearly six in 10 Americans disapproved, nearly matching his lowest marks in 2011, a year of repeated and damaging fiscal fights with the new Republican House majority. Advisers said the decline was a reflection of Mr. Obama’s diminished standing more broadly after months of public attention to issues that have dominated news coverage: the administration’s bungled introduction of the website for the insurance marketplaces created by his signature Affordable Care Act, and the controversy over intelligence gathering by the National Security Agency.
“For the average person sitting at home watching news on TV and the Internet, they have seen their president spend the last six months or so dealing with N.S.A., a government shutdown and a malfunctioning website,” said Mr. Obama’s chief strategist, Dan Pfeiffer. . . .
4a. In a video appearance by Assange at a Chaos Computer Club conference in early January of this year, a question about WikiLeaks’ role in getting Snowden out of the U.S. enhances suspicion that WikiLeaks may have been involved with Snowden’s journey to Hong Kong.
Given the Snowden timeline and the role Harrison and WikiLeaks have played since Snowden’s time in Hong Kong, choosing to have Assange field that question was an odd choice for Harrison because there’s never been any indication that Snowden required any help to leave Hawaii. Applebaum had a birthday party in Hawaii with 20 friends and returned in April of 2013, shortly before Eddie the Friendly Spook takes off for China.
A strange exchange occurred when members of the renegade publishing organization WikiLeaks were asked about the flight of Edward Snowden at a Chaos Computer Club conference last week.
WikiLeaks has been credited with helping Snowden escape extradition to the U.S. after the 30-year-old left Hawaii with at least hundreds of thousands of classified NSA files and flew to Hong Kong on May 20.
At the CCC conference on Dec. 29, Assange said that “WikiLeaks was able to rescue Edward Snowden because we are an organized institution with collective experience.”
Top WikiLeaks adviser Sarah Harrison, who met Snowden in Hong Kong and accompanied him to Moscow, then answered the last question coming from the Internet:
“What was the most difficult part on getting Snowden out of the U.S.?“
Assange, Harrison and “American WikiLeaks Hacker” Jacob Appelbaum all laughed, and then Appelbaum said: “That’s quite a loaded question.”
Assange then said: “Yeah, that’s interesting to think whether we can actually answer that question at all. I’ll give a variant of the answer because of the legal situation it is a little bit difficult.”
That is a very peculiar (and seemingly natural) collective response. Most people have not considered that WikiLeaks may have become involved with Snowden before June 12, when the former CIA technician contacted the organization after outing himself.
So the “loaded” question could have easily been pointed out as unsound, and Assange could have denied that WikiLeaks contacted Snowden before he reached out from China.
Instead, the 42-year-old Australian questioned whether it could be answered at all. . . .
4b. We have dealt at great length with the extensive degree of overlap between Snowden’s “op” and the WikiLeaks milieu. The genesis of the Greenwald/Poitras/Snowden relationship featured a WikiLeaks-connected journalist named James Ball.
. . . . And two weeks after that she flew to Brazil. It was there, in a Rio de Janeiro hotel, that Maass met her along with Greenwald, where they were working with MacAskill and another Guardian journalist, James Ball. . . .
4c. Ball had previously worked for the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Al Jazeera. Eventually, Ball quit WikiLeaks because of Assange’s continued association with Johannes Wahlstrom, the son of Assange’s fascist cohort Joran Jermas aka “Israel Shamir.” (We have discussed Wahlstrom, Jermas and their fascist politics in FTR #‘s 732, 745, 755.)
. . . . For me, the film was more like déjà vu—something I’d lived once already. From summer 2010, WikiLeaks became my life for months. First, at the U.K.-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, I was part of the team working for 10 weeks investigating the Iraq War Logs for Al Jazeera English and Arabic, Channel 4’s flagship Dispatches documentary, and iraqwarlogs.com.
I then went a step further, working directly for WikiLeaks for several months on the embassy cables—analyzing the cables, distributing them to staff, writing press releases, appearing on TV, and more.
. . . . Disturbingly, Assange seems to have a personal motivation for staying friendly with Shamir. Shamir’s son, Johannes Wahlstrom, is apparently being called as one of Assange’s defense witnesses in his Swedish trial. That’s not the only time self has come before principle. . . .
5. In FTR #724, we looked at the Santikitenan Park Association (also known as “The Family”), an intelligence-connected, fascist mind-control cult to which Julian Assange may well have belonged. A TIME review of the recent movie about WikiLeaks–“The Fifth Estate”–reinforces that working hypothesis. It is not clear what the writer’s source is for that assertion.
Photos of Assange, children of the cult are at right. Note the one child bearing striking resemblance to Assange. For more about the Assange/Family working hypothesis, see FTR #745.
“Julian Assange and The Fifth Estate: Wiki Wacky Who?” By Richard Corliss; Time; 9/08/2013.
. . . . Tall, drawling and white-maned (he has dyed his hair ever since being inducted into an Australian cult as a child), Assange radiates a star quality that impresses all spectators, especially himself. . . .
6. We note that, according to Snowden, BND has access to the NSA’s XKeyscore database.
. . . . The relationship between the NSA and its German equivalent the BND was described by Snowden as “intimate.” He alluded, among other things, to the BND’s ability to access the NSA’s “X Key Score” database, which Snowden described as a “one-stop-shop for access to the NSA’s information.” . . . .
7a. In an interview with German TV, Snowden mentioned that NSA engages in industrial espionage against, among other companies, Siemens. (Siemens is inextricably linked with German intelligence.) Note that industrial espionage is standard operating procedure for the world’s major intelligence services.
Note, also, that Snowden’s statement keeps industrial espionage on the front burner. We wondered in FTR #769 if U.S. internet companies were being held hostage to Germany’s inclusion in the Five Eyes spying network.
“Snowden Says NSA Engages in Industrial Espionage: TV” by Erik Kirschbaum; Reuters ;1/26/2014.
The U.S. National Security Agency is involved in industrial espionage and will grab any intelligence it can get its hands on regardless of its value to national security, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden told a German TV network.
In text released ahead of a lengthy interview to be broadcast on Sunday, ARD TV quoted Snowden saying the NSA does not limit its espionage to issues of national security and he cited German engineering firm, Siemens as one target.
“If there’s information at Siemens that’s beneficial to U.S. national interests — even if it doesn’t have anything to do with national security — then they’ll take that information nevertheless,” Snowden said, according to ARD, which recorded the interview in Russia where he has claimed asylum.
Snowden also told the German public broadcasting network he no longer has possession of any documents or information on NSA activities and has turned everything he had over to select journalists. . . . .
7b. Siemens’ control systems were a target of the Stuxnet worm. Note that this article supplements the discussion in FTR #769 about Snowden’s “op“as an assault on U.S. internet companies.
. . . . In the interview, Snowden was asked if German engineering conglomerate Siemens AG was one of the NSA’s espionage targets. Snowden’s reply, according to International Business Times, was that “the agency would take information even though it was not related to national security concerns.”
It’s possible Siemens did constitute a legitimate intelligence-gathering target in the NSA’s eyes — especially after many of its customers were hit with the Stuxnet worm, which seemed specifically designed (by whom, is another story) to target Siemens’s industrial automation software. (Siemens did not respond immediately to a request for comment.) . . . .
7c. Snowden attacked the Five Eyes alliance in his German TV interview. He also said that he had given his documents to journalists and had retained none of them. This, supposedly, because he fears for his life.
We believe that this actually puts Snowden’s life in danger. Underground Reich elements would do far more damage to the U.S., the NSA and the GCHQ by making Snowden a martyr. The journalists with whom he has placed the documents would then, presumably, “spill the beans.”
. . . . Snowden made note of his objections to the Five Eyes alliance between the intelligence services of English-speaking countries, which he said subverts the prohibition against domestic spying by exchanging surveillance data, with Britain spying on Americans and America spying on the British. . . .
. . . . . adding during the interview that he no longer has any of the documents, which have been parceled out to “trustworthy” journalists around the world. Their possession of the Snowden files are the “life insurance” keeping him from being killed, he said. . . .
Uncle Sam and Il Duce
David Sirota, a Greensnow wannabe who “writes” at Pando Daily, accused PBS of allowing a foundation which has advocated for reform of public employee pension funds to influence its coverage of a program it produced about public pensions without providing evidence. Gus at Little Green Footballs has challenged Sirota’s allegation, since this same foundation has also funded Pro Publica which Sirota has not publicized or criticized. Gus provided a link to an article about the formation of Pando, Sirota’s employer, and the start up money involves the usual suspects, including Peter Thiel: http://gigaom.com/2012/01/16/sarah-lacys-pandodaily-launches-with‑2–5‑million-in-funding/. Also, here is a link to Gus’ post at Little Green Footballs which contains more links and information: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/page/305539_The_Wolves_of_ProPublica_and_P
So this just happened again:
Since this isn’t the first time Julian Assange has publicly asserted that Wikileaks was advising Snowden to stay in Russia, you have to wonder why Assange keeps floating these little gems.