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Lawless NSA Spying Exposed
by Stephen Lendman
It's longstanding. It's no secret. It's well known. Now we know more. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) deserves credit.
On August 21, it headlined "Intelligence Agency Attorney on How 'Multi-Communication Transactions' Allowed for Domestic Surveillance."
EFF filed a FOIA lawsuit. For over a year, it fought for public disclosure. It demanded release of an 86-page FISA court opinion.
In October 2011, it was gotten. It called NSA's so-called "upstream collection (UC)" system illegal and unconstitutional. It violates the FISA Amendments Act. It breaches constitutional provisions. NSA violates the letter and spirit of federal law.
State-Sponsored Terrorism on Lebanon
by Stephen Lendman
Washington's war on Syria targets Lebanon. Cross-border spillover's increasing. Neighborhoods were attacked. State-sponsored anti-Assad/Hezbollah terrorists bear full responsibility.
In May, two rockets stuck south Beirut. Four casualties were reported. Attacks occurred hours after Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah spoke.
He vowed to help Assad achieve victory over Western-backed insurgents. His forces contribute significantly. They were instrumental in routing insurgents from Qusair.
It's near Lebanon's border. Anti-Assad forces controlled it for over a year. In early June, they were defeated.
Doing so shut down a strategic supply route. At the time, General Yahya Suleiman said "(w)hoever controls Qusair controls the center of the country, and whoever controls the center of the country controls all of Syria."
Bradley Manning: Imprisoning a National Hero
by Stephen Lendman
We're all vulnerable. We're all Bradley Manning. His fate is ours.
Charging, prosecuting, convicting, sentencing and imprisoning him reflects the shame of the nation. It reveals its true face.
Previous article said American honors its worst. It spurns its best. It vilifies them. It persecutes them. It does so shamelessly. It does it irresponsibly. It does it repeatedly. It does it lawlessly.
War criminals win Nobel Peace Prizes. They're awarded Presidential Medals of Freedom. They deserve prosecution. They deserve prison. They deserve the hardest of hard time longterm.
When exposing crimes of war and against humanity is criminalized, justice gets turned on its head. Manning faces 35 years in prison. It's for acting responsibly. It's for doing the right thing.
He deserves high praise, not prosecution. He faces potential decades behind bars instead. Washington intends making it hard time. A previous article explained.
Egypt’s Foreign Relations on Tightrope
By Nicola Nasser*
The internal crisis in Egypt has indulged the country in its most critical foreign relations test since these relations were shaped by the U.S. sponsored Camp David accords and the peace treaty with Israel in 1979.
An indicator is the warnings against travel to Egypt from east and west, which are exacerbating the rapidly shrinking tourism industry. Stopping production in Egypt by industrial giants like General Motors, Toyota Motor Corp. and Suzuki Motor Corp. is a second indicator. Summons of foreign envoys to Egypt by their governments, which invoked similar Egyptian reciprocal summons, is a third indicator. A fourth was cancelling the U.S. military’s participation in next month’s Operation Bright Star in Egypt and delaying the delivery of four fighter jets to the country. Suspension of the sale of military equipment used for “internal repression” by the EU was a fifth. Threats to cut or suspend aid to Egypt by the U.S. and EU was another more important indicator.
Ariel Castro: Sex Addict or Evil Genius
By Robert Singer
Breaking News: August 1, 2013, Ariel Castro, the man accused of holding three women captive for a decade, has agreed to life in a real prison plus 1,000 years, so he can avoid the death penalty.
Castro, who according to detailed secret chronicled diaries by all three women, attended church on Sunday before coming home to rape, beat and torture his victims, who were shackled to walls bound with duct tape or an extension cord and chained to a pole in the basement of Castro’s ram shackled house. At times he tortured them by subjecting them to the "cold of his basement" or the "heat of his attic."
At Castro’s sentencing hearing, his final court appearance, the diaries documenting their ordeal--- that had been kept secret from Castro [and the judge]--- are now introduced into evidence. Prosecutors, we are told, “relied on the diaries for many of the 977 criminal charges lodged against Castro.” Huh? “Relied on the diaries at the sentencing hearing?” A little unusual, I think you will agree.
According to a sentencing memorandum, “The entries speak of forced sexual conduct, of being locked in a dark room, of anticipating the next session of abuse, of the dreams of someday escaping and being reunited with family, of being chained to a wall and of being held like a prisoner of war.” Amanda Berry somehow found out her mother died during her captivity because her diary is addressed to “ her mother in heaven.”
Putting aside how she found out her mother died, how can you write and keep a diary secret, for ten years, when you were chained up and/or shackled, during which time you are being “viciously beaten, repeatedly raped, and “treated like an animal in a dark room, anticipating the next session of abuse?”
Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight
- Michele Knight, now 32, and the first of the three women to be kidnapped, was in a store asking for directions when Castro offered to give her a ride but then tricked her into coming to his house to pick out a puppy for her son, Joey, now living in foster care. In an ironic twist, Knight’s parents are the subject of a federal probe for cashing Michele’s Social Security checks while she was imprisoned all these years.
- Amanda Berry, a day before her 17th birthday, thought she was getting a ride home after her shift at a Burger King was over.
- Gina De Jesus, now 23, went home with him because he told her he needed help carrying a speaker to his car.
The three young girls disappeared and lived within blocks of one another in the same low-income neighborhood. They were kept locked up for 10 years in Castro’s house, also in the same neighborhood.
Castro’s son wrote a story about one of the girls and all of the girls were friends with one of Castro’s daughters by his first marriage. We aren’t told which one. One daughter, Emily, was convicted of slashing her 11-month-old daughter's throat and sentenced to 25 years in prison. The other, Annie Gregg, never wants to see him again.
Castro is a sex addicted evil genius who avoided authorities for the last decade and only likes to rape and beat women when they are wearing a motorcycle helmet.
The three women were confined in 1,436 square feet of this clapboard house with one bathroom for 10 years. Castro wired up the place with alarm clocks "in a makeshift manner" to create an alarm system to turn the house into a makeshift prison.
Syria: Truth v Lies on Chemical Weapons Use
By Stephen Lendman
Churchill was right saying "(a) lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."
Today it circulates instantly. It does so virtually everywhere.
Nazi Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels said:
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."
(T)ruth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
Media scoundrels understand. So do duplicitous leaders. Fingers point the wrong way. They do so with disturbing regularity.
In July, Washington accused Syria of chemical weapons use. No evidence whatever suggested it. Big Lies repeat.
WOMEN EXPLOITED: AUTHOR ZANOYAN SPOTLIGHTS SEX TRAFFICKING IN ARMENIA
By Lucine Kasbarian
Sexual slavery, forced labor and the extraction of body organs: These are the most common reasons for human trafficking, which represents an estimated $32 billion per year in international trade.
In 2008, the United Nations estimated that nearly 2.5 million people from more than 125 different countries were being trafficked into some 135 countries around the world.
According to the International Organization for Migration, sex trafficking means coercing a migrant into a sexual act as a condition of allowing or arranging the migration. Sex trafficking uses physical or sexual coercion, deception, abuse of power and bondage incurred through forced debt. Trafficked women and children, for instance, are often promised work in the domestic or service industry but, instead, are sometimes taken to brothels where they are forced into prostitution, and their passports and other identification papers are confiscated. They may be beaten or locked up and promised their freedom only after earning – through prostitution – their purchase price and their travel and visa costs.
Larry Summers and the Secret "End-Game" Memo
By Greg Palast
When a little birdie dropped the End Game memo through my window, its content was so explosive, so sick and plain evil, I just couldn't believe it.
The Memo confirmed every conspiracy freak’s fantasy: that in the late 1990s, the top US Treasury officials secretly conspired with a small cabal of banker big-shots to rip apart financial regulation across the planet. When you see 26.3% unemployment in Spain, desperation and hunger in Greece, riots in Indonesia and Detroit in bankruptcy, go back to this End Game memo, the genesis of the blood and tears.The Treasury official playing the bankers’ secret End Game was Larry Summers. Today, Summers is Barack Obama’s leading choice for Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, the world’s central bank. If the confidential memo is authentic, then Summers shouldn’t be serving on the Fed, he should be serving hard time in some dungeon reserved for the criminally insane of the finance world.
Duplicitous Peace Talks Resume
by Stephen Lendman
Global activists oppose them. They do so for good reason. They're dead on arrival. They're fake like all previous times.
They're ongoing secretly. Doing so conceals manipulated injustice. It diverts attention from what's important.
Israel's waging war on Palestine. Out-of-control land theft continues. Dispossessions follow. Thousands are being ethnically cleansed. Doing so makes way for exclusive Jewish development.
It doesn't matter. Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Zeev Elkin says calls for halting settlement construction are "anti-Semitic."
The anti-Semitism canard is repeatedly used. It doesn't wash. It wore thin long ago.
Bradley Manning Wrongfully Sentenced
by Stephen Lendman
On July 30, he was wrongfully convicted on 20 of 22 charges. They included multiple Espionage Act violations. It's a WW I relic.
It belongs in history's dustbin. It's unrelated to exposing serious government wrongdoing.
Manning revealed what everyone needs to know. He disclosed grave war crimes. Perpetrators are free to kill again. Doing the right thing got Manning convicted.
Judge Col. Denise Lind sentenced him to 35 years. It's by far the longest ever punishment for leaking government information.
Manning will be 26 years old in December. He'll be eligible for parole in around eight years. Chances appear slim to none. His conviction and sentencing sent a message. It warns other potential whistleblowers not to reveal what Washington wants suppressed.
Manning will serve hard time. Initially he's heading for Fort Leavenworth, KS incarceration. He faces potential Supermax harshness.
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