Glenn Greenwald speaks out

[coffin_dodger]

Ok, so it's becoming clearer that the NSA has records/dirt on everyone, including Congress, Senate & Prez.

So who is the NSA beholden to/collecting this shit for, if not the Official Executive?

[Wombaticus Rex]

Ok, so it's becoming clearer that the NSA has records/dirt on everyone, including Congress, Senate & Prez.

So who is the NSA beholden to/collecting this shit for, if not the Official Executive?

I....really?

The control room of the United States Empire has five sides and it's not White.

[coffin_dodger]

I....really?

Yes Wombat, I really am that dumb.

Name the Names at the Pentagon, if you'd be so kind.

[MayDay]

War is definitely brewing. Hillary and Barry storming in on the leaders of Brazil, India, China and S Africa in 2009. The "shift toward Asia". US and Nato funded coups in a half dozen countries. Wouldn't be surprised if war follows a mid July BRICS/ Russian announcement regarding the establishment of a new global banking system outside of US control.

[seemslikeadream]

All Snowden Files Will Be Published In July To Avert A War


CryptomeEdward SnowdenNational Security Agency
CryptomeAll of the National Security Agency files accessed by former contractor Edward Snowden could be published in the month of July if vaguely worded predictions tweeted this week from the digital library site Cryptome prove to be correct.

A series of micro-messages published by the website — a portal for sharing sensitive documents that predates WikiLeaks by a decade — suggest further Snowden leaks may be on the way.

“During July all Snowden docs released” reads an excerpt from one Cryptome tweet sent on Monday this week. “July is when war begins unless headed off by Snowden full release of crippling intel. After war begins not a chance of release,” reads another tweet sent from Cryptome on Monday this week. “Only way war can be avoided. Warmongerers [sic] are on a rampage. So, yes, citizens holding Snowden docs will do the right thing,” insists another.

[Searcher08]

I'm really intrigued by the war - there is a big build up of US forces in the Persian Gulf, yet Iran seems to be on the back burner due to ISIS, yet there is no political will to re-invade. Syria seems to be in a much more difficult position for intervention, so where this would happen (short of a huge nuclear false flag) seems really unclear. I guess Israel could start another war against the Palestinians, but that could ally Hamas more with ISIS. There is the potential for a conflict with China re the South China Sea islands or a North Korean surprise attack on Seoul?

[Sounder]

coffin_dodger » Tue Jul 01, 2014 3:26 pm wrote:

Ok, so it's becoming clearer that the NSA has records/dirt on everyone, including Congress, Senate & Prez.

So who is the NSA beholden to/collecting this shit for, if not the Official Executive?

I....really?

The control room of the United States Empire has five sides and it's not White.

Both the ‘Official Executive’ and the Generals are merely highly paid flunkies. If people want to know who is running things, just find out who is not being tapped. That would be a more useful and much smaller list.

[coffin_dodger]

Both the ‘Official Executive’ and the Generals are merely highly paid flunkies. If people want to know who is running things, just find out who is not being tapped. That would be a more useful and much smaller list.

Isn't that the $64,000 question?

[seemslikeadream]

ACLU Chief: Greenwald Will Reveal Spying on U.S. Muslims
The civil-liberties advocate Anthony Romero said new information about NSA surveillance will be exposed in a forthcoming article.
CONOR FRIEDERSDORFJUL 2 2014, 3:24 PM ET


ASPEN, Colo.—Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, told an Aspen Ideas Festival panel Wednesday that forthcoming revelations about the NSA will provoke new debate about the propriety of government spying. According to Romero, Glenn Greenwald will reveal that Muslim Americans in public life were "subject to the kind of surveillance that Hoover did on Martin Luther King." In a question-and-answer session, I asked for details.

Romero said he could speak openly about the forthcoming story due to another press report, but that he didn't know many details because, although the ACLU represents Edward Snowden, these stories are being worked on by journalists, not his organization. "It will be interesting to see who is on this list but I don't know," he said. "It will be interesting to see if there were members of Congress on this list, what kind of judicial review was provided." He said that ferreting out this information is harder than it once was. "This isn't a manila folder put in a filing cabinet. This is a database. So all the data is there. The question is, what have they pulled from the database. So you actually have to recreate the queries from the databases to see that which they've pulled. It's very labor intensive. It doesn't just spit out something that says, 'Romero, they followed him' ... you have to read the code, it involves a lot of technologists, and part of the reason the journalists have taken as long as they have with these stories is that it's very complicated to pull them out of these massive amounts of data. So we'll stay tuned."

In fact, a major Greenwald story was supposed to be released a couple days ago, but was delayed at the last minute due to claims from the government that required additional reporting. Greenwald still expects to publish the article very soon.

[Searcher08]

I hope this does not come across as sounding incredibly jaded... but I could see revelations that the NSA was spying upon all members of the three branches of Government as being of no interest.
Seriously, just wrap it in a Swiss Roll of "Everyone does it these days, it's about finding a balance of privacy and security... for the Left' and 'Aw Shucks, maybe we overstated but do we want another 9/11?' Lots of hot air on the Web for a while and maybe a Working Party that reports back in a couple of years.

[Spiro C. Thiery]

coffin_dodger » Tue Jul 01, 2014 3:26 pm wrote:

Ok, so it's becoming clearer that the NSA has records/dirt on everyone, including Congress, Senate & Prez.

So who is the NSA beholden to/collecting this shit for, if not the Official Executive?

I....really?

The control room of the United States Empire has five sides and it's not White.

Both the ‘Official Executive’ and the Generals are merely highly paid flunkies. If people want to know who is running things, just find out who is not being tapped. That would be a more useful and much smaller list.

I would not discount the accuracy of your assertion, Sounder. On the other hand, just as humankind seems attached to personalities as sources of guidance sometimes worthy of admiration, and even unrelenting hero-worship, so, too, are we bent on finding that one person/people to blame for our train running where we don't want it to.

I am almost entirely convinced that the system itself manages to subordinate all of us, including its originators. The apparatus is like an organism that functions without its parts being aware of the part they play in much of what it works. Naturally there are powerful people who game the system for their own purposes. But I think even the most influential don't always know precisely where they are headed. Does anyone here play Spades? Imagine how, when desperate at a potential end of game scenario, a player and/or the player and his partner swing semi-decisively between either setting the opposition, or feeding them bags.

Herewith, I don't mean to say that individual actors should not be held accountable. On the contrary. I feel like we constantly let authority off the hook based upon their being at the beck and call of an even higher authority. If there is an all-mighty at the head of this little pyramid that benefits regardless of outcome, then there is a God. I don't believe in God. In that regard, I think there is hope.

[JackRiddler]

If people want to know who is running things, just find out who is not being tapped. That would be a more useful and much smaller list.

My guess is, absolutely no one. There are doubtless those against whom the taps are not being used, and they are effectively the protected core of the ruling class. But if they make the wrong move, Robert Maxwells and Mikhail Kodhorkovskys and maybe even Rockefeller scions can be sacrificed (depending on what that small plane crash last month was all about).

Theses:

(1) Even as it provides self-service to capitalist interests ("the corporations," the banks, some of the largest funds and fortunes) and cross-institutional networks of pillage and plunder and divine mission (the various parapolitical octopii, in RI parlance),

(2) the enormous apparatus of surveillance, force, propaganda, "foreign policy" and war-making requires ideological unification and motivation based in obedience to hierarchy and a reigning idea (meaning a god!) of "national security."

(3) Buried within that is the mission of preserving a system of social class against ideas of democracy. Within this ideology this threat was traditionally understood as "communist," nowadays it is partly projected onto the decidely undemocratic movements of Islamism, or on to almost non-existent phantoms of "terrorism," whether false-flag or genuine.

(4) So national security ideology and, at the top levels, mutual blackmail are necessary glues for holding together a quite heterogeneous system of alliances among inherently corrupt and self-interested groups and individuals (or self-directed, since many of them have a sense of mission).

So I tend to agree with WR's assessment that the national security state is where the power has its systemic center of gravity (if not its "bosses" per se).

And with this:

The apparatus is like an organism that functions without its parts being aware of the part they play in much of what it works. Naturally there are powerful people who game the system for their own purposes. But I think even the most influential don't always know precisely where they are headed.

There are those who endeavor to theorize how it works, and to influence it through their ideas (for want of a better word, since these ideas are usually little more than a simplistic and violent-minded realpolitik), and by placing themselves at the strategic leverage points. Intellectuals, nowadays think-tankers, partly serving the power (and wealth), partly programming it. The Dulleses, McCloys, Huntingtons, Wohlstetters, Brzezinskis, Kissingers, Marshalls, Bakers, Gateses, Team B neocons, RAND, AEI-Heritage, etc. From another angle, the billionaire activists, the would-be shapers of the future, the "philanthropist" foundation-makers, Rockefellers, Morgans, Carnegies, Mellon-Scaifes (die again, mother-fucker!), Murdochs, Kochs, Gateses, Petersens (how is that fucker a Greek?!), Bloombergs, etc.

Also:

Herewith, I don't mean to say that individual actors should not be held accountable. On the contrary.

It's an absolute necessity.

(5) While the drivers behind the system's development function as always to head it in the same developmental direction as always, we have in the last 15 or so years crossed a threshold into a new plateau of lawlessness and global danger thanks to

(a) the escape from any consequences, first, of the political mob in U.S. and U.K. who openly engineered the unprovoked war of aggression of 2003; and second, of the entire Wall Street criminal class who conducted the mass fraud with MBS and derivatives prior to the 2007-2009 global crash that they caused and which exposed them.*

(b) The new U.S. administration that followed in their wake set up their getaway and consolidated their dark achievements under a new, liberally-tinged and legalistic system of state authoritarianism backing a financial feudalism.

(c) The EU powers abandoned any pretense to counterweight in a signal use of crisis capitalism to strengthen the same poisonous system and neoliberal policies that the crash had ostensibly discredited.

(d) The rest of the world's more traditionally authoritarian regimes (the ostensible antagonists in Russia and China, for example) are encouraged by the factual abandonment within the West of the pretense to rule of law and Western ideals as carte blanche to respond as they will in the midst of the global crisis.

The potential results are explosive.

* NOTE:

It's not that these two acts of class criminality were entirely without moral precedent, or (arguably) worse than earlier acts. It's that they were conducted so openly, so brazenly, backed by such awesomely stupid lies that were exposed even as they were spoken; that their perpetrators got entirely away and were allowed to double down, even after the predictable and dire mass disasters became manifest to the world; and that, in the fast-moving media and mentality landscapes of today, these recent disasters are essentially forgotten to the public, although their consequences are still determining current events. And by determining, I mean not as historical causes in a chain of causality, but still as direct, immanent causes. We are still in the economic crisis that manifested in 2008! Look at the situation in Iraq (and Syria), right now!

Furthermore, these acts were essentially cannibalistic. A functioning system of empire that can sell itself to the world and sees long-term future prospects would not have engaged in the high-risk self-sabotage of conducting the Iraq invasion against the oppostion of its key overseas allies; a stable system of exploitation still capable of growth would not have required predatory scams on the mass level of the Wall Street plays we've seen since the mid-1990s, let alone mid-2000s.

It's like an experimental confirmation with the lesson to sociopathic individuals and classes alike that they can commit such crimes again; that they should do it in big and brazen fashion; that they should recognize no limits, indeed cannot afford to recognize limits; that there will be no crisis and no protest, let alone an uprising, that cannot be easily weathered, or (like the legions of "Tea Party" idiots, some of whom are reading this) turned into a systemic support; that no law will be brought to bear on them, but that law will continue to function reliably as an authoritarian support; that they will, in fact, be rewarded in direct proportion to the level of their criminality and ambition. This is a step beyond crime pays: Crime wins, and only crime wins.

Or so it appears, until, inevitably, a much larger breakdown or outbreak comes about, but that's not anything that should give us hope, in the fashion of leftist apocalyptism that sees opportunity in crisis. The 2008 crisis has yet to produce a credible populist threat. Do you think a Mad Max scenario would do it? At the scale and level of development we have reached, such breakdowns are almost certain (even given periods of apparent chaos) to result in the re-consolidation of a more authoritarian state doubling down in backing a more predatory economy. A breakdown that really destroys the system is unlikely to leave a world that can sustain civilization. Successful reform movements have to somehow be grown just as much within the pockets of relative prosperity (based on long-term and complex thinking) as well as among the most damned, with these lower and middle classes coming together.

In other words, good luck.

.

[MayDay]

War is definitely brewing. Hillary and Barry storming in on the leaders of Brazil, India, China and S Africa in 2009. The "shift toward Asia". US and Nato funded coups in a half dozen countries. Wouldn't be surprised if war follows a mid July BRICS/ Russian announcement regarding the establishment of a new global banking system outside of US control.

Bump.

[zangtang]

'During July all Snowden docs released” reads an excerpt from one Cryptome tweet sent on Monday this week. “July is when war begins unless headed off by Snowden full release of crippling intel. After war begins not a chance of release,” reads another tweet sent from Cryptome on Monday this week. “Only way war can be avoided. Warmongerers [sic] are on a rampage.'

better #*#*kin hurry up !

if 'the mighty wurlitzer' is as unipolar and orchestrated (& i imagine it is) as the entirety of the press here in UK this weekend........................

well, it looks like decisions have already been made.

still, hope springs eternal. I mean it. Nothing - but Nothing.....is written in stone

woo-woo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[elfismiles]

lucky dogs ...



A Web Guerrilla Breaking News From the Jungle
Inside Glenn Greenwald’s Mountaintop Home Office (Video)
By DAVID CARRAUG. 3, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/04/busin ... ffice.html