NSA Security running amok to plug leaks about 9/11

by Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer
July 7, 2009

(WMR) -- WMR has learned that the National Security “Q” Group, responsible for security, has grown to an immense security and counter-intelligence force, with an estimated one thousand government employees, contractors, and paid informants. NSA’s Security force is reportedly primarily tasked with plugging any leaks of classified or other information that points to U.S. government’s involvement with the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

NSA Security has doggedly pursued a number of NSA employees, some in “sting” operations, others in frequent polygraphs and repeated security interviews where threats are made by thuggish NSA security agents with and without the presence of FBI agents, and others in constant surveillance operations at their homes, churches, and other locations away from the Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters of the agency.

The most egregious NSA Security operation against an NSA employee was the 2004 arrest of NSA analyst Ken Ford, Jr. Ford became a target of opportunity for NSA Security and the FBI after Vice President Dick Cheney noted his name on an NSA signals intelligence report on Saddam Hussein’s government that stated that there was no proof from interceptions of Iraqi communications that Saddam Hussein possessed “weapons of mass destruction.”

Cheney and other neocons in the Bush White House arranged for a “sting” operation to be mounted as retribution against Ford. Ford was charged with taking classified papers home from NSA headquarters, something that is quite impossible considering the stringent security in place at one of the most-secured complexes in the world.

Ford was convicted by a tainted jury and sentenced to seven years in federal prison. Ford, who is African-American, originally had an African-American federal trial judge. However, the judge was replaced by a pro-Iraq war Jewish U.S. judge, Peter Messitte, who set out to ensure a guilty conviction of Ford in cahoots with Jewish U.S. Attorney for Maryland Rod Rosenstein, and Jewish Assistant U.S. Attorney for Southern Maryland David Salem, both Bush appointees. Nothing was done by the judge or prosecutors to dismiss from the jury a contractor whose company had major contracts with NSA. The trio of Messitte, Rosenstein, and Salem have also “rocket-docketed” a number of cases, resulting in slam-dunk convictions, against Arab- and Iranian-Americans in the southern district of Maryland.

NSA’s Security chief is Kemp Ensor III. Ensor has built up what amounts to a massive law enforcement and intelligence agency in Maryland that operates as a virtual independent operation that answers to no one. Maryland’s congressional delegation has shown little interest in oversight over the security operation.

In fact, WMR has learned that many NSA employees, aware of the political and other misuse of their agency by the Bush-Cheney administration, avidly backed Barack Obama for president hoping that the past era when NSA complied with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution would be restored. However, many NSA employees are bitterly disappointed that Obama has done nothing to curtail not only the widespread surveillance of the communications of law-abiding Americans but the constant “Stasi-like” harassment and surveillance conducted by Ensor’s team of agents and confidential informants.

WMR has also learned that NSA Security has been authorized to work directly with Washington area local police department intelligence divisions to carry out its surveillance of not only NSA employees and contractors, but journalists who report on the activities of NSA. Two police departments mentioned in this respect are the Alexandria, Virginia, and Anne Arundel County, Maryland, sheriff departments.

One senior level NSA official recently found himself sitting in front of NSA Security questioners asking why he gave his NSA business cards to some students at a university. It turns out the official was trying to recruit students for NSA employment. When the official asked why there was a problem in his handing out his business cards, the answer by NSA Security was that some of them, all American citizens, had “Russian last names.”

Even former NSA employees and contractors are being subjected to continual NSA Security surveillance and harassment at their work places and other locations, according to WMR’s sources. Some have lost their jobs as a result of pressure from NSA Security.

WMR has in the past reported on NSA surveillance of journalists. On December 28, 2005, we reported: “WMR has learned that the National Security Agency (NSA), on the orders of the Bush administration, eavesdropped on the private conversations and e-mail of its own employees, employees of other U.S. intelligence agencies -- including the CIA and DIA -- and their contacts in the media, Congress, and oversight agencies and offices. The journalist surveillance program, code named ‘FIRSTFRUITS,’ was part of a Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) program that was maintained at least until October 2004 and was authorized by then-DCI Porter Goss. FIRSTFRUITS was authorized as part of a DCI ‘Countering Denial and Deception’ program responsible to an entity known as the Foreign Denial and Deception Committee (FDDC). Since the intelligence community’s reorganization, the DCI has been replaced by the Director of National Intelligence headed by John Negroponte and his deputy, former NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden.”

Since the revelation of the NSA journalist monitoring database, which later added communications intercepts of journalists’ phone calls, emails, and faxes to its database, NSA Security has, according to information received by WMR, conducted physical surveillance of journalists it deems to be threats to the operations of the agency. The top targeted journalists, who make up a virtual “rogues’ gallery” at NSA Security, complete with photographs and other personal information, are: former Baltimore Sun and current Wall Street Journal reporter Siobhan Gorman, Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz, former Baltimore Sun and current New York Times reporter Scott Shane, Baltimore Sun reporter Phil McGowan, author James Bamford, New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, and this editor, Wayne Madsen.

In addition to the aforementioned, FIRSTFRUITS also contained the names of former Washington Post reporter Vernon Loeb, New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh, and UPI’s John C. K. Daly.

Ironically, NSA Security allegedly has its own connections in the news media. A Washington Times source revealed that the paper’s writer of the “Inside the Beltway” column, John McCaslin, has a relative inside NSA Security -- Robert McCaslin, the chief of NSA Security counter-intelligence and the chief “sting” agent against Ford. Robert McCaslin, according to the Times source, is the brother of the paper’s columnist.

NSA Security is also able to utilize the agency’s most sophisticated electronic surveillance systems to monitor the activities of journalists. The cell phones of journalists are routinely used as listening devices, even when turned off. And what was considered a sure-fire method of avoiding having a cell phone used as a transmitter, removing the batteries in what has become known as “batteries out” conversations, is no longer safe. Even when the batteries are removed, the global positioning system (GPS) chip in cell phones continues to have enough residual power that two to three pings from satellites can give away a person’s location and what other uniquely identifiable cell phones are at the same location.

The bottom line is that a number of NSA personnel who were on duty in the months leading up to 9/11, the day of the attacks, and subsequent weeks and months, are aware of undeniable facts that point to a massive cover-up by the Bush-Cheney administration of the circumstances surrounding 9/11, including what actually befell United Airlines flight 93 and who was issuing direct military orders from the White House.

The Obama administration, rather than lessen the pressure on the NSA personnel, has turned up the heat and is resorting to even more draconian methods to ensure silence. The word from inside NSA is that a state of fear exists and the mission of the agency, to conduct surveillance of foreign communications to provide threat indications and warnings to U.S. troops and policy makers and protect sensitive U.S. government communications from unauthorized eavesdropping is suffering as a result.

Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

Copyright © 2009 WayneMadenReport.com

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).

The waning power of truth

by Paul Craig Roberts
June 22, 2009

David Ray Griffin, the nemesis of the collection of disinformation known as the 9/11 Commission Report, has taken up the question of Osama Bin Laden, dead or alive?

On the basis of the available evidence, Griffin concludes that bin Laden died in December 2001, most likely of kidney failure. He has been kept alive in the media by US government PSYOPS as a useful bogyman to justify America’s illegal wars of aggression. The messages received from bin Laden since his death appear to be conveniently timed fabrications designed to advance US government purposes.

Osama bin Laden is likely to become a mythical person, like the Georgia Tech student, George P. Burdell, who will be sighted from time to time over a period that exceeds the length of a human life.

It was less than one year ago that Americans were subjected to PSYOPS disinformation from their government concerning the Russia-Georgia conflict over South Ossetia.

Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin incorporated South Ossetia, formerly a part of Russia, into his home province of Georgia. When the Soviet Union broke up, Georgia became independent and retained South Ossetia. Secession movements arose in South Ossetia and in Abkhazia. These secession movements were the reason European members of NATO rejected the US government’s attempt to make Georgia a NATO member in order to extend the US/NATO military presence on Russia’s borders in contravention of previous US government agreements with Russia.

To terminate the secession movement and, thereby, remove the barrier to Georgia becoming a NATO member, the US, with Israel’s help, trained and equipped the Georgian military and gave the American puppet ruler, installed in the aftermath of one of the US-orchestrated “color revolutions,” the green light to attack South Ossetia.

Under mutual agreement, Russia and Georgia both provided peace-keeping troops in South Ossetia to prevent violence by secessionists. On the night of August 7-8, 2008, Georgian troops attacked South Ossetia, destroying a town and killing many Russian Ossetians and some Russian soldiers who were part of the peace-keeping force. Large numbers of South Ossetians fled across the border to Russia.

The US government, in its hubris, assumed that Russia would accept the ethnic cleansing of Russians from South Ossetia. Instead, Russian troops arrived and quickly destroyed the American-trained and equipped Georgian army and could easily have taken control of Georgia, but refrained.

Defeated in its aim, the US government unleashed a PSYOPS disinformation war against the Russian government, claiming falsely that Russia had initiated the conflict by attacking Georgia. The US government’s blatant and transparent lies were force-fed to the American public by the US media.

British disinformation services cooperated with their American masters, but the rest of the world blew the whistle. The real facts emerged, and an American disinformation campaign experienced a rare failure.

Now 10 months later, US “black ops” is at it again, pumping out disinformation about the “stolen” Iranian election. The US media is again serving the government’s disinformation campaign. This despite the fact that on May 23, 2007, Brian Ross and Richard Esposito reported on ABC News: “The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert ‘black’ operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell . . . ABC News.”

On May 27, 2007, the London Telegraph independently reported: “Mr. Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilize, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs.”

A few days previously, the Telegraph reported on May 16, 2007, that Bush administration neocon warmonger John Bolton told the Telegraph that a US military attack on Iran would “be a ‘last option’ after economic sanctions and attempts to foment a popular revolution had failed.”

On June 29, 2008, Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker: “Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.”

The Iranian election protests, essentially led by the westernized youth of Tehran who wish to be free of Islamic moral codes, have the hallmarks of orchestration. The protesters are color-coded with green wristbands. Their protest signs are in English and are obviously directed at the Western media. Their chants are propagandistic and bear no relation to facts known by every Iranian.

And again, the US media and various experts, whose ambitions depend on government-related careers, are force-feeding the American public the disinformation designed to further isolate and weaken, if not overthrow, the Iranian government.

Until 1978 the US ruled Iran through the Shah. The US intends to again rule Iran through puppets. The only two remaining independent governments in the region are Iran and Syria. If the US doesn’t first bankrupt itself, both countries will fall to US black ops destabilization.

The limitless gullibility of the American people guarantees carte blanche to the US government’s schemes. Americans seemingly cannot put two and two together. They have already forgotten the lies about weapons of mass destruction that have resulted in the destruction of Iraq. They have forgotten Secretary of State Colin Powell’s publicly expressed remorse at the lies he told the UN. Americans blithely accept the conflation of Taliban with al Qaeda and terrorists and the new war that the Obama regime has started in Pakistan, a war that has already produced 2 million refugees.

It can fairly be said that there is not much difference between the American public and the fictional one under Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984. The few independent voices that do exist are simply drowned out by the constant flow of disinformation.

The US government’s success in spinning 9/11 guaranteed the government’s success in pursuing a hegemonic agenda under a cloak of lies. Although a large percentage of the US population does not believe the government’s account and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of experts and informed and well-connected people have challenged the government’s tale, the US media have shown no interest despite the official account of 9/11 bearing every known hallmark of a cover-up.

High-ranking fire marshals have complained that legally required forensic procedures were not followed by authorities entrusted with investigation.

The testimony of more than 100 policemen, firemen, and maintenance personnel who were in the towers at the time and report hearing and experiencing a series of explosions was ignored and withheld from the public until the government got its story in place.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology studiously avoided testing for evidence of explosives. The severed steel beams were quickly collected and sold abroad as scrap.

As a number of observers have complained, the crime scene was destroyed, not investigated.

The government’s story of the destruction of the towers is based on computer simulations that produce results in keeping with the assumptions.

The collapse of the third building is not even mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report.

No one abroad believes the US government’s story. Europeans have produced documentary films that laugh at the official explanation.

Recently, an international team of scientists reported on their two-year examination of dust samples from the debris. They report that they found nano-thermite in the samples. To my knowledge no mainstream US media reported the finding.

One would think that such a finding would lead to a real investigation. Instead, within the US the finding is dismissed by debunkers of “conspiracy theories” (except of course the government’s own conspiracy theory) with the charge that the dust samples have not been in controlled environments since collected and could have been contaminated by those who volunteered the samples. In other words, the nano-thermite, if actually in the samples, was planted.

One wonders how residents of lower Manhattan obtained nano-thermite with which to contaminate the dust. Indeed, who has access to nano-thermite other than government?

Why doesn’t the National Academy of Science choose a team to examine the samples? If the finding of nano-thermite is verified, the issue of contamination can be investigated. If it turns out that the people who volunteered the samples have no possible access to nano-thermite, the case for a real investigation is established.

There is little prospect of such a development in the US. American science and the careers of scientists are heavily dependent on US government funding. It would be a career-ending event for American scientists to get involved with this matter other than as a contributor to a cover-up. Professor Steven Jones, a physicist at BYU who first raised the issue of explosives being used to bring down the three WTC buildings, was terminated, despite his tenure, by BYU. Many believe Jones was terminated because of political threats to the university’s funding.

In the US truth is an ineffective means by which to hold government accountable. Consider, for example, the fate of whistleblowers. Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon Papers was perhaps the last successful whistleblower and that was three decades ago. Since then the government has put in place many defenses against whistleblowers.

The American public has looked to government for its salvation since Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Government provides education, health care (Medicare, Medicaid), pensions (Social Security), food stamps, housing subsidies, child care and protects Americans from a long list of demonized villains ranging from spouse abusers and child molesters to terrorists. Americans see themselves and their government as the salt of the earth, an image supported by American generosity to other peoples who suffer natural calamities. Most Americans believe that their government does stupid things, but not evil things except perhaps by accident.

The right-wing believes that America was attacked on 9/11 because we are so good, hubris to which Bush successfully played with his statement that “they hate us for our freedom and democracy.”

The left wing finds emotional satisfaction in its belief that 9/11 was deserved blow-back from peoples oppressed by US foreign policy who rose up and struck back.

Truth is so impotent in America that the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty 42 years ago is still covered up by the US government despite the best efforts of Admiral Tom Moorer, who was Chief of Naval Operations and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and by decades of effort by the Liberty survivors.

This raises the question: Why do some people blow whistles? Why do those few write books and columns that challenge the lies and deceptions? There is probably more than one answer. For some, hope springs eternal. Others naively destroy their careers thinking that truth will be honored. Still others speak from a sense of responsibility to truth and not from a hope that anything will actually change.

In October 1987, John Stockwell, a former CIA cover operative who ran the CIA’s covert war in Angola, gave a lecture in which he said he abandoned his career when he realized that CIA covert operations resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people and were totally unconnected to any US national security interests. “I concluded that I just couldn’t see the point.”

Nothing has changed. What was the point of the US invasion of Iraq? Even President Bush eventually conceded that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

What was the point of the US invasion of Afghanistan and what is the point of Obama’s escalation of the war there? The Taliban is not al Qaeda and was totally focused on unifying Afghanistan under an Islamic government. The US was not on the Taliban’s radar screen.

What is the point of the war that the US has started in Pakistan?

What is the point of the destabilization of the Iranian government? After the stolen elections of the Karl Rove/Bush era, why does the US think it must overthrow the Iranian government because of allegations that Ahmadinejad stole an election?

If the answer is that these wars and interventions serve the interest of US hegemony, the obvious reply is that US hegemony is more likely to be lost from the massive red ink in the government’s budget that is likely to be monetized, thus destroying the dollar as reserve currency, the main source of US hegemony.

If the US wants to have an empire in the Middle East or elsewhere, the government should come out and say so. At least then Americans could revel in the glories of empire. As it is, the pleasure must be gained surreptitiously under the table, pretending that we are protecting the world from evildoers while we do evil ourselves.

Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.

Project Censored Modern Media Censorship - September 11, 2008

Stephen Lendman and Connie Fogal, "The Security and Prosperity Partnership", Modern Media Censorship, Lecture 2. Only part of Lendman's lecture is included, within the first 7 or so minutes, after which Fogal's topnotch lecture begins. Click here for the Project Censored webpage which introduces these two lectures, and which includes an .mp3 link for Lendman's full lecture.

I, Thomas Paine, Two Hundred Years Hence*

It is Monday, 8 June 2009, two hundred years to the day since my miserable death, though I should add that while death was, indeed, miserable it was a swim in the sea compared with my life as it finally turned out. However, I have been dead for too long to want to harp on those wretched final years of my life—the assassination of my character, of my person, the unspeakable hypocrisy of it all, my freefall from grace and renown, the poverty, ill health, my seeking refuge in a bottle. But if there remains even one son or daughter of Liberty and Democracy in this present day—that is, the person to and for whom I write, as opposed to those who celebrate the cartoon Tom Paine, never thinking to read my works or to carry forth the struggle—then I should think that such a son or daughter of Liberty is unlikely to protest my assuming the privilege of penning this brief posthumous account. If not a single such person remains who is, in word and deed, committed to Liberty and Democracy—the only fit state for a human being who wishes to live as a whole person and who refuses to be infantilised—then rather than to assume the privilege, if there’s none worthy to grant it, I shall steal it back as rightfully my own.

I can quite quickly sum up what befell me and what has befallen countless other revolutionaries over the course of history; however, I do so not out of a desire or need to explain myself, but rather as a word of warning to those whom I consider my rightful progeny. My task is made easier by the fact that my rightful progeny, by the nature of the task which lies before them, shall already have apprised themselves of the historical accounts of revolutions, failed and successful, if in fact there has ever been an example of the latter. In brief, revolutionaries with integrity—those who hold, still, to the original stated aims of the revolution, the aims of Liberty and Democracy—are, at the point of the revolution’s failure (as opposed to the success touted in history books), quickly stripped of their honours, hollowed out, and hung safely out to die so that the ‘revolutionaries’ who were merely playing a part can usurp The Powers That Were to become those That Be. This perverted outcome must be avoided, and it shall not be avoided unless those who are in the struggle forever keep this near-inevitable outcome in mind, day in and day out, and for ever more, as the innumerable false actors lie constantly in wait.

My good friend Benjamin Franklin did his best to warn us. In response to being asked at the close of the Constitutional Convention, ‘Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?’, Dr. Franklin said, simply, ‘A Republic, if you can keep it.’ A prescient warning, indeed. And it is clear even, or perhaps particularly so, in this post-Obamamania, post-Democratic-controlled-Congress present day that the Republic has been lost, for the Republic cannot coexist with an undermined Constitution. The Republic is dead when the State itself no longer abides by the rule of law, no matter what pseudo-legislation is ushered through Congress, usually unread, in an attempt to provide a cover of legitimacy which no one is fooled by, certainly not the politicians nor their corporate paymasters.

The situation is at least as bad in Britain—Closed Circuit TV capital of the world—but in both the U.S. and the UK, the rule of law, any protection against the State, has been wilfully obliterated under the false pretext of National Security, which rightfully understood covers anything which might threaten not the well-being of the people, the mock citizenry, but the powers of the State. And, so, blatant lies which have been proven to be lies have enabled myriad murderous and treasonous crimes to be committed by the State, including the supreme international crime of wars of aggression, the murder of one-million-plus innocent civilians, numerous political assassinations, international kidnappings, torture, widespread domestic surveillance, and other intrusions into our civil liberties. And those persons who repeatedly and blatantly lied to the public and who committed the crimes which followed from those lies stand not in prison but remain protected by the full powers of the State under the pretext of National Security.

Let me state now that revolutions never end, and that it is not a fixed state which we are shooting for but, rather, an asymptotic ideal which requires a never-ending commitment to process rather than an end, for the ideal end is hogwash if the process does not remain. Democracy—very far, indeed, from what nauseatingly passes for it today, as I write—cannot be institutionalised, it cannot be spoken of as an objective achieved, it cannot reside, ever, in the State, and it can never be brought to bear upon a people by a foreign occupier, the very idea of which is absurd and oxymoronic. Democracy and its sacred sister, Liberty, reside within the individual, and such an individual who is committed to protecting these innate ideals from those who would usurp them from without must pursue, always, an anti-authoritarian way of life, a mode of being, which requires that we be adults, not overgrown children.

We shall no longer look to the State as provider, as head of the family, or as Big Brother, but shall, instead, seek to govern ourselves, the very act of which shall nullify in an instant any presumed pretensions of the State as our benefactor. We shall act in our own best interests, for we have all witnessed everywhere around us what happens when the State purports to so provide—the law is used against us to empower and enrich the State and those within its favour, and we, the people, pay the price. We must also—if we are to become and remain free—disassemble the myriad mechanisms by way of which the rotten State derives and attempts to maintain its rotten powers, as opposed to the only legitimate source of government—that is, through the will of the people, fully realised.

Such mechanisms which must be abolished include, but are not limited to, the various agencies and machinations of the secret State, the State (and the corporate-State) media as its controlled propaganda arm—the primary means by which, in conjunction with the ‘education’ system, the mock citizenry is kept under heel, ignorant, and wholly uneducated irrespective of the attainment of virtually meaningless university degrees—the corrupted courts of justice, the torture centres, the criminalised military, and the militarised police forces which do far more to tyrannise than to protect the people.

For those who might wonder, still, whether they are free, whether this account seems too strong, too reactionary—as no doubt many in America, England and Europe thought my words too strong, too reactionary more than two centuries ago—then there exists a simple litmus test which tells us immediately whether we are, in fact, a free people or enslaved. If the majority finds itself in the demeaning position of having to ask the State, to beg of it, to plead with it, to protest against it, then we are no longer free, but in chains and fetters. This is true even when the State obliges us and fulfils our request, which it should be noted typically permits the transfer of power from us to the State, a dynamic which is unfortunately lost on so many, who think they’re getting something for nothing. But, if a majority of the people finds itself asking the State to serve it or to abide by the rule of law, and it either refuses outright or deliberates and finally fails to deliver, then we live not in a democracy but under the dictates of a despotic and authoritarian regime which has no rightful place amongst us but which has over the years, decades and centuries slowly stolen our Liberty because we ceded it, in exact measure.

If we are to live as adults rather than as children, each and every one of my rightful progeny must hold a truth within their innermost selves which must always be kept alive, for in dark times such as those presently upon us the flame of Liberty shall surely flicker, waver, and without a steady stream of fresh air, fresh energy and fresh commitment it shall die, first, within you, and then as surely as we ourselves are mortal, Liberty herself shall be frog-marched to her death. That aforementioned truth is this: The State is not and shall never be your friend, its intentions are not yours. You are its enemy.

In authoritarian regimes like the ones which I see have befallen all of you, the State, of course, spares no horses in co-opting the terms of Democracy, of Liberty, of Freedom, but those words have been drained of life, of meaning; worse, they’ve been inverted just as George Orwell prophesied—Freedom is Slavery, War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength. They’ve become, in short, tools of oppression which, while some of us might more readily accept the truth that these emptied-out concepts are being used to justify unjust wars against the peoples of lands outside our own—Iraq and Afghanistan come readily to mind; however, this is but the tip of the iceberg, for there’s nary a land beyond which the State and the State of its Ally-in-Arms is not overtly or covertly oppressing, tyrannising at this very moment—while there are, I know, quite a few of you who might more readily accept this truth, there are unfortunately many more of you who might find it more difficult to recognise that these same emptied-out concepts are being deployed against the State’s more foundational enemy—those of you who live within its borders.

Do you really think that those CCTV cameras which are multiplying more quickly than springtime bunnies are there to protect you? Do you think the War OF Terror is being fought to protect you? Do you think that the news which you watch, which you listen to, which you read, exists to inform you? Did the State protect you on 9/11, or did it, in fact, commit the crimes? Did the State protect you during the 7/7 London bombings, or did it, in fact, commit the crimes? Did the State prove to you beyond any reasonable doubt who actually perpetrated those acts? Were independent investigations forthcoming, or were they precluded and the facts buried by those guilty of or complicit in the crimes? Were the politicians readily forthcoming, or did they, too, seek to bury the facts? And were such facts buried in large part by the State’s media-propaganda-arm? With CCTV cameras ubiquitous in airports and Tube stations even in 2001-2005, there would be video footage which demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt who committed these inhuman crimes. But why have we not seen such critical footage? Why has it been kept from you—the public—the bedrock upon which any good government gains its legitimacy?

These are just a few of the many questions you must ask yourself, if you are to carry on the struggle which I gave my life and my creative energies to more than two centuries ago, and if you are to remain amongst my rightful progeny who desire Liberty and Democracy not only in word but in deed as well. I shall leave off with something I said a long time ago: ‘Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.’ And, lastly, a corollary quip from Henry David Thoreau: ‘That government is best which governs least.’ Is this, rightful progeny, what you have, here, in this moment?

* Transcribed by Sean M. Madden on 8 June 2009. Thomas Paine also transferred the copyright to Sean M. Madden, 2009.

Thomas Paine (January 29, 1737 – June 8, 1809) was a British pamphleteer, revolutionary, radical, inventor, intellectual, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.^[1] He lived and worked in Britain until age 37, when he emigrated to the British American colonies, in time to participate in the American Revolution. His principal contributions were the powerful, widely-read pamphlet Common Sense (1776), advocating colonial America's independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, and The American Crisis (1776–1783), a pro-revolutionary pamphlet series.

Later, Paine greatly influenced the French Revolution. He wrote the Rights of Man (1791), a guide to Enlightenment ideas. Despite not speaking French, he was elected to the French National Convention in 1792. The Girondists regarded him as an ally, so, the Montagnards, especially Robespierre, regarded him as an enemy. In December of 1793, he was arrested and imprisoned in Paris, then released in 1794. He became notorious because of The Age of Reason (1793–94), the book advocating deism and arguing against institutionalized religion, Christian doctrines, and promoted reason and freethinking, for which he would become derided in America.^[2]

In France, he also wrote the pamphlet Agrarian Justice (1795), discussing the origins of property, and introduced the concept of a guaranteed minimum income.

Paine remained in France during the early Napoleonic era, but condemned Napoleon's dictatorship, calling him "the completest charlatan that ever existed".^[3] At President Jefferson's invitation, in 1802 he returned to America.

Thomas Paine died at 59 Grove Street, Greenwich Village, New York City on June 8, 1809 at the age of 72. Alienated by his religious views, only six people attended his funeral.^[4] He was buried at what is now called the Thomas Paine Cottage in New Rochelle, New York, where he had lived after returning to America in 1802. His remains were later disinterred by an admirer, William Cobbett, who sought to return them to England and give him a heroic reburial on his native soil. The bones were, however, later lost and his final resting place today is unknown.

(Source: Wikipedia, “Thomas Paine” entry.)

Sean M. Madden is an American writer-educator living in East Sussex, England. His articles have been headlined by a wide range of online media outlets, including Information Clearing House, United Press International’s ReligionAndSpirituality.com, After Downing Street, Guerrilla News Network, Online Journal, Atlantic Free Press, Scoop, OpEdNews.com, Thomas Paine’s Corner, Carolyn Baker’s popular website and the Populist Party of America’s website. Sean also edits and writes for his iNoodle.com and MindfulLivingGuide.com blogs, and welcomes correspondence from readers. His email address is sean@inoodle.com.

Revealing the Secrets in Room 101 ...

Harper's Magazine

Ron Paul: What If?

Speech before the US House of Representatives, Feb 12, 2009

by Rep. Ron Paul
PopulistAmerica.com
February 12, 2009

Madam Speaker,

I have a few questions for my colleagues.

What if our foreign policy of the past century is deeply flawed and has not served our national security interests?

What if we wake up one day and realize that the terrorist threat is a predictable consequence of our meddling in the affairs of others and has nothing to do with us being free and prosperous?

What if propping up repressive regimes in the Middle East endangers both the United States and Israel?

What if occupying countries like Iraq and Afghanistan - and bombing Pakistan - is directly related to the hatred directed toward us?

What if someday it dawns on us that losing over 5,000 American military personnel in the Middle East since 9/11 is not a fair trade-off for the loss of nearly 3,000 American citizens, no matter how many Iraqi, Pakistani, and Afghan people are killed or displaced?

What if we finally decide that torture, even if called "enhanced interrogation techniques," is self-destructive and produces no useful information - and that contracting it out to a third world nation is just as evil?

What if it is finally realized that war and military spending is always destructive to the economy?

What if all wartime spending is paid for through the deceitful and evil process of inflating and borrowing?

What if we finally see that wartime conditions always undermine personal liberty?

What if conservatives, who preach small government, wake up and realize that our interventionist foreign policy provides the greatest incentive to expand the government?

What if conservatives understood once again that their only logical position is to reject military intervention and managing an empire throughout the world?

What if the American people woke up and understood that the official reasons for going to war are almost always based on lies and promoted by war propaganda in order to serve special interests?

What if we as a nation came to realize that the quest for empire eventually destroys all great nations?

What if Obama has no intention of leaving Iraq?

What if a military draft is being planned for the wars that will spread if our foreign policy is not changed?

What if the American people learn the truth: that our foreign policy has nothing to do with national security and that it never changes from one administration to the next?

What if war and preparation for war is a racket serving the special interests?

What if President Obama is completely wrong about Afghanistan and it turns out worse than Iraq and Vietnam put together?

What if Christianity actually teaches peace and not preventive wars of aggression?

What if diplomacy is found to be superior to bombs and bribes in protecting America?

What happens if my concerns are completely unfounded - nothing!

What happens if my concerns are justified and ignored - nothing good!

Ron Paul is a republican member of congress from Texas.

Americans Want Torture Inquiry, Obama Doesn’t

by Thomas R. Eddlem
New American
February 13, 2009

A Gallup Poll released February 12 revealed that 62 percent of Americans want to investigate or criminally prosecute Bush administration officials who authorized torture in the so-called “war on terror.” But even though President Obama has said numerous times that “nobody's above the law,” on February 10 he used the Bush administration’s “state secrets” gambit to quash a lawsuit attempting to penalize some of those involved in renditioning torture subjects.

That lawsuit sought damages against a private airline used by the CIA to rendition low-value suspects for torture by dictatorial regimes abroad. One of the five plaintiffs, Benyam Muhammed (a British and Ethiopian citizen), alleged he was renditioned to Morocco where torturers made razor cuts on his penis. The lawsuit alleges that San Jose-based Jeppesen DataPlan Inc. should have known that its planes were being used to ferry suspects for torture and is therefore liable for damages.

But because the Obama administration invoked the “state secrets” policy at the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, the lawsuit’s likelihood of revealing felony torture on the part of Bush officials is now remote.

“This is not change,” ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero correctly told the Associated Press. “Candidate Obama ran on a platform that would reform the abuse of state secrets, but President Obama's Justice Department has disappointingly reneged on that important civil liberties issue.”

The Obama policy in San Francisco also drew a rare condemnation of a Democrat from the New York Times editorial page.

The Gallup Poll came just two weeks after it was revealed that the Obama administration’s Justice Department has dispatched several government lawyers to defend Bush-era Justice Department official John Yoo from a lawsuit by torture victim Jose Padilla.

Jordan Paust of the University of Houston Law Center calls giving Justice Department lawyers to alleged international war criminals “an outrage and constitute an embarrassing embrace of international criminal conduct that the international community has demanded must result in absolutely no form of impunity.” Paust says that alleged criminals should bear the costs of their own defense, and notes there is a long historical case for this. At “a 1781 Resolution of the Continental Congress, the Founders expected that 'the author of ... injuries [that are “offenses against the law of nations”] should compensate the damage out of his private fortune.'”

President Obama’s actions are fast diverging from his public rhetoric.

Ship of Fools, etc.

Introduction by Sean@iNoodle.com:

Firstly, apologies (of sorts) for there not having been a post yesterday.

In reality, I know from three-plus years' experience that I am perhaps unlikely, ever, to be able to deliver a fresh (or even a leftover reprint) iNoodle each and every day, for the need to earn a (self-employed, worse – in the very best sense of the word – creative, mindful, honest) living rather impinges upon the ideal.

Oh, were it possible for me to earn a semblance of just such a living by way of my dear ol' iNoodle.com!

Imagine, or at least allow me but a moment to indulge the fantasy, if I could afford to be both commissioning editor and writer, to call myself into an office of the mind each morning to hand out nothing but peach assignments for my writerly aspect to pursue, and pursue far beyond mere journalism. Well, perhaps one day. But until such a day arises, while I wish I could press an iNoodle out of the pasta machine with daily regularity, iNoodles shall, I'm afraid, continue to come in fits and starts. So, while I truly do apologize, I also know that I cannot apologize perpetually for that which I know cannot be, at least for now.

But, secondly, a reason is, at least on this occasion, proffered as to why I was absent from the iNoodle.com page yesterday. My day rather centered around my taking my 13:08 British practical (as opposed to theory, taken/passed in mid-December) driving test. I can report, too, that I passed (thank you, James). Not bad considering I have been driving, now, for 28 years, albeit on an inferior American driver's license, inferior as it is issued to anyone who can essentially drive around the block without causing a multi-car pileup.

But here's a guy, below, who does somehow manage to press out not only a noodle-of-sorts, day in and day out, but who serves absolutely essential fare which we all need, if we are to keep ourselves regular (that is, rational, fact-based, sane).

As an indicator of Paul Craig Roberts' feat, his reach, his magnanimity, consider that when I did a Google search just now on "ship of fools" "paul craig roberts" 515 hits were returned.

That's for one piece, published in the past 24 hours!

Perhaps some sort of juxtaposition is needed to drive the point home. I'll do a search, now, on "sean m. madden" (my byline): 928 results. And that includes everything (including, no doubt, a fair amount of Google garbage), not just the resulting hits for one article.

Anyway, without further rigmarole, here's Paul Craig Roberts doing, again, what he does day in and day out. And after, or before, reading the below, I suggest – indeed, I implore – you to read another of his recent propaganda-busting offerings, this one entitled, The War on Terror is a Hoax. Read it and begin to take back what is ours: our own minds, first of all, our own country (be it the US or the UK), and our rightful place within it, as fully embodied and spirited citizens of not a faux/sham-democracy but a true, living, breathing democracy in which we all, truly, govern ourselves. Those who purport to lead, to run the show have, in truth, run us aground.

*****

Washington morons are steering the Ship of Fools into the vortex

by Paul Craig Roberts
Online Journal
February 10, 2009

Is there intelligent life in Washington, DC? Not a speck of it.

The US economy is imploding, and Obama is being led by his government of neoconservatives and Israeli agents into a quagmire in Afghanistan that will bring the US into confrontation with Russia, and possibly China, America’s largest creditor.

The January payroll job figures reveal that last month 20,000 Americans lost their jobs every day.

In addition, December’s job losses were revised upward by 53,000 jobs from 524,000 to 577,000. The revision brings the two-month job loss to 1,175,000. If this keeps up, Obama’s promised 3 million new jobs will be wiped out by job losses.

Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reports that this huge number is an understatement. Williams notes that built-in biases in seasonal adjustment factors caused a 118,000 understatement of January job losses, bringing the actual January job loss to 716,000 jobs.

The payroll survey counts the number of jobs, not the number of employed as some people have more than one job. The household survey counts the number of people who have jobs. The household survey shows that 832,000 people lost their jobs in January and 806,000 in December, for a two-month reduction of Americans with jobs of 1,638,000.

The unemployment rate reported in the US media is a fabrication.

Williams reports that “during the Clinton administration, ‘discouraged workers’ those who had given up looking for a job because there were no jobs to be had -- were redefined so as to be counted only if they had been ‘discouraged’ for less than a year. This time qualification defined away the bulk of the discouraged workers. Adding them back into the total unemployed, actual unemployment, [according to the unemployment rate methodology used in 1980] rose to 18% in January, from 17.5% in December.”

In other words, without all the manipulations of the data from a government that lies to us every time it opens its mouth, the US unemployment rate is already at depression levels.

How could it be otherwise given the enormous job loss from offshored jobs. It is impossible for a country to create jobs when its corporations are moving production for the American consumer market offshore. When they move the production offshore, they shift US GDP to other countries. The US trade deficit over the past decade has reduced US GDP by $1.5 trillion. That is a lot of jobs.

I have been reporting for years that American university graduates have had to take jobs as waitresses and bartenders. As over-indebted American consumers lose their jobs, they will visit restaurants and bars less frequently. Consequently, Americans with university degrees will not even have jobs waiting on tables and mixing drinks.

US policymakers have ignored the fact that consumer demand in the 21st century has been driven, not by increases in real income, but by increased consumer indebtedness. This fact makes it pointless to try to stimulate the economy by bailing out banks so that they can lend more to consumers. The American consumers have no more capacity to borrow.

With the decline in the values of their principal assets -- their homes -- with the destruction of half of their pension assets, and with joblessness facing them, Americans cannot and will not spend.

Why bail out GM and Citibank when the firms are moving as many operations offshore as they possibly can?

Much of US infrastructure is in poor shape and needs renewing. However, infrastructure jobs do not produce goods and services that can be sold abroad. The massive commitment to infrastructure does nothing to help the US reduce its massive trade deficit, the financing of which is becoming a major problem. Moreover, when the infrastructure projects are completed, so are the jobs.

At best, assuming Mexicans do not get most of the construction jobs, all Obama’s stimulus program can do is to reduce the number of unemployed temporarily.

Unless US corporations can be required to use American labor to produce the goods and services that they sell in American markets, there is no hope for the US economy. No one in the Obama administration has the wits to address this problem. Thus, the economy will continue to implode.

Adding to the brewing disaster, Obama has been deceived by his military and neoconservative advisers into expanding the war in Afghanistan, a large mountainous country. Obama intends to use the drawdown of US soldiers in Iraq to send 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan. This would bring the US forces to 60,000 -- 600,000 fewer than US Marine Corps and US Army counterinsurgency guidelines define as the minimum number of soldiers necessary to bring success in Afghanistan -- and less than half as many as the army that was unable to occupy Iraq.

The Iranians had to bail out the Bush regime by restraining its Shi’ite allies and encouraging them to use the ballot box to attain power and push out the Americans. In Iraq, the US troops only had to fight a small Sunni insurgency drawn from a minority of the population. Even so, the US “prevailed” by putting the insurgents on the US payroll and paying them not to fight. The withdrawal agreement was dictated by the Shi’ites. It was not what the Bush regime wanted.

One would think that the experience with the “cakewalk” in Iraq would make the US hesitant to attempt to occupy Afghanistan, an undertaking that would require the US to occupy parts of Pakistan. The US was hard pressed to maintain 150,000 troops in Iraq. Where is Obama going to get another half million soldiers to add to the 150,000 to pacify Afghanistan?

One answer is the rapidly growing massive US unemployment. Americans will sign up to go kill abroad rather than be homeless and hungry at home.

But this solves only half of the problem. Where does the money come from to support an army in the field of 650,000, an army 4.3 times larger than US forces in Iraq, a war that has cost us $3 trillion in out-of-pocket and already incurred future costs. This money would have to be raised in addition to the $3 trillion US budget deficit that is the result of Bush’s financial sector bailout, Obama’s stimulus package, and the rapidly failing economy. When economies tank, as the American one is doing, tax revenues collapse. The millions of unemployed Americans are not paying Social Security, Medicare, and income taxes. The stores and businesses that are closing are not paying federal and state income taxes. Consumers with no money or credit to spend are not paying sales taxes.

The Washington Morons, and morons they are, have given no thought as to how they are going to finance a fiscal year 2009 budget deficit of some two to three trillion dollars.

The practically nonexistent US saving rate cannot finance it.

The trade surpluses of our trading partners, such as China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, cannot finance it.

The US government really has only two possibilities for financing its budget deficit. One is a second collapse in the stock market, which would drive the surviving investors with what they have left into “safe” US Treasury bonds. The other is for the Federal Reserve to monetize the Treasury debt.

Monetizing the debt means that when no one is willing or able to purchase the Treasury’s bonds, the Federal Reserve buys them by creating bank deposits for the Treasury’s account.

In other words, the Fed “prints money” with which to buy the Treasury’s bonds.

Once this happens, the US dollar will cease to be the reserve currency.

In addition, China, Japan and Saudi Arabia, countries that hold enormous quantities of US Treasury debt in addition to other US dollar assets, will sell, hoping to get out before others.

The US dollar will become worthless, the currency of a banana republic.

The US will not be able to pay for its imports, a serious problem for a country dependent on imports for its energy, manufactured goods, and advanced technology products.

Obama’s Keynesian advisers have learned with a vengeance Milton Friedman’s lesson that the Great Depression resulted from the Federal Reserve permitting a contraction of the supply of money and credit. In the Great Depression good debts were destroyed by monetary contraction. Today bad debts are being preserved by the expansion of money and credit, and the US Treasury is jeopardizing its credit standing and the dollar’s reserve currency status with enormous quarterly bond auctions as far as the eye can see.

Meanwhile, the Russians, overflowing with energy and mineral resources, and not in debt, have learned that the US government is not to be trusted. Russia has watched Reagan’s successors attempt to turn former constituent parts of the Soviet Union into US puppet states with US military bases. The US is trying to ring Russia with missiles that neutralize Russia’s strategic deterrent.

Putin has caught on to “comrade wolf.” He has succeeded in having the president of Kyrgyzstan, a former part of the Soviet Union, evict the US from its military base. This base is essential to America’s ability to supply its soldiers in Afghanistan.

To stop America’s meddling in Russia’s sphere of influence, the Russian government has created a collective security treaty organization comprised of Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Uzbekistan is a partial participant.

In other words, Russia has organized central Asia against US penetration.

To whose agenda is President Obama being hitched? Writing in the English language version of the Swiss newspaper, Zeit-Fragen, Stephen J. Sniegoski reports that leading figures of the neocon conspiracy -- Richard Perle, Max Boot, David Brooks, and Mona Charen -- are ecstatic over Obama’s appointments. They don’t see any difference between Obama and Bush/Cheney.

Not only are Obama’s appointments moving him into an expanded war in Afghanistan, but the powerful Israel Lobby is pushing Obama toward a war with Iran.

The unreality in which the US government operates is beyond belief. A bankrupt government that cannot pay its bills without printing money is rushing headlong into wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. According to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, the cost to the US taxpayers of sending a single soldier to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq is $775,000 per year!

The world has never seen such total mindlessness. Napoleon’s and Hitler’s march into Russia were rational acts compared to the mindless idiocy of the United States government.

Obama’s war in Afghanistan is the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. After seven years of conflict, there is still no defined mission or endgame scenario for US forces in Afghanistan. When asked about the mission, a US military official told NBC News, “Frankly, we don’t have one.” NBC reports: “they’re working on it.”

Speaking to House Democrats on February 5, President Obama admitted that the US government does not know what its mission is in Afghanistan and that to avoid “mission creep without clear parameters,” the US “needs a clear mission.”

How would you like to be sent to a war, the point of which no one knows, including the commander-in-chief who sent you to kill or be killed? How, fellow taxpayers, do you like paying the enormous cost of sending soldiers on an undefined mission while the economy collapses?

Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.

How Bush Threatened Britain, etc.

Introduction by Sean@iNoodle.com:

And what really happened to Michael Todd, the Manchester police chief "found dead in Snowdonia," and who, notably, led the investigation into Britain's involvement in the CIA's extraordinary rendition (cross-border kidnapping) and torture programs?

The British press coverage of his death made a mockery of journalism and professed fair and balanced reporting. The venomous accounts of Todd's life were wide-ranging and conflicting, even when held in juxtaposition with one another, irrespective of how they may have conflicted with the facts themselves.

It was as if the British media was given a license to kill the character in the public's eye of an esteemed public official – a sort of journalistic Jean Charles de Menezes thug-killing – to shame Todd beyond the grave, to shame his wife and children, and to show with what impunity the UK government and the British press can act when serving their own interests, as opposed to the well-being of the British people at large, should someone with the courage of conviction consider acting in behalf of the latter, and in accordance with the rule of law.

*****

by Andrew Sullivan
The Atlantic
February 6, 2009

In order to prevent any details of its torture record being publicly disseminated, the Bush administration threatened the British government with withdrawal of intelligence sharing if they allowed a court to publish the redacted evidence. Foreign secretary David Miliband denied this on Wednesday, but the letters from the US have been released by Channel 4 News. And their message is unmistakable. The first letter:

"I write with respect to proceedings … regarding Mr Binyam Mohamed," the letter said. "We note the classified documents identified in your letters of June 16 and August 1, 2008, to the acting general counsel of the Department of Defence … the public disclosure of these documents or of the information contained therein is likely to result in serious damage to US national security and could harm … intelligence information sharing arrangements between our two governments."

The second:

"Ordering the disclosure of the US intelligence information now would have only the marginal effects of serious and lasting damage to the US-UK intelligence sharing relationship, and thus the national security of the UK …"

That is a threat to hurt the security of a very close ally unless the British government intervenes into a court process to suppress evidence of US torture. In a critical test of the Obama administration, the demand that such evidence be suppressed was reiterated. (I don't know by whom. Panetta isn't in place yet. Brennan? Clinton?) And that's how illegal torture spreads throughout a legal and military system to undermine alliances as well as the rule of law. The poison of Cheney is still in the system. And it will be for a long time. That was the point: the crimes and blunders they committed were such that their successors find themselves, willy nilly, implicated in them.

House of Lords: Rise of CCTV is threat to freedom

Britain leads the world in the use of CCTV, says report published today.
(Photograph: Getty Images)

Introduction by Sean@iNoodle.com:

Note that while the Lords appear to be critical on this issue their report serves as a limited hangout (or smokescreen) which leaves the most egregious surveillance practices untouched, unaccounted for.

*****

World's most pervasive surveillance undermines
basic liberties, say peers

by Alan Travis
The Guardian
February 6, 2009

The steady expansion of the "surveillance society" risks undermining fundamental freedoms including the right to privacy, according to a House of Lords report published today.

The peers say Britain has constructed one of the most extensive and technologically advanced surveillance systems in the world in the name of combating terrorism and crime and improving administrative efficiency.

The report, Surveillance: Citizens and the State, by the Lords' constitution committee, says Britain leads the world in the use of CCTV, with an estimated 4m cameras, and in building a national DNA database, with more than 7% of the population already logged compared with 0.5% in the America.

The cross-party committee which includes Lord Woolf, a former lord chief justice, and two former attorneys general, Lord Morris and Lord Lyell, warns that "pervasive and routine" electronic surveillance and the collection and processing of personal information is almost taken for granted.

Although many surveillance practices and data collection processes are unknown to most people, the expansion in their use represents "one of the most significant changes in the life of the nation since the end of the second world war", the report says. The committee warns that the national DNA database could be used for "malign purposes", challenges whether CCTV cuts crime and questions whether local authorities should be allowed to use surveillance powers at all.

The peers say privacy is an "essential prerequisite to the exercise of individual freedom" and the growing use of surveillance and data collection needs to be regulated by executive and legislative restraint at all times.

Lord Goodlad, the former Tory chief whip and committee chairman, said there could be no justification for this gradual but incessant creep towards every detail about an individual being recorded and pored over by the state.

"The huge rise in surveillance and data collection by the state and other organisations risks undermining the long-standing traditions of privacy and individual freedom which are vital for democracy," he said. "If the public are to trust that information about them is not being improperly used there should be much more openness about what data is collected, by whom and how it is used."

The constitution committee makes more than 40 recommendations to protect individual privacy, including the deletion of all profiles from the national DNA database except for those of convicted criminals and a call for the mandatory encryption of personal data held by public and private organisations that are legally obliged to hold it.

But the report is silent on proposals from Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, for a "superdatabase" tracking everybody's emails, calls, texts and internet use and from Jack Straw, the justice secretary, to lower barriers on the widespread sharing of personal data across the public sector.

But the peers are critical of whether local authorities should continue to exercise their surveillance powers under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. They say examples of local councils using covert surveillance operations to stop fly tipping, reducing dog fouling, and investigate fraudulent school place applications led them to question how they acquired such powers. Ministers should examine whether local authorities, rather than the police, are the appropriate bodies to mount surveillance operations, the peers say. If they are, then their use should be confined to crime investigations that carry a minimum two-year prison sentence.

The peers say individuals targeted by such operations should be informed when it is completed, as long as no investigation is prejudiced.

Sycophancy at its cringiest (and most criminally complicit): Blair, Obama and the Media

(headline, of course, by Sean@iNoodle.com)

by Lee Glendinning
guardian.co.uk
February 6, 2009

BLAIR MEETS OBAMA

The political sphere has been abuzz for weeks about just who will be the first foreign leader to meet Barack Obama. The early phone calls and the order they were placed were well documented, so too the analysis of every raft of legislation. But what's this? Turning every expectation on its head - it's not Nicolas Sarkozy or Gordon Brown but Tony Blair. The former prime minister became the first foreign statesman since the inauguration to spend quality time with the Obamas at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. The Telegraph - complete with page one photo, couches it in these terms: "If you're Gordon, look away now", while the Independent goes with "Eat your heart out Gordon". Blair offered Obama words of advice, with many having drawn similarities between his sweep to power in 1997 with Obama's victory last year. "Mr President you are fortunate, as is your nation, that you have already shown in your life, courage in abundance. But should it ever be tested, I hope your faith can sustain you and your family. The public eye is not always the most congenial." John Rentoul, Blair's biographer, wrote in the Independent: "There is an afterlife: religion does have its uses after all. After you have left office it gets you to the front of the line of foreigners queuing up to be the first to meet the new President of the United States."

Independent: Religion has its uses, like jumping the queue

Telegraph: Barack Obama meets Tony Blair before Gordon Brown

Deborah Orr: A Tribute to the Propaganda Box

ADDENDUM (31 Jan 09):

In good conscience, and beyond satire, I would like to write and archive an addendum to this iNoodle.com post – not a retraction as there is no inaccurate fact to retract – but, rather, a heartfelt addition to my glib references concerning Deborah Orr and her husband.

My opinion concerning the article itself stands as, likewise, being heartfelt.

However, my closing suggestion – immediately following the close of Orr's article – that "she and her husband get a life" (left intact, below, for the record) was, in retrospect, careless. Of course, social critics with public platforms, like Deborah Orr and her husband Will Self, should not, themselves, be beyond reproach. However, when I wrote the piece I had no idea, or cared, who Orr's husband was.

It was not until yesterday, the morning after I published this post, that I looked up Orr's Wikipedia entry and learned that she is married (since 1997) to Self. And given Self's life – his body of work (e.g., fiction, journalism, criticism), his wealth of experience, and his philosophy education – it is ludicrous, in retrospect, that I suggest, even satirically, that he get a life and, by extension given their shared lives together, Deborah Orr, as clearly their off-the-couch lives are rich, and their respective sources of knowledge existing well beyond television.

I, therefore, offer a sincere apology to them both.

*****
Introduction by Sean@iNoodle.com:

Is there anyone left out there who hasn't been sucked into TV Land – British (or American) style – who can still attest to life devoid of the culturally (politically) requisite 3.75 hours of daily TV watching, or 26.25 hours per week? It's worth noting that Deborah Orr tells us within her below article, published in today's Independent newspaper, that these figures only include broadcast television, not watching DVDs, films in cinemas, YouTube or other internet-broadcast content.

According to Al Gore the American equivalent of this knucklehead phenomenon is "an average of four hours and thirty-five minutes every day," or "almost three-quarters of all the discretionary time that the average American has."

Like many things transatlantic, there exists little difference, despite what many Britons blindly believe, between the two criminal-war-waging nations and the complicit cultures they breed.

Once upon a time parents used to be so parental as to limit their kids' TV watching in order to avoid their offspring turning into pliable goo instead of developing as physically, intellectually and emotionally engaged children. Nowadays you're a social pariah if as a grown adult you choose not to hook up along with the kids' grandparents and the kids, of course, to passively imbibe the prescribed daily dose elixir of mindrot, propaganda and advertising. Three generations melded into one brainless heap in one fell swoop! This is the stuff of advertisers' and criminal politicians' wet dreams. Four generations – can you imagine four generations hooked up, hypnotized and in sync!?! – should qualify the head of any such household for an OBE. (Americans might one day have OAEs bestowed upon them should the US political elite ever decide to come out of the closet and embrace imperial language and hierarchy with the same vehemence as they do empire-building in practice.)

And why stop at the prescribed (minimum) dose required to demonstrate good (nominal) citizenship? Whether the corporate land you couch in – or on behalf of which you might be willing to commit war crimes – is the cutting-edge-in-conformity UK or US, the more boob tube you watch, presumably, the better brainwashed citizen you will be.

In my experience as an American living in England, the UK wins hands down (and the US is, it needn't really be emphasized, a tough act to follow) in the production of homogenous nonthinkers who would be at a loss for words (and nonthoughts) without the previous night's, let alone the previous season's, programming having been uploaded, via TV, to their cerebral cortices. Britons even pay a TV licensing fee for the privilege, in a very real sense funding the corporate-government's propagandizing of their own, and their childrens', minds. Now that's good, indeed superb, (nominal) citizenship!

Social optimists (and the propagandists whom they tend to be unable to see as propagandists, incapable as they often are of distinguishing between fact and fiction, the two having been stirred into one war-on-terror solution) like to refer to this mutually imbibed TV experience as the social glue which keeps us stuck to one another so that we can do culturally crucial things like chatter empty phrases at "the apocryphal water-cooler". In other words, to keep us from the dangerous society-splintering activity of having – and sharing – serious, meaningful thoughts.

Anyway, without further ado, here's Deborah Orr singing the Sirens' call for more of that which ails us, and who seems as shameless in her glorifying all things TV as Bush, Blair and Brown (Obama too?) were in spreading freedom and democracy. To check in with how the latter benevolent pursuit is going, click here for the latest Iraqi death count. I'm afraid, however, that you'll have to look elsewhere for evidence which gives a sense of the literally countless deaths in Afghanistan, to say nothing of Gaza, Pakistan and the various other places where our Anglo-American lifestyle apparently requires continual mass murder.

Do yourself, your family, and democracy (an as yet far-from-attained vision; don't let Obama, his Israeli chief of staff, or the compliant US/UK press convince you otherwise) a favor and pull the plug on your TV. Far better yet, throw the damn thing away. Whatever you do don't give it as a hand-me-down gift to someone you love. Consider sending it, instead, to Deborah Orr and her husband. I'd much rather they continue to dummy themselves down, not you.

By the way, the below headline and subheading come directly from The Independent. As the saying goes, I couldn't make this stuff up.

*****
Suddenly, we are all taking television more seriously

There is a desire for TV that can be shared around the apocryphal water-cooler

by Deborah Orr
The Independent
January 29, 2009

For me, one detail in the messy, horrible death of the rock star Jimi Hendrix at 27 years old, has always stood out. Early in his distress, he left a message asking for help on the answering machine of his agent. An answering machine! In 1970! How modern.

No one really needs answering machines any longer. In fact, if you leave someone a message on an answering machine, particularly at their home, they are likely to call you back weeks later, explaining that they are dreadfully sorry, but they have got out of the habit of listening to their messages. If you need to impart some significant information to someone these days, then you call them on their mobile or email. I don't even have an answering machine any longer.

I am not, in the parlance, an early adopter. I can – and have – resisted technologies until they have been overtaken by obsolescence. Perversely, I take some pride in this. So I felt only mild shame last Sunday, when it became apparent that my husband and I didn't have the technology we needed to be able to watch Generation Kill on FX.

Generation Kill is a drama about the invasion of Iraq and is written by the team that made The Wire, which was also broadcast in this country by FX. The Wire is lauded by many as one of the finest television drama series ever to have been created, and it is a pity that it was initially seen, communally, by such a small number of viewers.

Yet while my husband and I had been quite happy to watch the The Wire on DVD, we surprised ourselves this weekend by making an urgent call to our supplier, asking for our cable package to be immediately updated, because we just didn't want to wait to watch at our own leisure.

Yesterday, the reason for our sudden shift in viewing priorities became crystal clear. It's a reaction to the recession. A report this week from the TV marketing organisation, Thinkbox, confirmed that 2008 has been a record year for television watching, with British viewers watching an average of 26-and-a-quarter hours of broadcast television each week.

The report suggested that the popularity of the X Factor, which reached ratings highs last year, had been a contributing element, along with bad weather. But other statistics, such as BSkyB acquiring 171,000 new customers over Christmas, are being explained as the consequence of a heightened reliance on television for entertainment during the economic downturn.

For Sky, this is great news. The satellite broadcaster announced a 26 per cent increase in first-half profits, and also said it planned to recruit 1,000 engineers and call centre staff in a push to get more people to sign up for high definition TV. So, jobs for people to do, things for them to buy with their wages, and healthy audiences for advertisers to target their wares at. It makes a change from news of unremitting gloom on all these fronts.

Certainly, there are many people who might query the idea that more people at home on their sofas slumped in front of the telly could ever be a cause for celebration. But there are signs that the trend might turn out to be culturally beneficial as well as economically positive. The chief executive of Thinkbox, Tess Alps, is mainly interested in numbers. "The broadcast audience may not always be watching the same programme at the same time, as it did when there were a handful of channels," she says. "But viewers haven't gone anywhere."

Alps also noted that the huge growth in viewing online and on-demand, through services such as the BBC's iPlayer, has been in addition to traditional viewing habits, usually to catch up on programmes that have been missed. The effect of digital video recorders, such as Sky+ was the same. The technology increased TV viewing, rather than just moving it about.

All this evidence conspires to suggest that viewers might be taking their television more seriously. Early on in the rise of satellite and cable television there was a sense that viewing had become atomised, and conditional. Trawling though pages and pages of listings seemed like a fag, and people tended to plan less what they wanted to watch. The habit of knowing when notable new shows were being broadcast became so unusual, that some newspapers dropped their television review pages completely.

Less serious viewing, one could argue, led a demand for less serious programming. For a long time, when I wanted to watch TV, I would just plonk myself down, pick up the remote, and surf until something appealed to me. Usually, this would mean watching something that was already familiar – like a repeat of Friends – or something that was easy to get into – like a conventionally formatted makeover show. The tailend of documentaries I'd missed the start of, or a drama in mid-series, anything that looked, at a glance, hard to get into, was rejected.

Gradually, though, as the media itself has got to grips with multi-channel telly, and has started to run features about upcoming shows, such as Generation Kill, that are being broadcast on relatively obscure channels, I've begun tailoring my viewing again, and it makes for a more satisfactory relationship with the medium.

This might be part of a more general trend. It is acknowledged that one of the things that people love about the X Factor, or Strictly Coming Dancing, is that the whole family watches it, and enjoys the fact that this communality spills over into other aspects of life. Sure, it was a bit barking that John Sergeant's resignation from Strictly was urgently discussed on Newsnight. But the frenzy around this one story might also speak of a more general desire for television that can be shared and discussed round the apocryphal water cooler.

Teenagers, for example, insist that the real must-see appeal of late-night comedy-drama Skins is not the sex and the drugs but the experience the next day, of having a cultural reference point that everyone can enjoy talking about. Presumably, the online or digital recorder viewing allows those who missed out on the night to slide seamlessly back into next week's conversation.

Yet the move towards more committed viewing is not confined to the young. The trend is reported among all ages. It would be good, for example, if the flurry of interest in Generation Kill that was fanned by widespread advance exposure in the press, persisted through the series in the form of week-to-week commentary.

I don't believe that listless channel-surfing is going to disappear, any more than the answering machine has disappeared. But the response to multi-channel TV, when it was a novelty to be tackled with the help only of a remote control and the baffling Videoplus, might be tempered as our brief reliance on the answering machine was, by further technologies that make targeted or sustained viewing less complicated. Perhaps the recession will give us time to get to grips with it all, and perhaps quality television that offers something valuable to the general debate will be the beneficiary

d.orr@independent.co.uk (Please feel free to write and suggest to Deborah that: 1) she and her husband get a life and 2) she stop trying to convince the rest of us to give ours up to the propaganda box.)