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Snowden’s Ride, Part 2: Geo-Politics, the Earth Island and the Underground Reich

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.)

COMMENT: To grasp the nature of elite strate­gic think­ing, it is vital to incor­po­rate the con­cept of The Earth Island–the enor­mous, con­tigu­ous land mass stretch­ing from the Straits of Gibral­tar, all the way through Europe, the Mid­dle East, Rus­sia, India and Chi­na and the rest of con­ti­nen­tal Asia.

This stretch of land has most of the world’s land mass, pop­u­la­tion and nat­ur­al resources. Con­trol­ling it has long been seen as the key to world dom­i­na­tion by geo-polit­i­cal thinkers.

(We note, par­en­thet­i­cal­ly, that across the mid­dle of that land mass, con­trol­ling most of the petro­le­um resources of the Earth Island, is a stretch of Mus­lim-inhab­it­ed lands. Ally­ing with the Mus­lim pop­u­la­tion of The Earth Island has long been seen by Ger­many and the Under­ground Reich as a key to world dom­i­na­tion.)

Snow­den’s Ride is an obvi­ous intel­li­gence oper­a­tion and desta­bi­liza­tion gam­bit, which we have com­pared with the U‑2 Inci­dent. We link our pre­vi­ous posts on the sub­ject below for your con­ve­nience.

Pre­vi­ous posts on the sub­ject are: Part IPart IIPart IIIPart IVPart VPart VIPart VII, Part VIII.

Snow­den is not an ide­al­ist, but a cyn­ic and fas­cist, who advo­cates the elim­i­na­tion of social secu­ri­ty, return­ing to the gold stan­dard, thinks high unem­ploy­ment is fine and a nec­es­sary part of cap­i­tal­ist cor­rec­tion, as well as a prac­ti­tion­er and endors­er of short-sell­ing. A young Snow­den post­ed a pic­ture of him­self, at right.

The vast bulk of the infor­ma­tion that has come to light in this imbroglio has been known for years–one rea­son why it is high­ly sus­pi­cious that this brouha­ha is being gen­er­at­ed at this time.

Clear­ly, this “op” is being con­duct­ed for pro­pa­gan­da pur­pos­es, with the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion the U.S. and the U.K. the targets/victims.

Mr. Emory has been cov­er­ing the ECHELON/Menwith Hill/NSA con­flict with Ger­man intel­li­gence since August of 1998, first cov­ered in FTR #103.

As we have not­ed in pre­vi­ous posts, Eddie the Friend­ly Spook decamped to Chi­na just before Oba­ma’s meet­ing with Chi­nese pre­mier Xi, releas­ing infor­ma­tion embar­rass­ing and dam­ag­ing to Oba­ma and the Unit­ed States in the process.

Just before Oba­ma met with Ger­man Chan­cel­lor Merkel, Eddie the Friend­ly Spook releas­es infor­ma­tion about NSA spy­ing on Ger­many, pro­duc­ing more embar­rass­ment.

Hit­ting the tri­fec­ta, Snow­den winds up in Moscow, dam­ag­ing rela­tions between Rus­sia and the U.S. and frus­trat­ing Oba­ma’s attempts at reboot­ing the Amer­i­can rela­tion­ship with that coun­try, although recent state­ments by Vladimir Putin–a for­mer KGB officer–indicate the pos­si­bil­i­ty that Rus­sia may be on to what is tak­ing place.

In addi­tion to attempt­ing to get Snow­den to stop leak­ing NSA secrets that would dam­age “our Amer­i­can part­ners” (a con­di­tion reject­ed by Snow­den), Putin made a very rel­e­vant com­ment. Para­phras­ing, slight­ly, he said the whole affair is “like shear­ing a piglet–a lot of squeal­ing, but very lit­tle wool.”

Return­ing to the sub­ject of The Earth Islandin the space of a cou­ple of weeks, Eddie the Friend­ly Spook “cov­ered the water­front,” so to speak, cre­at­ing prob­lems with the coun­tries that dom­i­nate the Earth Island. This applied geo-pol­i­tics should not be over­looked and is con­sis­tent with what might be expect­ed of an intel­li­gence offi­cer act­ing on assign­ment. 

Eddie the Friend­ly Spook-and his asso­ciates, has cast a pall over U.S. rela­tions with the Ger­man-dom­i­nat­ed EU, Ger­many prop­er, Rus­sia and Chi­na.

Snow­den’s Ride has also done much to alien­ate young and so-called pro­gres­sive vot­ers from Oba­ma and the Democ­rats. 

Some points to con­sid­er:

  • As not­ed in pre­vi­ous posts on Snow­den’s Ride, Ger­many itself does the same thing as NSA/GCHQ, and does so in vio­la­tion of Ger­man law, as revealed by some excel­lent sleuthing done by the Chaos Com­put­er Club. (See text excerpts below.)
  •  As not­ed in past posts on Snow­den’s Ride, the attack on the NSA/GCHQ ECHELON orig­i­nat­ed with the far right and the Under­ground Reich and appears to be inex­tri­ca­bly linked with maneu­ver­ing around the 9/11 attacks. (See text excerpts below.) It remains to be seen if oth­er infor­ma­tion does dam­age U.S. intel­li­gence-gath­er­ing infor­ma­tion, as the over­throw of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood regime in Egypt fig­ures to ramp up ter­ror­ism by that orga­ni­za­tion.
  • Tele­phone inter­cepts, among oth­er intel­li­gence data, indi­cate that Ger­man intel­li­gence had the Ham­burg cell under sur­veil­lance by August, 1998, yet took no action! (See text excerpts below.)
  • Among those attack­ing NSA/GCHQ/ECHELON in recent years was Grover Norquist, a lynch­pin of the GOP right and point man for the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood in the Unit­ed States. Norquist, Karl Rove and Bush asso­ciate Talat Oth­man are deeply involved in the milieu that was aid­ing the fund­ing of Al-Qae­da.
  • Ger­man Green politi­cians, among oth­ers, are call­ing for Ger­many to give Snow­den Asy­lum. (As dis­cussed in oth­er pro­grams, the Ger­man Greens them­selves have a fas­cist his­to­ry and work–perhaps with­out their full aware­ness–in con­junc­tion with the Under­ground Reich.) (See text excerpts below.)
  • The NSA con­sid­ers Ger­many a “third class part­ner”–some­thing that will undoubt­ed­ly infu­ri­ate the Ger­mans, but which is some­what encour­ag­ing to us. At least NSA is not total­ly obliv­i­ous to some of the things we’ve been point­ing out. (See text excerpts below.)
  • NSA/U.S. has been spy­ing on EU per­son­nel and offices. This may make the piglet squeal, but is no news at all. Stan­dard oper­at­ing pro­ce­dure for the intel­li­gence ser­vices of any nation, which spy on friend and foe alike. (See text excerpts below.)
  • Ger­many is report­ed­ly ready to bring crim­i­nal charges against U.S. and U.K. offi­cials. (See text excerpts below.)
  • If, in fact, Ger­many does bring those charges, it will be inter­est­ing to see if the charges are brought in the Inter­na­tion­al Crim­i­nal Court, which is dom­i­nat­ed by Ger­many.
  • What can be safe­ly said is that the Snow­den affair has per­mit­ted Ger­many to paint the Unit­ed States as “the bad guy” to its own pop­u­la­tion, as well as that of the EU, many of whose mem­ber states have been fierce­ly crit­i­cal of Ger­many. It is also allow­ing the Ger­mans to tar the U.K. as well.
  • Snow­den’s ride has also per­mit­ted Ger­many to divert atten­tion from the tri­al of the sole sur­viv­ing mem­ber of the Nation­al Social­ist Union–a neo-Nazi group that clear­ly oper­at­ed with the con­nivance of the Ger­man author­i­ties and whose mur­der spree may have been intend­ed, in part, to cov­er up German/Underground Reich involve­ment with the 9/11 attacks.
  • We won­der about the pos­si­bil­i­ty that Snow­den might be dou­bling for Ger­man intel­li­gence

“Polit­i­cal Oppo­sites Aligned against Bush Wire­taps” by James Stern­gold; San Fran­cis­co Chron­i­cle; 1/26/2006.

EXCERPT: . . . . Grover Norquist is one of the most influ­en­tial con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­cans in Wash­ing­ton. His week­ly “Wednes­day Meet­ing” at his L Street office is a must for con­ser­v­a­tive strate­gists, and he has been called the “man­ag­ing direc­tor of the hard-core right” by the lib­er­al Nation mag­a­zine. Per­haps the coun­try’s lead­ing anti-tax enthu­si­ast, he is, like Dia­mond, a hawk in the war on ter­ror.

Despite com­ing from oppo­site ends of the polit­i­cal spec­trum, they agree on one oth­er major issue: that the Bush admin­is­tra­tion’s pro­gram of domes­tic eaves­drop­ping by the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency with­out obtain­ing court war­rants has less to do with the war on ter­ror than with threats to the nation’s civ­il lib­er­ties. . . .

“U.S. Taps Half-Bil­lion Ger­man Phone, Inter­net Links in Month: Report”; Reuters.com; 6/30/2013. 

EXCERPT: The Unit­ed States taps half a bil­lion phone calls, emails and text mes­sages in Ger­many in a typ­i­cal month and has classed its biggest Euro­pean ally as a tar­get sim­i­lar to Chi­na, accord­ing to secret U.S. doc­u­ments quot­ed by a Ger­man news­magazine.

The rev­e­la­tions of alleged U.S. sur­veil­lance pro­grams based on doc­u­ments tak­en by fugi­tive for­mer Nation­al Secu­rity Agency con­trac­tor Edward Snow­den have raised a polit­i­cal furor in the Unit­ed States and abroad over the bal­ance between pri­vacy rights and nation­al secu­ri­ty.

Expos­ing the lat­est details in a string of reput­ed spy­ing pro­grams, Der Spiegel quot­ed from an inter­nal NSA doc­u­ment which it said its reporters had seen.

The doc­u­ment Spiegel cit­ed showed that the Unit­ed States cat­e­go­rized Ger­many as a “third-class” part­ner and that sur­veil­lance there was stronger than in any oth­er EU coun­try, sim­i­lar in extent to Chi­na, Iraq or Sau­di-Ara­bia.

“We can attack the sig­nals of most for­eign third-class part­ners, and we do it too,” Der Spiegel quot­ed a pas­sage in the NSA doc­u­ment as say­ing.

It said the doc­u­ment showed that the NSA mon­i­tored phone calls, text mes­sages, emails and inter­net chat con­tri­bu­tions and has saved the meta­data — that is, the con­nec­tions, not the con­tent — at its head­quar­ters. . . .

“Attacks from Amer­ica: NSA Spied on Euro­pean Union Offices” by Lau­ra Poitras, Mar­cel Rosen­bach, Fidelius Schmid and Hol­ger Stark; Der Spiegel; 6/29/2013.

EXCERPT: America’s NSA intel­li­gence ser­vice alleged­ly tar­geted the Euro­pean Union with its spy­ing activ­i­ties. Accord­ing to SPIEGEL infor­ma­tion, the US placed bugs in the EU rep­re­sen­ta­tion in Wash­ing­ton and infil­trated its com­puter net­work. Cyber attacks were also per­pe­trated against Brus­sels in New York and Wash­ing­ton.

Infor­ma­tion obtained by SPIEGEL shows that America’s Nation­al Secu­rity Agency (NSA) not only con­ducted online sur­veil­lance of Euro­pean cit­i­zens, but also appears to have specif­i­cally tar­geted build­ings hous­ing Euro­pean Union insti­tu­tions. The infor­ma­tion appears in secret doc­u­ments obtained by whistle­blower Edward Snow­den that SPIEGEL has in part seen. A “top secret” 2010 doc­u­ment describes how the secret ser­vice attacked the EU’s diplo­matic rep­re­sen­ta­tion in Wash­ing­ton.

The doc­u­ment sug­gests that in addi­tion to installing bugs in the build­ing in down­town Wash­ing­ton, DC, the EU representation’s com­puter net­work was also infil­trated. In this way, the Amer­i­cans were able to access dis­cus­sions in EU rooms as well as emails and inter­nal doc­u­ments on com­put­ers.

The attacks on EU insti­tu­tions show yet anoth­er lev­el in the broad scope of the NSA’s spy­ing activ­i­ties. For weeks now, new details about Prism and oth­er sur­veil­lance pro­grams have been emerg­ing that had been com­piled by whistle­blower Snow­den. Details have also emerged that the British intel­li­gence ser­vice GCHQ oper­ates a sim­i­lar pro­gram under the name Tem­pora with which glob­al tele­phone and Inter­net con­nec­tions are mon­i­tored.

The doc­u­ments SPIEGEL has seen indi­cate that the EU rep­re­sen­ta­tion to the Unit­ed Nations was attacked in a man­ner sim­i­lar to the way sur­veil­lance was con­ducted against its offices in Wash­ing­ton. An NSU doc­u­ment dat­ed Sep­tem­ber 2010 explic­itly names the Euro­peans as a “loca­tion tar­get”

The doc­u­ments also indi­cate the US intel­li­gence ser­vice was respon­si­ble for an elec­tronic eaves­drop­ping oper­a­tion in Brus­sels. A lit­tle over five years ago, EU secu­rity experts noticed sev­eral tele­phone calls that were appar­ently tar­get­ing the remote main­te­nance sys­tem in the Jus­tus Lip­sius Build­ing where the EU Coun­cil of Min­is­ters and the Euro­pean Coun­cil is locat­ed. The calls were made to num­bers that were very close to the one used for the remote admin­is­tra­tion of the building’s tele­phone sys­tem. . . .

“Ger­man MP: EU Should Shel­ter Snow­den”; The Local; 7/1/2013.

EXCERPT: The Euro­pean Union should offer safe haven to fugi­tive US leak­er Edward Snow­den, a leader of Germany’s oppo­si­tion Green par­ty, for­mer cab­i­net min­is­ter Jür­gen Trit­tin, said Mon­day.

“The Amer­i­cans are act­ing just like they accuse the Chi­nese of act­ing,” Trit­tin, co-chief of the Greens’ par­lia­men­tary group, told ARD pub­lic tele­vi­sion, refer­ring to US accu­sa­tions that Bei­jing spon­sors state espi­onage of US inter­ests.

He said Snow­den, the for­mer Nation­al Secu­rity Agency (NSA) con­trac­tor behind a series of dam­ag­ing alle­ga­tions about US spy­ing, had “done Europe a ser­vice.”

Snow­den is holed up in a Moscow air­port tran­sit zone after the Unit­ed States issued a war­rant for his arrest and revoked his pass­port.

Trit­tin, a for­mer envi­ron­ment min­is­ter, said it was “embar­rass­ing” for west­ern democ­ra­cies that “such a per­son, who served the cause of democ­racy, who uncov­ered a major vio­la­tion of fun­da­men­tal rights, has to hun­ker down with despots who are at war with fun­da­men­tal rights.”

“I am of the opin­ion that such a per­son should be pro­tected,” he said, when asked whether Snow­den should be grant­ed asy­lum.

After the EU spy­ing report in Ger­man week­ly mag­a­zine Der Spiegel Berlin
said the Unit­ed States must quick­ly say whether the alle­ga­tions were true.

The Ger­man oppo­si­tion has leapt on the issue three months before a nation­al elec­tion, demand­ing Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel take a tough line with Wash­ing­ton.

Merkel’s spokesman Stef­fen Seib­ert expressed shock Mon­day over the reports of US spy­ing on Euro­pean insti­tu­tions and said it had told Wash­ing­ton that it must restore trust in the wake of the alle­ga­tions. . . .

 “Ger­many Ready to Charge UK and US Intel­li­gence over Alleged Bug­ging Oper­a­tions” by Tony Pat­ter­son; The Inde­pen­dent [UK]; 6/30/2013.

Germany’s Fed­eral Prosecutor’s office said it was prepar­ing to bring charges against British and US intel­li­gence today amid fresh alle­ga­tions that the ser­vices spied far more exten­sively than thought on Ger­man phone and inter­net traf­fic and bugged Euro­pean Union offices in Amer­i­ca.

A report alleg­ing a major and con­tin­u­ous US Nation­al Secu­rity Agency spy­ing oper­a­tion in Ger­many was pub­lished by Der Spiegel mag­a­zine today, prompt­ing out­rage from Berlin MPs still reel­ing from reports about exten­sive British sur­veil­lance in their coun­try. The Ger­man Jus­tice Min­is­ter, Sabine Leutheuss­er-Schnar­ren­burg­er, demand­ed an imme­di­ate expla­na­tion and said the behav­iour of the intel­li­gence ser­vices was “rem­i­nis­cent of the actions against ene­mies dur­ing the Cold War”. “It defies belief that our friends in the US see the Euro­peans as their ene­mies,” she said.

The leak, which Der Spiegel said came from fugi­tive ex-CIA ana­lyst Edward Snow­den, claimed that the NSA tapped into half a bil­lion Ger­man phone calls, emails and SMS mes­sages each month. Reports last week revealed exten­sive tap­ping of Ger­man phone and inter­net traf­fic by British intel­li­gence under its so-called Tem­pora pro­gramme. The infor­ma­tion was said to be shared with the NSA.

A spokesman for the Fed­eral Pros­e­cu­tor said the office was prepar­ing to bring charges against “per­sons unknown” in rela­tion to the reports.

There was also wide­spread and mount­ing anger at offi­cial Euro­pean Union lev­el yes­ter­day fol­low­ing dis­clo­sures that the NSA had spied on EU com­puter net­works at its offices in New York and Wash­ing­ton and that it had also bugged the premis­es. Mar­tin Schulz, head of the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment, demand­ed “full clar­i­fi­ca­tion” from the US and said that if the dis­clo­sures proved true they would have a severe impact on US-EU ties. . . .

“World Brief­ing | Europe: Report On U.S. Spy Sys­tem” by Suzanne Daley; The New York Times; 9/6/2001.

EXCERPT: [Notice when this was published–9/6/2001.–D.E.] . . . The Unit­ed States-led spy­ing sys­tem known as Ech­e­lon can mon­i­tor vir­tu­al­ly every com­mu­ni­ca­tion in the world — by e‑mail, phone or fax — that bounces off a satel­lite, the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment was told. But in report­ing on a year­long study of the sys­tem that was prompt­ed by con­cern that Amer­i­can com­pa­nies were using data from the sys­tem to gain a com­pet­i­tive edge, Ger­hard Schmid, a Ger­man mem­ber of the Par­lia­ment, said that many Euro­pean coun­tries had sim­i­lar abil­i­ties . . .

“Ger­mans Were Track­ing Sept. 11 Con­spir­a­tors as Ear­ly as 1998, Doc­u­ments Dis­close” by Desmond But­ler; New York Times; 1/18/2003; p. A10.

EXCERPT: . . . . Three years before the Sept. 11 attacks, Germany’s domes­tic intel­li­gence ser­vice was track­ing promi­nent mem­bers of the Ham­burg ter­ror­ist cell that planned and exe­cuted the air­craft hijack­ings, accord­ing to new­ly obtained doc­u­ments. The doc­u­ments, includ­ing intel­li­gence reports, sur­veil­lance logs and tran­scripts of inter­cepted tele­phone calls, appear to con­tra­dict pub­lic claims by the Ger­man author­i­ties that they knew lit­tle about the mem­bers of the Ham­burg cell before the attacks.

As ear­ly as 1998, the records show, the Ger­mans mon­i­tored a meet­ing between men sus­pected of plot­ting the attacks. The sur­veil­lance would lead a year lat­er to the Ham­burg apart­ment where Mohamed Atta and oth­er main plot­ters were liv­ing while attend­ing uni­ver­si­ties. While the records do not indi­cate that author­i­ties heard any men­tion of a spe­cific plan, they depict a sur­veil­lance mis­sion exten­sive enough to raise anew the polit­i­cally sen­si­tive ques­tion of whether the Ger­mans missed a chance to dis­rupt the cell dur­ing the ini­tial stages of plan­ning the attacks. Some Amer­i­can inves­ti­ga­tors and offi­cials have argued that the Ger­mans in the past missed evi­dence that could have stopped the plot. The Ger­mans have main­tained stead­fastly that the infor­ma­tion they had was too scanty to war­rant seri­ous alarm, and that their police and intel­li­gence agen­cies were not focused on Al Qae­da at the time.

The doc­u­ments come from the files of var­i­ous Ger­man police and intel­li­gence agen­cies. They detail how close an inves­ti­ga­tion of Qae­da con­tacts in Ham­burg begun in 1997 by the Con­sti­tu­tional Pro­tec­tion Agency, Germany’s domes­tic intel­li­gence ser­vice, came to the main cell mem­bers. They were pro­vided to The New York Times by some­one with offi­cial access to the files of the con­tin­u­ing inves­ti­ga­tion into the events lead­ing to the Sept. 11 attacks. When the doc­u­ments were described to offi­cials at the Ger­man Inte­rior Min­istry and the con­sti­tu­tional pro­tec­tion police, they declined to answer any ques­tions about them but did not dis­pute their authen­tic­i­ty . . .

Mr. Motas­sadeq admit­ted that he knew Mr. Atta and oth­er plot­ters and had attend­ed Qae­da train­ing camps in Afghanistan. He has main­tained in tri­al tes­ti­mony that he did not know that his friends were plan­ning to attack the Unit­ed States. No evi­dence has been pre­sented at his three-month tri­al that would reveal when the police first opened an inquiry into Mr. Motas­sadeq. But the intel­li­gence agency doc­u­ments show that by August 1998 he was under sur­veil­lance and that the trail soon led to most of the main par­tic­i­pants in the lat­er attacks. [It was in August of 1998 that Pres­i­dent Clin­ton ordered the cruise mis­sile strike against Bin Laden and the same month that Bin Laden went to a couri­er sys­tem instead of using his cell phone. Note, also, that the head of the Ham­burg police at the time the sur­veil­lance of the Ham­burg cell was in place is now head of the BND!–D.E.]

Accord­ing to the doc­u­ments, the sur­veil­lance was in place on Aug. 29, 1998, when Mr. Motas­sadeq and Mohamed Hay­dar Zam­mar, who had already been iden­ti­fied by police as a sus­pected extrem­ist, met at the Ham­burg home of Said Baha­ji. [Ital­ics are Mr. Emory’s] The police mon­i­tored sev­eral oth­er meet­ings between the men in the months that fol­lowed, the doc­u­ments said. The record of the meet­ing shows that police had iden­ti­fied Mr. Baha­ji, anoth­er per­son sus­pected of being a cell mem­ber and believed to have been inti­mately involved in the plan­ning and logis­tics of the plot, who fled to Pak­istan days before the attacks. Mr. Baha­ji lat­er moved in with Mr. Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh in the now-infa­mous apart­ment at 54 Marien­strasse in the Har­burg sec­tion of Ham­burg[There are pro­found indi­ca­tions of a link between Mohamed Atta and the BND–D.E.]. . .

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