Assange brokering deal for Snowden

SUBHEAD: Wikileaks and others working on deal for asylum in Iceland for Edward Snowden.

By Ned Resinkoff on 19 June 2013 for MSNBC -
(http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/06/19/assange-wikileaks-brokering-asylum-for-snowden/)


Image above: Julian Assange continues his work at the Ecuadoran Embassy in London in June 2013. From (http://www.thewestsidestory.net/2013/06/17/assange-to-continue-asylum-in-ecuadoran-embassy/).

Edward Snowden is not alone. On Wednesday, the men behind some of the other most notorious unauthorized leaks in the history of U.S. intelligence said Snowden had their full support. And that wasn’t just an empty promise.

“We are in touch with Snowden frequently, and we are involved in the process of brokering his asylum in Iceland,” Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said on a Wednesday press conference call. Also featured on the call were Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and previous National Security Agency leaker Thomas Drake. The joint gathering was an unusual show of solidarity from three men who have all found themselves under attack by the United States government for disclosing classified information.

“I support unreservedly Assange, [Bradley] Manning, and Thomas Drake,” said Ellsberg on the call. “And Snowden of course.” The similarity between all three cases, including his own, was that they all “saw crimes and unconstitutional behavior, inhumane and reckless behavior, being covered up by the administration, effectively,” he said. “And each of us was willing to take a personal cost, a personal risk, to expose it to the public.”

Currently, Pfc. Bradley Manning is undergoing court martial for allegedly leaking vast troves of secret information to Wikileaks. Assange has spent the past year holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in the United Kingdom, where he sought asylum in order to avoid being extradited to Sweden to face sexual assault allegations. Snowden’s last-known whereabouts were an anonymous hotel somewhere in Hong Kong. Drake and Ellsberg both currently walk free, but each of them has faced criminal prosecution.

Drake, who leaked details of the NSA’s electronic surveillance programs years before Snowden, said that all of them were battling a vast, unaccountable national security apparatus.

“What we’ve seen over the past 12 years is going over to the dark side of secret law, secret rules, secret courts and secret evidence,” he said. He dismissed President Obama’s claim, repeated this week in Berlin, that NSA spying is limited in scope.

“The policy is there to provide legal cover, what I call the color and cover of law, because they’re secretly interpreting it as they will and they essentially have a rubber-stamp court,” said Drake, referring to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The three men also attacked the Obama administration’s attempts to limit transparency to the press, comparing the current president to Richard Nixon.

“Thomas Jefferson once said he would prefer newspapers without a government, if he had to choose, to government without a newspaper,” said Ellsberg. “President Obama clearly disagrees with that.”

Last month, the Washington Post revealed that the Department of Justice had used the Espionage Act as justification to name Fox News reporter James Rosen an unindicted co-conspirator in the leaking of classified materials, essentially arguing that cultivating journalistic sources was tantamount to spying for a foreign agent. Ellsberg said such a move “goes very far beyond criminalizing the process of investigative journalism, which I think is the objective of the administration.”

Assange wondered aloud whether the next step would be to start prosecuting journalists for publishing classified materials.

“Will [Guardian reporter] Glenn Greenwald be granted asylum by Brazil by this time next year?” he asked.

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Green Shadow Cabinet

SUBHEAD: The Green Shadow Cabinet joins critical struggle to defeat Amerika's Trans-Pacific Partnership.

By Staff on 17 June 2013 for the Green Party Cabinet -
(http://www.greenpartywatch.org/2013/06/17/green-shadow-cabinet-joins-critical-struggle-to-defeat-trans-pacific-partnership/)


Image above: Green Party Presidential Candidate Jill Stein (with VP candidate Cheri Honkala,) about to be arrested for trying to join Presidential Debate in October 2012. From (http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2012/11/03/greens-candidate-people-not-profits.html).

The Green Shadow Cabinet stands united in opposition to the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and is committed to defeating this Obama administration effort to enrich and empower global corporations at the expense of people and planet.

For three years, the Obama administration has engaged in 16 rounds of secret negotiations to develop the TPP. Those negotiations have included hundreds of representatives of global corporations. The TPP negotiations have excluded representatives of the vast majority of the American people. It is a fact that the TPP is global economic policy for the 1%, at the expense of the 99%.

Today, all five branches and 81 members of the Green Shadow Cabinet begin to act in concert to not only defeat the TPP, but to show America that another government with another global economic agenda is possible. There is an alternative to the corrupt political establishment that produces economic terrors like the TPP. Our Cabinet is proof of that alternative.

Daily this week, the Green Shadow Cabinet will release over a dozen statements in opposition to the TPP; these statements describe the threats posed by the TPP, and offer better alternatives.

This month, our Cabinet members will begin participating in the broader movement against the TPP through actions and events across the United States and urge all Americans to join this effort. We are bringing our networks and communities into this critical struggle.

THE TPP THREATENS ALL OF US
If you oppose the industrial farming practices of Monsanto, Cargill and other giant food and agribusiness corporations, with their intense use of toxic herbicides and other harmful chemicals, production of untested genetically modified food, efforts to control the seed supply and patent life, their pollution of the water, air, soil and food supply, then you must oppose the TPP.

If you oppose the actions of the big banks and financial institutions that led to the world economic crash, exploding wealth inequality, risky investments that endanger the economic future, and their ability to dominate national economies, then you must oppose the TPP.

If you are committed to protecting the rights of working people to a living wage, the right to organize, and to safe working conditions, then you must oppose the TPP.

If you favor a free and open Internet where free speech is protected and creativity and communication flourish, then you must oppose the TPP.

If you understand that healthcare is a human right and that the inflated prices of pharmaceutical drugs should not be protected by law, then you must oppose the TPP.

If you want to see the air, waters and lands protected from toxic chemicals and pollution, and know that the ecological crisis of species extinction and environmental breakdown must be reversed, then you must oppose the TPP.

If you would live in a world where local, state, and national governments are allowed to take urgent action to deal with the global climate crisis, and to implement a Green New Deal, then you must oppose the TPP.

We look forward to working with you in the coming months to defeat the Trans-Pacific Partnership and to prevent its sister trade agreement, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, from following the same path. The first step is to stop enactment of Trade Promotion Authority legislation, also known as “Fast Track,” that would prevent Congress from holding hearings on the TPP or amending the TPP. There must be no end-run around the Constitution, or the right of the American people to petition the government for redress.

DEFENDING THE NEW WORLD
We know that another world is possible. We are building that world every day through local governments, cooperatives, community organizations, and publicly owned financial institutions.
Those who defend corporate capitalism also understand that another world is possible, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership is their attempt to foreclose our new world.

The TPP gives major corporations legal personhood to sue in transnational courts dominated by judges who themselves are lawyers for major corporations. Under the TPP, corporations would be able to claim that environmental, labor, financial, health and other laws cost them profits, and to extract damages from our governments – and from us as taxpayers – if they enforce those laws.

The current administration in Washington D.C. is committed to passing the TPP and to defeating America’s grassroots movement for economic democracy. The Green Shadow Cabinet is committed to defeating the TPP, and to strengthening the U.S. democracy movement. We and our allies are the many, they are the few. Let us defend our communities and our future and stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Statement of the Green Shadow Cabinet of the United States of America:

• Jill Stein, President
• Cheri Honkala, Vice President
• Patch Adams, Assistant Secretary of Health for Holistic Health
• Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, Government Transparency and Accountability, Director
• Kali Akuno, Secretary of Racial Justice
• Kris Alman, Assistant Secretary of Health for Data Privacy
• Gar Alperovitz, New Economy Advisor to the President
• Marc Armstrong, Secretary of Commerce
• Ajamu Baraka, Public Intervenor for Human Rights
• Bill Barry, Workers Rights Administration, Administrator
• Roshan Bliss, Assistant Secretary of Education for Higher Education
• Leah Bolger, Secretary of Defense
• Steve Breyman, Environmental Protection Agency, Administrator
• Mary Bricker-Jenkins, Aid to Families and Youth, Director
• Ellen Brown, Secretary of the Treasury
• Richard Bruno, Assistant Secretary of Health for Medical Education and Training
• Shahid Buttar, Civil Rights Enforcement, Director
• Lee Camp, Commissioner for the Comedic Arts
• Olveen Carrasquillo, Assistant Secretary of Health for Health Equity
• Claudia Chaufan, Assistant Secretary of Health for System Design
• Steven Chrismer, Secretary of Transportation
• David Cobb, Commission on Corporations and Democracy, Chair
• Khalilah Collins, Public Intervenor for Social Justice
• Christopher Cox, Political Ecology Advisor to the President
• Michael Crenshaw, People’s Culture Bureau, Work Progress Administration
• Maureen Cruise, Assistant Secretary of Health for Community Wellbeing
• Ronnie Cummins, Administrator, Food and Drug Administration
• Tim DeChristopher, Emergency Climate Action Coordinator
• King Downing, President’s Commission on Corrections Reform, Chair
• Mark Dunlea, White House Office of Climate and Agriculture, Director
• Steve Early, Workers Power Administration, Administrator
• Robert Fitrakis, Federal Elections Commission, Chair
• Margaret Flowers, Secretary of Health
• George Friday, Commission on Community Power, Chair
• Bruce Gagnon, Secretary of Space
• Jack Gerson, Assistant Secretary of Education for K-12
• Jim Goodman, Secretary of Agriculture
• Philip Harvey, Full Employment Council, Chair
• Howie Hawkins, Full Employment Council, Vice Chair
• Kimberly King, Secretary of Education
• Charles Komanoff, Assistant Secretary for Sustainable Urban Transportation
• Bruce Levine, Assistant Secretary of Health for Clinical Mental Health
• Vance “Head-Roc” Levy, Poet Laureate
• Ethel Long-Scott, Commission on Women’s Power, Co-Chair
• Sarah Manski, Small Business Administration, Administrator
• Ben Manski, White House Chief of Staff
• George Paz Martin, Peace Ambassador
• Gloria Mattera, Assistant Secretary of Health for Public Health Education
• Richard McIntyre, U.S. Trade Representative
• David McReynolds, Peace Advisor to the President
• Gloria Meneses Sandoval, Secretary of Immigration
• Richard Monje, Secretary of Labor
• Suren Moodliar, Global Democracy Programs, Director
• Jim Moran, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Administrator
• Carol Paris, Assistant Secretary of Health for Mental Health Systems
• Sandy Perry, Secretary of Housing
• Todd Price, Assistant Secretary of Education for Education Technology
• Jesselyn Radack, National Security and Human Rights Advisor to the President
• Jack Rasmus, Federal Reserve System, Chairman
• Michael Ratner, Division of Civil, Social & Economic Rights, Director
• Ray Rogers, International Labor Rights, Advisor
• Anna Rondon, Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs
• Lewis Rosenbaum, Public Media Administration, Administrator
• Daniel Shea, Veteran’s Affairs: Chemical Exposure
• Diljeet Singh, Assistant Secretary of Health for Women’s Health and Cancer
• Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, Bureau of Water Preservation, Director
• Robert Stone, Assistant Secretary of Health for Emergency and Palliative Care
• David Swanson, Secretary of Peace
• Sean Sweeney, Climate Change Advisor to the President
• Clifford Thornton, Drug Policy Agency, Administrator
• Brian Tokar, Director of the Office of Technology Assessment
• Bruce Trigg, Assistant Secretary of Health for Drug Policy
• Walter Tsou, Surgeon General
• Kabzuag Vaj, Commission on Women’s Power, Co-Chair
• Harvey Wasserman, Secretary of Energy
• Rich Whitney, Office of Management and Budget, Director
• Richard D. Wolff, Council of Economic Advisors, Chair
• Ann Wright, Secretary of State
• Bruce Wright, Commission on Ending Homelessness, Chair
• Stephen Zarlenga, Monetary Authority Board, Chair
• Kevin Zeese, Attorney General

Click here to read other statements of the Green Shadow Cabinet and to learn more.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Obama's Third World America 5/14/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Obama & Multi-Nationals in the Pacific 9/21/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Opposing paradigms meet in Hawaii 10/7/11
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The Keystone XL spill to come

SUBHEAD: TransCanada shuns Keystone XL Pipeline state-of-art oil spill detection technology.

By Mike Lee & Rebecca Penty on 18 June 2013 for Bloomberg -
(http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-17/keystone-xl-pipeline-shuns-high-tech-oil-spill-detectors.html)


Image above: Exxon oilspill on 3/29/13 in suburban Mayflower, Arkansas. From (http://www.businessinsider.com/mayflower-arkansas-exxon-oil-spill-2013-4?op=1).

TransCanada Corporation which says Keystone XL will be the safest pipeline ever built, isn’t planning to use infrared sensors or fiber-optic cables to detect spills along the system’s 2,000-mile (3,200-kilometer) path to Texas refineries from fields in Alberta.

Pipeline companies have been slow to adopt new leak detection technology, including infrared equipment on helicopters flying 80 miles an hour or acoustic sensors that can identify the sound of oil seeping from a pinhole-sized opening. Instead of tools that can find even the smallest leaks, TransCanada will search for spills using software-based methods and traditional flyovers and surveys.

As pipelines multiply across North America to carry booming supplies of oil and natural gas, a series of recent spills and explosions are raising concerns about the safety of the conduits, including Keystone XL, which is awaiting U.S. government approval.

“There are lots of things engineering-wise that are possible, that the industry doesn’t do,” said Carl Weimer, executive director of Pipeline Safety Trust, a fuel-transportation safety advocacy group in Bellingham, Washington. As pipeline executives say they’re changing their industry’s culture to tolerate zero incidents, companies aren’t spending on technology to catch even pinhole-sized leaks that can turn into bigger problems, Weimer said.

Though the so-called external leak detection tools have been recommended by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, the Calgary-based company says they’re impractical for the entire project. At the EPA’s request, TransCanada is studying whether to add the systems in sensitive environmental areas, Grady Semmens, a company spokesman, said in an e-mail.

Studying Leaks
Keystone XL is part of an additional 4.7 million barrels a day of new U.S. oil pipeline capacity expected to be built during the next two years, according to the Association of Oil Pipe Lines, a Washington-based industry group. About 19.2 million barrels of crude are transported each day in the U.S.

Pipelines spilled an average of 112,569 barrels per year in the U.S. from 2007 to 2012, a 3.5 percent increase from the previous five-year period, according to U.S. Transportation Department figures compiled by Bloomberg.

The department is studying leak detection as it considers new rules to improve safety. Equipment available to spot spills more quickly would have cut 75 percent off the estimated $1.7 billion toll in property damage caused by major incidents on oil lines from 2001 to 2011, consultants said in a December report prepared for the department.

Internal Detection
The figure doesn’t include cleanup costs in environmentally sensitive areas, fines, lost life and the potentially much bigger financial impact to operators related to investor concerns.

Leak-detection technology consists of internal and external systems. Much of the newest technology tends to be for external monitors that look for leaks outside the pipeline, such as the infrared sensors and fiber-optic cables.

Internal systems, most often employed by operators, rely on computer-based tools to remotely analyze flow data transmitted every few seconds by sensors along the conduit. Operators using software-based systems are alerted if pressure drops, indicating a possible leak.

Keystone XL would have to be spilling more than 12,000 barrels a day -- or 1.5 percent of its 830,000 barrel capacity - - before its currently planned internal spill-detection systems would trigger an alarm, according to the U.S. State Department, which is reviewing the proposal. In comparison, BP Plc (BP/)’s Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico was leaking at an estimated rate of about 53,000 barrels a day, according to a U.S. Interior Department report.

Leak Threshold
“You’re talking about a system that isn’t going to be able to detect a leak that’s greater than half a million gallons a day,” said Anthony Swift, a lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group in Washington.

The company’s leak detection specialist would be able to spot leaks “well below” the 1.5 percent threshold by analyzing trends in data collected over a period in time, said Vern Meier, vice president of pipeline safety and compliance at the company.

TransCanada is seeking U.S. approval for Keystone XL amid heightened regulatory scrutiny following spills such as the 5,000 barrels leaked in March by Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM)’s Pegasus line in Arkansas, and the 2010 rupture of an Enbridge Inc. (ENB) line in Marshall, Michigan. Enbridge, which spilled more than 20,000 barrels of heavy oil from Canada into a branch of the Kalamazoo River, boosted its estimate of cleanup costs to nearly $1 billion earlier this year, a figure that doesn’t include fines.

Adding Cable
Keystone XL would carry crude from the oil sands to supply U.S. Gulf Coast refineries. TransCanada requires a presidential permit to build the $5.3 billion northern portion of the line because it crosses an international border.

It would cost TransCanada an additional $705,000 to add a fiber-optic cable to the parts of Keystone XL that may affect ecologically sensitive areas, drinking water, or populated regions, according to figures compiled by Bloomberg. The line has 141 miles in high consequence areas, according to the State Department, and the cable costs about $5,000 a mile, the December Transportation Department report estimates.

“This will be the safest pipeline that has ever been built in the United States,” Russ Girling, TransCanada’s CEO, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television that aired June 2.

Among sensitive new technologies to test for leaks is a 200-pound (90-kilogram) device the size of a garbage can that’s mounted on the outside of a helicopter. The sensor, made by Synodon Inc. (SYD) in Edmonton, Canada, detects oil vapors in the infrared rays of sunlight to find leaks flowing at rates below 10 barrels a day, according to the company.

Aluminum Balls
Pipeline operators also are considering using aluminum balls that flow along the conduit with oil or gas, listening for leaks. Pure Technologies Ltd. (PUR) of Calgary, which makes the balls, says their acoustic systems can spot leaks as small as 0.03 gallons a minute.

In its original comments on a State Department assessment of Keystone XL, the EPA recommended TransCanada install some of the latest leak detection technology. In a later report, the State Department questioned the reliability of the gear for the entire length of the line, noting its high cost and variable effectiveness.

Project Complexity
“Many of the technologies out there haven’t been deployed on that scale of system with the complexities that the type of project presents,” TransCanada’s Meier said.

The Association of Oil Pipe Lines has warned that any new rules inspired by the study may force the adoption of unproven technologies. It cited flaws in the report, which it said was based on vendor claims and not operator experience.

Several external leak detection technologies produce false alarms, said John Stoody, a spokesman for the association.

“People start tuning out false positives until the one time in 100 that it’s real,” Stoody said.

Internal systems such as the one planned for Keystone XL have a spotty record catching leaks, according to the Transportation Department’s report, prepared by the engineering firm Kiefner & Associates Inc., of Worthington, Ohio. Members of the public reported 23 percent of the 197 oil and liquids pipeline leaks between January 2010 and July 2012, according to the study, compared to 17 percent identified by the pipeline companies.

No Alarm
Oil identified last week on the surface of the Trans Mountain pipeline in British Columbia was detected during maintenance work, according to operator Kinder Morgan Energy Partners LP (KMP) of Houston, the biggest U.S. pipeline company. The leak, estimated at less than 6 barrels by Kinder Morgan two days after it was discovered, was missed by the line’s internal systems.

“It likely was a very slow leak, so we didn’t have any alarms going off to suggest there was a problem,” said Andy Galarnyk, a Kinder Morgan spokesman. Galarnyk couldn’t immediately say whether external tools would have caught it earlier.

The average pipeline company would probably save as much as $1.1 million a year by using external monitors in heavily populated or environmentally sensitive “high consequence areas,” making it cost effective to install systems in those places, the Transportation Department report concluded.

Even the most expensive systems could make sense at river crossings or in towns, the study found. Liquid-sensing cables can cost as much as $50,000 a mile, or $20 million for an average 400-mile line, compared with $100,000 for an internal computer-based system.

New regulations may be needed to force operators to adopt additional tools, according to the study.

Old Pipelines
Even without the most technologically sensitive tools to detect leaks, the risk of a spill on Keystone XL will be far less than on existing pipelines that lack leak detection systems, automated valves and good quality steel and coatings, Weimer of the Pipeline Safety Trust said.

“Clearly we’ve got millions of miles of old pipelines in the ground that are riskier than these new ones they’re putting in,” Weimer said. “What they’re doing now is better than what’s been in the ground for 50 years.”

Emily Mir, Kinder Morgan’s manager of corporate communications, deferred comment on leak detection to the Association of Oil Pipe Lines.

Rule Review
Enbridge, Canada’s largest transporter of crude, is testing performance claims on new technology before considering its adoption, said Ray Philipenko, senior manager for leak detection at the company. Enbridge is building a research center in Edmonton, Alberta, that will simulate leaks on a 40-foot-long pipeline to test how well external tools, including fiber-optic cables and vapor sensing tubes, detect the oil, Philipenko said.

The Transportation Department must give Congress a one-year review period following its December report before moving forward on new rules. Leak detection is “crucial to pipeline safety,” Cynthia Quarterman, head of the department’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, said in an e-mailed statement.

Any regulations should focus on the most environmentally sensitive areas along pipelines, where spill cleanup costs are the highest, said Richard Kuprewicz, president of the consulting engineering company Accufacts Inc. in Redmond, Washington.

A billion dollars used to seem like a lot of money, Kuprewicz said. “If you have a rupture in the wrong place, you can go through that in a heartbeat.”

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The Terror Con

SUBHEAD: Snowden has threatened the profitability of Booz Allen and parent company the Carlyle Group.

By Robert Scheer on 18 June 2013 for Truth Dig -
(http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_terror_con_20130618/)


Image above: NSA Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander is a military general. From (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/03/nsa-continues-b/).

For defense contractors, the government officials who write them mega checks, and the hawks in the media who cheer them on, the name of the game is threat inflation. And no one has been better at it than the folks at Booz Allen Hamilton, the inventors of the new boondoggle called cyberwarfare.

That’s the company, under contract with the National Security Agency, that employed whistle-blower Edward Snowden, the information security engineer whose revelation of Booz Allen’s enormously profitable and pervasive spying on Americans now threatens the firm’s profitability and that of its parent hedge fund, the Carlyle Group.

[IB Edior's note: Don't forget the Carlyle group is has been controlled by George Bush senior - the ex CIA head, VP, President and father of President George W Bush who invented the term WMD. Also, the Carlyle Group owns Hawaiian Telcom - our friendly phone company.]

Booz Allen, whose top personnel served in key positions at the NSA and vice versa after the inconvenient collapse of the Cold War, has been attempting to substitute terrorist for communist as the enemy of choice. A difficult switch indeed for the military-industrial complex about which Dwight Eisenhower, the general-turned-president, had so eloquently warned us.

But just when the good times for war profiteers seemed to be forever in the past, there came 9/11 and the terrorist enemy, the gift that keeps on giving, for acts of terror always will occur in a less than perfect world, serving as an ideal excuse for squandering resources, as well as our freedoms.

Just ask New York Times columnists Thomas Friedman and Bill Keller. Rising to the defense of NSA snooping on a scale never before imagined in human history, they warn us that if there was a second 9/11-type attack, we would lose all of our civil liberties, so we should be grateful for this trade-off.

 “I believe that if there is one more 9/11—or worse, an attack involving nuclear material—it could lead to the end of the open society as we know it,” Friedman wrote in his June 11 column.

No nation in history has ever possessed such an imbalance of military superiority and the ability to ward off foreign threats without sacrificing its core values. Never has this country been as vulnerable to foreign attacks as when the founders approved our Constitution with its Fourth Amendment and other protections of individual sovereignty against an intrusive government. They did so out of the conviction that individual freedom makes us stronger rather than weaker as a nation. In short, they trusted in the essential wisdom of the people as opposed to the pundits who deride it.

Defending Friedman’s column, Keller wrote Sunday:

“Tom’s important point was that the gravest threat to our civil liberties is not the NSA but another 9/11-scale catastrophe that could leave a panicky public willing to ratchet up the security state, even beyond the war-on-terror excesses that followed the last big attack.”

So it’s the panicky public’s fault and not the ill-informed work of establishment journalists like Friedman, who led the charge to war with Iraq based on phony claims about terrorism.

Once again, Friedman has a misplaced faith in the work of the intelligence community. The NSA snooping was quite extensive before 9/11 and certainly in full force prior to the Boston Marathon attack, but did not prevent either event. Indeed, our much-vaunted spy agencies still have not come up with an explanation of how 19 hijackers, 15 from our ally Saudi Arabia, managed to legally enter this country and learn flying skills while under our government’s watch.

Nor have those intelligence agencies explained why the only three countries that recognized the Taliban government sponsors of al-Qaida were that same Saudi Arabia as well as our other friends in Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates. For information on the UAE connection, the NSA might check with its buddies at Booz Allen Hamilton.

As The New York Times reported Saturday: “When the United Arab Emirates wanted to create its own version of the National Security Agency, it turned to Booz Allen Hamilton to replicate the world’s largest and most powerful spy agency in the sands of Abu Dhabi. It was a natural choice: The chief architect of Booz Allen’s cyber strategy is Mike McConnell, who once led the NSA and pushed the United States into a new era of big data espionage. It was Mr. McConnell who won the blessing of the American intelligence agencies to bolster the Persian Gulf sheikdom, which helps track the Iranians.”

Tracking the Iranians, you say? But they’re not the enemies who attacked us on 9/11, and indeed they are Shiites, who were implacably hostile to the Sunni fanatics of al-Qaida. The reasoning makes sense only if you follow the money that the UAE can pay. “They are teaching everything,” one Arab official told The New York Times about Booz Allen’s staffers. “Data mining, web surveillance, all sorts of digital intelligence collection.”

How great. Now, it’s not just the government we elect but also those everywhere, even in desert emirates, that can mine our data.

“The NSA data mining,” Keller assures us, “is part of something much larger. On many fronts, we are adjusting to life in a surveillance state, relinquishing bits of privacy in exchange for the promise of other rewards.”

Behold McConnell. While director of national intelligence from 2007-09, he did much to inflate the threat of cyberterrorism; he then returned to the private sector and was rewarded with $4.1 million his first year back at Booz Allen, solving the problem he had hyped while heading the NSA. There’s a guy who knows how to play the game.


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Thank you Edward Snowden

SUBHEAD: Snowden's effort to unmask the secret surveillance of Americans by unaccountable agencies will reverberate. 

By Juan Wilson on 18 June 2013 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2013/06/thank-you-edward-snowden.html)


Image above: Graphic of Edward Snowden by Jonanthan Jay.


It may not seem obvious at first, but Obama is finished. He may totter on as "leader" of the apparatus of imperial government in Washington, but it will be a ghost walk through a landscape of dissolving bureaucracies. And don't mistake this for a Shakespearian tragedy.

This guy may be amiable with plenty of people skills; he may be athletic and telegenic; he may have a quick wit with a humorous delivery - but down deep he's a smarmy authoritarian. Obama's actions reveal the angst and fearfulness of the suburban elitist in an underwater McMansion. That someone who will do anything - ANYTHING - to delay foreclosure and keep the illegal immigrants tending the kitchen, garden and pool.

What is ANYTHING? In the case of Obama it was to sell us down the river as slaves for the sake of his 1% handlers. They promised him a plantation in either Paraguay or Columbia when the shit hits the fan… that is IF he can keep a lid on it until they bleed the system dry. Poor guy. He can hardly keep the wheels on the buggy as it careens down the back slope of Peak Everything.

Well screw Obama! That's exactly what Edward Snowden did when he revealed that NSA has been given the means and permission to spy on all the telephone, email and web traffic they can access - which turns out to be basically all of it. Obama may be able to extradite Snowden from Hong Kong by pressuring the Chinese, but that won't matter.

A mortal blow has been delivered to "American Exceptionalism". Namely, we find America wasn't exceptional - just another corrupt authoritarian empire that sank into mistrusting not only the world but its own people.  Snowden seems content to be "the brave martyr". One suspects he'll play the role well. We wish him well.

The Real Trouble Makers
It comes down to a very simple question. Why are there terrorists anywhere who want to destroy America? The typical answer our leaders give us is because the terrorists are filled with insane religious fervor - they are wild-eyed Islamists. They hate our freedom. The Islamist terrorists are so irrational that we have to take extraordinary efforts to thwart them. America seems willing to trade off its freedom for security. Many will tell you that they feel safer with the TSA at our airports and the NSA in our iPhones.

But another take is that we are worried that after screwing the Middle East for their cheap oil for the last 50 years those people are fed up. We have substituted "Muslim" for "Commie" in our geopolitical game. The people of the Middle East don't look at America as a beacon of freedom but as the boot of oppression.

Wouldn't you want to destroy America if you lived in Pakistan (an ally) and America flew a robot plane over your daughter's backyard wedding party and killed all the guests present with a missile? Shouldn't Americans be fearful? The world is sick of American economic manipulation and continuous war.

Who are the cowards?
It's odd that we see the pilot of the drone as a warrior - one who sits in an air-conditioned trailer on an American base near a Pizza Hut and his home; while we characterize the girl that walks into an American controlled Afghan police station and blows herself up as a coward.

We are the cowards. I agree with the old saw - if you trade freedom for safety you don't deserve either.

But is security from insane terrorists really the root of why we need a worldwide surveillance network to spy on every electronic communication in the world? I don't think so.

The reason we need the TSA and NSA peering into our most private parts is because we are frightened of the consequences of what we do in the world. People around the world resent cliches about American exceptionalism while we bully them and kill those that resist.

World powers are now lining on either side of the Shia/Sunni schism in the Middle East. As more force is applied the chances of a loss of control increases. Obama should receive no support for entering the war in Syria. It is laughable that he would bring out the old Weapons of Mass Destruction excuse. We won't fall for that crapola.

Snowden's effort to unmask the secret surveillance of Americans (as well as the rest of the world) by unaccountable agencies will reverberate.  That genie won't go back in the bottle. What is clear is that the US government sees it own citizenry as the next enemy. Instead of leading us away from the cliff, they are taking us over it while cooing in our ear. As we awake to our peril they know we'll react badly and they will have to be ready.

At least some of us may wake up in time.
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Snowden Supporters

SUBHEAD: Three former NSA employees corroborate Snowden. They all say he succeeded where they failed.

By Conor Friederdorf on 18 June 2013 for the Atlantic -
(http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/3-former-nsa-employees-praise-edward-snowden-corroborate-key-claims/276964/)


Image above: From original article.

USA Today has published an extraordinary interview with three former NSA employees who praise Edward Snowden's leaks, corroborate some of his claims, and warn about unlawful government acts.

Thomas Drake, William Binney, and J. Kirk Wiebe each protested the NSA in their own rights. "For years, the three whistle-blowers had told anyone who would listen that the NSA collects huge swaths of communications data from U.S. citizens," the newspaper reports. "They had spent decades in the top ranks of the agency, designing and managing the very data collection systems they say have been turned against Americans.

When they became convinced that fundamental constitutional rights were being violated, they complained first to their superiors, then to federal investigators, congressional oversight committees and, finally, to the news media."

In other words, they blew the whistle in the way Snowden's critics suggest he should have done. Their method didn't get through to the members of Congress who are saying, in the wake of the Snowden leak, that they had no idea what was going on. But they are nonetheless owed thanks.

And among them, they've now said all of the following:

• His disclosures did not cause grave damage to national security.

• What Snowden discovered is "material evidence of an institutional crime."

• As a system administrator, Snowden "could go on the network or go into any file or any system and change it or add to it or whatever, just to make sure -- because he would be responsible to get it back up and running if, in fact, it failed. So that meant he had access to go in and put anything. That's why he said, I think, 'I can even target the president or a judge.' If he knew their phone numbers or attributes, he could insert them into the target list which would be distributed worldwide. And then it would be collected, yeah, that's right. As a super-user, he could do that."

• "The idea that we have robust checks and balances on this is a myth."

• Congressional overseers "have no real way of seeing into what these agencies are doing. They are totally dependent on the agencies briefing them on programs, telling them what they are doing."

• Lawmakers "don't really don't understand what the NSA does and how it operates. Even when they get briefings, they still don't understand."

• Asked what Edward Snowden should expect to happen to him, one of the men, William Binney, answered, "first tortured, then maybe even rendered and tortured and then incarcerated and then tried and incarcerated or even executed." Interesting that this is what a whistleblower thinks the U.S. government will do to a citizen. The abuse of Bradley Manning worked.

• "There is no path for intelligence-community whistle-blowers who know wrong is being done. There is none. It's a toss of the coin, and the odds are you are going to be hammered."

The fact that former NSA employees have said these things doesn't automatically make them true. All have reason to identify with Snowden (though one thinks he may have crossed a line by talking about surveillance on China). What this interview does mean is that some of Snowden's allegations seem even more credible than they did when he was the only one making them.

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Paths of Folly

SUBHEAD: As the American economy dissolves these idiots will be waiting for the next iPhone app that can power the electric grid.

By James Kunstler on 17 June 2013 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/paths-of-folly/)


Image above: iPhone apps that will impress your friends. From (http://www.hackcollege.com/blog/2012/03/13/iphone-apps-that-will-improve-your-phone-and-impress-your-friends.html).

Societies periodically go insane. Fallacious memes sweep through a frightened and confused populace and bad things happen, bad choices get made. Two bad ideas in particular infect the American thought-o-sphere these days: 1) that non-cheap oil can keep all the rackets of consumerism going; 2) that we can offset all the quandaries of non-cheap oil with accounting fraud and debt creation.

These ideas present themselves in the places of greatest authority and influence. The president says “we have a hundred years of shale gas.” The Wall Street Journal says that an inflating Dow Jones index stands for a growing economy. My recent favorite came out of the increasingly demented New York Times on Saturday: Even Pessimists Feel Optimistic About the American Economy. Quoting an econ professor named Tyler Cowen from George Mason University The Times said:

The recent surge in domestic oil and gas production signals “the start of a new era of cheap energy,” he said, while less expensive online education programs could open the door to millions of people who have been priced out of more traditional academics.

That was a two-fer of stupidities since A) it ought to be self-evident that $90-a-barrel oil is not cheap oil, and B) that because of A, there’s unlikely to be lucrative employment for people who learn double-entry book-keeping on their laptops. In fact, anyone who actually learns math over the Internet must conclude that $90-a-barrel oil will crash all the  supposedly normal operations of a consumer society, including the ability of oil-and-gas companies to get the capital investment necessary for further oil production.

None of these accredited morons seems to get the basic equation between available cheap energy — e.g. oil with a high energy-return-on-investment — and capital formation — the accumulation of wealth that can be deployed to produce more wealth-producing activity. That was only possible on the way up Hubbert’s curve. 

On the way down, alas, the relationship enters a Ponzi unwind of too many claims on excessive promises to pay. The net result is a society with a lower standard of living. Personally, I think it will go way lower, and way sooner than later.

The idea that on-line education is a sovereign tonic for economic vitality is just another gloss on the inane belief that technology can take the place of energy in the equation above. Tom Friedman, grand poobah, of The New York Times Op-Ed page is the cheerleader-in-chief for that meme, but it is accepted by virtually all authorities in business and politics, and their handmaidens in the academic chairs. 

As the American economy dissolves in an acid bath of capital scarcity and grievance, these idiots will be waiting for the next iPhone app that can power the electric grid — and thus all the new iPhones streaming out of the Apple factories of China into the hot little hands of nineteen-year-olds in Michigan taking “Macroeconomics” on the Kahn Academy website.

Speaking of China, The New York Times ran another humdinger over the weekend: China’s Great Uprooting: Moving 250 Million Into Cities that illustrates how meshugga that society is. Such are the tragic sorrows of late-blooming techno-industrialism that China is doing exactly the opposite of what the future requires — namely, destroying the basis for small-scale local food production. 

But, not to put too fine a point on it, China is fucked. They are simply in the hopeless zone of population overshoot and resource scarcity. There was some loose talk in that Times story to the effect that China will offset all its problems by colonizing Africa (and, who knows, other lands with other resources), but it will be interesting to see how it goes on the slow boat back to Shanghai with all that bok choy rotting in the hold as it plies east out of Mombasa under an ever-hotter tropical sun.

Chinese leadership apparently thinks this is the way to go. Just as the Princeton-bred American economists think that we can all migrate onto the Web and live a virtual existence on virtual wealth with virtual energy. The manifold disappointments that societies around the world face as they discover the falsity of their own memes is already leading to a lot of dangerous mischief, which is to say armed conflict. There is potential for a lot worse.

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Hearing the Call

SUBHEAD: The beauty of the Great Turning is that each of us takes part in distinctive ways.

By Joann Macy on 17 June 2013 in Resilience.org-
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-06-17/hearing-the-call)


Image above: Soul of the Whole by Pat Silbert Waverly Street Gallery, Bethesda MD, USA. From original article (www.patsilbertpaintings.com).

This article is an edited excerpt from the introduction to Stories of the Great Turning, edited by Peter Reason and Melanie Newman, published by Vala Publications. This article originally appeared in Resurgence magazine, and is republished with permission from the author.

When you know where to look, you begin to see an unprecedented phenomenon now happening in this world of ours. Be they teachers in favelas, forest defenders, urban farmers, occupiers of Wall Street, designers of windmills, military resisters (the list goes on…), the fact is people from all walks of life are coming alive and coming together, impelled to create a more just and sustainable society.

In his book Blessed Unrest Paul Hawken presents this – what he calls The Movement With No Name – as the largest social movement of human history. Estimating the number of grassroots groups and nongovernmental organisations for social justice, Indigenous rights and environmental sanity, he suggests a figure of 2 million of us (as of 2007), and counting.

Each of these groups and organisations represents a yet vaster number of individuals who, in some way or another (and each uniquely in their own fashion), are hearing the call to widen the notions of their self-interest and act for the sake of life on Earth. In this defining moment, countless choices are being made, habits relinquished, friendships forged, and gateways opened to unforeseen collaborations and capacities.

These shape the stories that deserve to be told – stories of ordinary men, women and youngsters who are making changes in their minds, their lives and their communities, in order to lay the groundwork for this more just and sustainable world. These are the tales that we need to hear, and those who come after us will want them as well. For when future generations look back at this historical moment, they will see, more clearly than we can right now, just how revolutionary it is. They may well call it the time of the Great Turning.

For those of us living now it is easy to be unaware of the immensity of this transition – from an entrenched, militarised industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilisation.

Mainstream education and mainstream media do not provide the tools for comprehending such a perspective. Yet social thinkers such as Lester Brown and Donella Meadows and others recognise this transition as the third major watershed in humanity’s journey, comparable in magnitude and scope to the agricultural and industrial revolutions. This is the essential adventure of our time.

Like all true revolutions, it belongs to the people. Its inspiring stories do not star titans of industry or party politicians, military generals or media celebrities. The power of this revolution lies in the fact that it comes from people of all ages and backgrounds as they engage in actions on behalf of life itself. Their motivation represents a remarkable expansion of allegiance beyond personal or group advantage. This wider sense of identity is a moral capacity more often associated with heroes and saints; but it now manifests everywhere on a practical and workaday plane. From children restoring streams for salmon spawning, to inner-city neighbours planting community gardens, from forest defenders perched high in trees marked for illegal logging, to countless climate actions to limit greenhouse-gas emissions, an undreamt-of wave of human endeavour is under way. Each of these engagements has its own intrinsic rewards, whether its initial goal is achieved or not. And even when failing to reach the desired outcome, the gains can be invaluable in terms of all that has been learnt in the process – not only about the issue, but also about courage and co-creativity.

Still, it is easy to turn away from playing a part in the Great Turning. All of us are prey to the fear that it may be too late, and thus any effort is essentially hopeless. Any strategy we can mount seems so puny in comparison with the mighty systemic forces embedded in the military-industrial complex. The accelerating pace of destruction and contamination may already be taking us beyond those tipping points where ecological and social systems unravel irreparably. Along with the Great Turning, the Great Unravelling is happening too, and there is no way to tell how the larger story will end.

So we learn again that hardest and most rewarding of lessons: how to make friends with uncertainty; how to pour your whole passion into a project when you can’t be sure it’s going to work. How to free yourself from dependence on seeing the results of your actions. These learnings are crucial, for living systems are ever unfolding in new patterns and connections. There is no point from which to foresee with clarity the possibilities to emerge under future conditions.

Instead of any blueprint of the future, we have this moment. In lieu of a sure-fire strategy to pull off the Great Turning, we can only fashion guidelines to help us keep going as best we can, and to stay on track with a simple faith in the goodness of life. Here are five of those guidelines that have already served a number of us over the years. Try them out, and make up some of your own.

1. Come from gratitude
We have received an inestimable gift: to be alive in this wondrous, self-organising universe with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it. And how amazing it is to be accorded a human life with self-reflective consciousness that allows us to make choices, letting us opt to take part in the healing of our world.

The very scope of the Great Turning is cause for gratitude as well, for it embraces the full gamut of human experience. Its three main dimensions include actions to slow down the destruction wrought by our political economy and its wars against humanity and Nature; new structures and ways of doing things, from holding land to growing food to generating energy; and a shift in consciousness to new ways of knowing, a new paradigm of our relation to each other and to the sacred living body of Earth. These dimensions are equally essential and mutually reinforcing. There are thousands of ways to take part in the Great Turning.

2. Don’t be afraid of the dark
This is a dark time filled with suffering, as old systems and previous certainties come apart. Like living cells in a larger body, we feel the trauma of our world. It is natural and even healthy that we do, for it shows we are still vitally linked in the web of life. So don’t be afraid of the grief you may feel, or of the anger or fear: these responses arise, not from some private pathology, but from the depths of our mutual belonging. Bow to your pain for the world when it makes itself felt, and honour it as testimony to our interconnectedness.

When the Zen poet Thich Nhat Hanh was asked: “What do we most need to do to save our world?” his questioners expected him to identify the best strategies to pursue for social and environmental causes. But Thich Nhat Hanh answered: “What we most need to do is to hear within us the sounds of the Earth crying.” When we learn to hear that, we discover that our pain for the world and our love for the world are one. And we are made stronger.

3. Dare to vision
We will never bring forth what we haven’t dared to dream or learnt to imagine. For those of us dwelling in a high-tech consumer society, replete with ever proliferating electronic distractions, the imagination is the most underdeveloped, even atrophied, of our mental capacities. Yet never has its juicy, enlivening power been more desperately needed than now.

So, think of how many aspects of our current reality started out as someone’s dream. There was a time when much of America was a British colony, when women didn’t have the vote and when the slave trade was seen as essential to the economy. To change something, we need to hold the possibility that it could be different. Author and coach Stephen Covey reminds us: “All things are created twice. There’s a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation to all things.”

4. Link arms with others
Whatever it is that you’re drawn to do in the Great Turning, don’t even think of doing it alone. The hyper-individualism of our competitive industrialised culture has isolated people from each other, breeding conformity, obedience and an epidemic of loneliness. The good news of the Great Turning is that it is a team undertaking. It evolves out of countless spontaneous and synergistic interactions as people discover their common goal and their different gifts. Paul Hawken sees this amazing emergence at the grassroots level as an immune response of the living Earth to the crises now confronting us.

Many models of affinity groups and study-action have emerged in recent decades, offering methods for learning, strategising and working together. They help us uncover confidence in ourselves as well as in each other.

5. Act your age
Now is the time to clothe ourselves in our true authority. Every particle in every atom of every cell in our body goes back to the primal flaring forth of space and time. In that sense you are as old as the universe, with an age of about 14 billion years. This current body of yours has been being prepared for this moment by Earth for some 4 billion years, so you have an absolute right to step forward and act on Earth’s behalf. When you are speaking up at a city council meeting, or protecting a forest from demolition, or testifying at a hearing on nuclear waste, you are doing that not out of some personal whim or virtue, but from the full authority of your 14 billion years.

The beauty of the Great Turning is that each of us takes part in distinctive ways. Given our different circumstances and with our different dispositions and capacities, our stories are all unique. All have something fresh to reveal. All can help inspire others. And that’s why we need these stories…

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Thoughts on the Apocalypse

SUBHEAD: Industrial civilization is murdering Earth. We need to stop this culture from killing the planet. Fight for what you love!

By Derrick Jensen on 15 May 2013 for Terrain.org -
(http://blog.terrain.org/2013/05/02/thoughts-on-the-apocalypse-fight-for-what-you-love/)


Image above: Fallen bird on Midway. A message from the Gyre. Photo by Chris Jordan. From original article (http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/midway/#CF000774%2015x20).

The dominant culture is murdering the planet, and there really isn’t a prayer of stopping this murder so long as so many people continue to value this culture over life on this planet, the life it is murdering. This valuing is almost universal in this culture.

Even most mainstream environmentalists say explicitly that they’re attempting to save civilization, not the real world. For example, even someone as dedicated as Bill McKibben regularly states he wants to stop global warming to save civilization, and even someone equally dedicated like Peter Montague— who puts out the invaluable Rachel newsletter on toxics—said that pumping carbon underground for storage is a bad idea because if it leaked out all at once it could, to use his words, “disrupt civilization as we know it.” No, Peter, it could end life on earth.

Here’s another example of this valuing: what do most mainstream “solutions” to global warming have in common? They all take industrial civilization as a given, and the natural world as that which (never who) must conform to industrial civilization. That is literally insane, in terms of being out of touch with physical reality. And it will never work.

This valuing of this culture over life is even inherent in the way Terrain.org’s request for this essay was phrased: “By apocalypse, of course, I mean simply the end of life as we know it—be it the result of nuclear war, the long-term result of climate change, a post-oil world, etc.”

This definition of apocalypse makes me incredibly sad. Especially the words “of course.” When I talk about the apocalypse I don’t mean “simply the end of life as we know it,” by which was clearly meant the end of this culture (because the causes included a “post-oil world” (by which was meant a post-oil culture)).

What I mean when I talk about the apocalypse is the death of the planet. I mean the death of the salmon. I mean the death of the oceans. I mean the extirpation of 200 species per day. I mean 99 percent of native forests already having been murdered, and 99 percent of native grasslands, and so on. I mean one-quarter of all rivers no longer reaching the ocean. I mean oysters experiencing reproductive failure—which is science-speak for their babies all dying—in the ocean off the Pacific Northwest. I mean dead zones all through the oceans. I mean the collapse of migratory songbird populations. I mean the collapse of insect populations. I mean the collapse of bat populations. I mean the death of the real world.

Even when “life as we know it” is what’s killing the planet, far too many people, including far too many mainstream environmentalists, perceive the end of this culture as the real apocalypse. The real world doesn’t even enter the picture. So it’s no wonder the real world continues to be killed: it’s not nearly so important to most of the beneficiaries of this way of life as those benefits they gain from planetary murder.

How do we avoid seeing what is right in front of our eyes? Well, that’s dead easy: we simply spend more of our energy attempting to avoid facing the severity of the problems this culture is causing, than actually solving these problems.

One of the ways we avoid looking at the problems is by pretending those we are killing don’t really exist. For example, when I say this culture is killing the planet, I don’t mean it is causing, as too many people put it, the “irreparable breakdown of the Earth’s systems.” This is because I don’t believe the earth has systems. That is machine language. I believe the earth has communities. The world consists of subjects whose lives are as beautiful and precious to them as your own life is to you and mine is to me.

And these subjects live in communities as complex and vibrant as those communities with which you and I are surrounded. This understanding is crucial, because the language we use not only reflects but influences how we perceive and experience the world—and how we perceive and experience the world influences how we behave in the world. And our current behavior is abysmal, and is killing the planet.

Another way we avoid looking at the severity of the problems is by pretending that the murder of the planet isn’t really the murder of the planet, but just “the death of the planet as we know it.” That language only serves to abstract us from the horrors. Ninety percent of the large fish in the oceans are gone. There is more plastic in the oceans than phytoplankton. Reflect on this: the oceans are being killed. The oceans.

Look at it this way: if a person you really love is dying from being poisoned (like rivers and oceans and soil), or from being skinned alive (prairies), or if someone you love is being tortured to death—and picture your parent, your child, your lover, your sibling, your best friend—would you say this person is dying “as we know it”? Of course not. Yet when it comes to the real world—the world that is the source of all life—this is precisely the attitude taken by even too many environmentalists.

Picture this: You’re sitting somewhere with a friend and suddenly you hear screaming and realize your lover is being tortured in the next room. You leap up, say to your friend, “My lover is being tortured and killed. We need to stop this!” Your friend sits on his chair, puffing contemplatively on his pipe, and responds, “Does this mean the death of your lover, or just the death of your lover as we know your lover?” So you sit right back down and say, “Damn good point, Charlie. I can always count on you to help me stay rational.” A philosophical conversation ensues, one that is so interesting that after a while you no longer hear the screams.

Sometimes at talks people say to me, “Oh, the world isn’t being killed. It’s just being transformed.” That’s merely another bullshit lie people tell themselves to maintain their distance, merely another way people can justify their lack of sufficient action in the face of planetary murder.

Whenever people say this I always ask if they have a knife I can borrow. Someone in the audience gives me a knife. I walk up to the questioner and ask him (it’s almost always a male) to extend his hand. He doesn’t want to. I insist. I take his hand in mine. I hold the knife over the base of his finger. I don’t cut him, or even make the remotest gesture to, but I say, “Let’s pretend I’m going to start cutting you. I’m not going to kill you. I’m just going to transform you. I’m going to cut off this finger, and then this finger, and then this thumb, and then I’ll start on your toes, and then I’ll move to your hands, feet, arms, and your legs. But don’t worry, I won’t kill you. At some point your heart will stop beating, but that’s not a big deal: it’s not like I’m going to torture you to death or anything: it will merely be the end of your life as we know it, a transformation.”

Most people get the point.

If things are so bad, people sometimes ask, what drives your work? That’s really simple. What keeps me working is love. I love the salmon, and the lampreys, and the forest where I live, and I love the oceans, and I love the bears and slender salamanders and banana slugs. If you’re in love, you act to defend your beloved. If your beloved is threatened and you don’t do whatever it takes to defend your beloved, then what you’re feeling isn’t love.

Or sometimes I’m asked what gives me hope. The answer is that I don’t believe in hope. Hope is a longing for a future condition over which we have no agency. That’s how we use the word in everyday life: I don’t hope I eat something in a few moments—I’m just going to do it. On the other hand, the next time I get on a plane I hope it doesn’t crash: once it’s in the air I have no agency. So when people say they hope coho salmon survive, they’re saying they have no agency. I’m not interested in hope: I’m interested in doing what needs to be done.

What salmon need to survive is five things: they need for dams to be removed, for industrial logging to stop, for industrial fishing to stop, for global warming to stop (which means for the oil economy to stop), and for the oceans to not be murdered. These are daunting but doable tasks. If those things happen salmon will survive. If they don’t, they won’t.

Someone once asked me, “Do you mean I can’t hope that my brother, who has cancer, survives?” I said, “Of course you can hope your brother survives: some of that is out of your control. But if he needs to go to the hospital, you can’t stand there with car keys in your hand and say, ‘I hope you make it to the hospital.’” You just do it.

The world is being murdered. Industrial civilization is causing this murder. This is not cognitively challenging. We need to stop this culture from killing the planet. The planet is more important than this culture. It’s more important than any culture. This is by definition, because without a planet you don’t have any culture at all. We need to fight for what we love, fight harder than we have ever thought we could fight.

• Derrick Jensen is the author of many books, including Endgame, The Culture of Make Believe, A Language Older than Words, and Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet. He was named one of Utne Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World” and won the Eric Hoffer Award in 2008. He writes for Orion, Audubon, and The Sun Magazine, among many others.

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War in Gezi Park

SUBHEAD: The Turkish police no longer were trying to get people to disperse - they were torturing them.

By Brian Felson on 16 June 2013 for Boing Boing-
(http://boingboing.net/2013/06/16/from-gezi-park.html#more-236618)


Image above: A protester runs through tents covered by tear gas in Gezi park in Istanbul's Taksim square June 15, 2013. Turkish riot police stormed a central Istanbul park on Saturday firing tear gas and water cannon to evict hundreds of anti-government protesters, hours after an ultimatum from Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan. From original article - more images there.

I've been attending the Gezi Park protests since arriving in Turkey on June 6.

Thousands of people have camped at the park in Taksim Square, traditionally a gathering place for all kinds of meetings and protests, to prevent Prime Minister Erdoğan from razing the park to remove the place of assembly and erase some of the last green space in Istanbul to turn it into an Ottoman barracks shopping mall. 

On the morning of the 11th, the protesters in the park were peaceful; in Taksim Square below, they were throwing fireworks and rocks and it was being responded to with tear gas and sonic booms and water canon blasts.

By nightfall, the square was becoming filled with people coming home from work, and at 7:30PM, the police gassed the square, driving the protesters into the park. I retreated into the center of the park, at which point the police completely surrounded the park, so that nobody could leave. Then they gassed the whole park.

People were passing out, puking, crying, and nobody was able to breathe or see. The police no longer were trying to get people to disperse - they were torturing them. They even gassed the ambulances outside waiting to carry away the injured protesters.

Although I was gassed several times, the final assault was so thorough that there was nowhere to go to get breathable air. In addition to the burning in my eyes and mouth, it felt like drowning.

But the crazy thing is that even after all that, I've become addicted to going to Gezi Park. Maybe it's the sense of community and purpose there - with free food, cigarettes, music, accommodations, books, education, and healthcare.

Maybe it's the joyous, resilient mood of the Turks - who, the second the gas attacks stopped, were cheering and applauding the fact that they held their ground, even while people were gagging and vomiting and it was bleak and horrible. Maybe it's because in the protests, the biggest cultural differences and partisan conflicts are forgotten, as arch political enemies and rival soccer teams are joined together in song, arm around arm.

Maybe it's because it's a rare opportunity for genuine, protracted conversation and interaction between people from all walks of life - rather than the small, unrepresentative group of looters and thugs as Erdogan characterized, the "capulcus" came from all classes, ages, political parties, and sexual orientations.

And maybe it's that I find it surreal to be walking around yesterday's battle zone as if it were a movie or stage set. But probably the real reason I keep coming back, even after being tear gassed and hearing Erdogan's "final warning" to the protestors, is that there's probably nothing more emblematic of the human condition than to be dancing in the street with a gas mask around your neck.
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Pentagon's war against us

SUBHEAD: NSA Prism is motivated in part by fears that environmental and energy disasters could spur anti-government activism.

By Chris Hedges on 15 June 2013 for Truth Dig -
(http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/the_pentagons_preparations_for_war_against_us_20130615/)


Image above: Scene from the Terminator with drones, operated by SkyNet, hunting down the last few rebel humans in America. From (http://ascendingstarseed.wordpress.com/2011/12/11/policing-the-herd-domestic-drones-for-domestic-terrorists/).

A score of recent defense department and other official documents warn that climate change, energy shocks and economic crisis could trigger waves of civil unrest. The understanding seems to explain the proliferation of security and surveillance programs over the last decade.

The preparation makes sense from the perspective of governments (four of which—the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand—appear to have been granted access to data collected by the NSA spying program disclosed in recent weeks, as members of an international intelligence alliance known as “Five Eyes”). The world can unravel in at least three different ways. If and when it does, those in power will want the means to keep their grip. Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges has been warning us about this for a while now.

One legal military document grants extraordinary powers to intervene in a domestic “emergency” or “civil disturbance” outside of White House approval. A 2006 National Security Strategy brief warned that “Environmental destruction, whether caused by human behavior or cataclysmic mega-disasters … may overwhelm the capacity of local authorities to respond, and may even overtax national militaries, requiring a larger international response.”

Two years later, the defense department’s Army Modernization Strategy described a soon-to-arrive “era of persistent conflict” due to competition for “depleting natural resources and overseas markets” fueling “future resource wars over water, food and energy,” and predicting a resurgence of “anti-government and radical ideologies that potentially threaten government stability.”

That same year, a report by the U.S. Army’s Strategic Studies Institute warned that a series of domestic crises could initiate large-scale civil unrest. “Under the most extreme circumstances,” the report showed, Department of Defense action “might include use of military force against hostile groups inside the United States. Further, Dod would be, by necessity, an essential enabling hub for the continuity of political authority in a multi-state or nationwide civil conflict or disturbance.” Around the same time, the Pentagon began developing a force of 20,000 troops who would be on hand to respond to “domestic catastrophes” and civil unrest.

Of course there’s money in this game too. Speaking before employees of Booz Allen Hamilton, the defense contractor that formerly employed NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, Lt Col. Mark Elfendahl, then chief of the Joint and Army Concepts Division, in 2010 described preparations for fighting in the homeland as a way to legitimize the U.S. military budget.

Also in 2010, the Army’s annual Unified Quest program—a yearly conference to determine how war should be waged in the future—voiced expectations that “ecological disasters and a weak economy” would fuel migration to urban areas, increasing social tensions within the United States and between “resource-starved nations.”

The tragic irony here is that the U.S. government’s foreign and domestic policies have created and continue to create the conditions of violent unrest that both honest social critics and war officials are expecting.

Nafeez Ahmed, the Guardian contributor who deserves great credit for compiling excerpts from these documents for the public, concluded his article on the subject by saying: “The Pentagon knows that environmental, economic and other crises could provoke widespread public anger toward government and corporations in coming years. The revelations on the NSA’s global surveillance programmes are just the latest indication that as business as usual creates instability at home and abroad, and as disillusionment with the status quo escalates, Western publics are being increasingly viewed as potential enemies that must be policed by the state.”

The point is driven home in the examples of the targeting of domestic activist groups, by government and private industry in cooperation, below.

—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

The Guardian:

It is therefore not surprising that the increasing privatisation of intelligence has coincided with the proliferation of domestic surveillance operations against political activists, particularly those linked to environmental and social justice protest groups.

Department of Homeland Security documents released in April prove a “systematic effort” by the agency “to surveil and disrupt peaceful demonstrations” linked to Occupy Wall Street, according to the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF).

Similarly, FBI documents confirmed “a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector” designed to produce intelligence on behalf of “the corporate security community.” A PCJF spokesperson remarked that the documents show “federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”

In particular, domestic surveillance has systematically targeted peaceful environment activists including anti-fracking activists across the US, such as the Gas Drilling Awareness Coalition, Rising Tide North America, the People’s Oil & Gas Collaborative, and Greenpeace.

... A University of Bath study ... based on confidential sources, found that a whole range of corporations - such as McDonald’s, Nestle and the oil major Shell, “use covert methods to gather intelligence on activist groups, counter criticism of their strategies and practices, and evade accountability.”

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DOD braces for climate & energy shocks

By Nafeez Ahmed on 14 June 2013 for the Guardian - (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism)

Top secret US National Security Agency (NSA) documents disclosed by the Guardian have shocked the world with revelations of a comprehensive US-based surveillance system with direct access to Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and other tech giants. New Zealand court records suggest that data harvested by the NSA's Prism system has been fed into the Five Eyes intelligence alliance whose members also include the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

But why have Western security agencies developed such an unprecedented capacity to spy on their own domestic populations? Since the 2008 economic crash, security agencies have increasingly spied on political activists, especially environmental groups, on behalf of corporate interests. This activity is linked to the last decade of US defence planning, which has been increasingly concerned by the risk of civil unrest at home triggered by catastrophic events linked to climate change, energy shocks or economic crisis - or all three.

Just last month, unilateral changes to US military laws formally granted the Pentagon extraordinary powers to intervene in a domestic "emergency" or "civil disturbance":

"Federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the President is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances."

Other documents show that the "extraordinary emergencies" the Pentagon is worried about include a range of environmental and related disasters.

In 2006, the US National Security Strategy warned that:

"Environmental destruction, whether caused by human behavior or cataclysmic mega-disasters such as floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, or tsunamis. Problems of this scope may overwhelm the capacity of local authorities to respond, and may even overtax national militaries, requiring a larger international response."

Two years later, the Department of Defense's (DoD) Army Modernisation Strategy described the arrival of a new "era of persistent conflict" due to competition for "depleting natural resources and overseas markets" fuelling "future resource wars over water, food and energy." The report predicted a resurgence of:

"... anti-government and radical ideologies that potentially threaten government stability."

In the same year, a report by the US Army's Strategic Studies Institute warned that a series of domestic crises could provoke large-scale civil unrest. The path to "disruptive domestic shock" could include traditional threats such as deployment of WMDs, alongside "catastrophic natural and human disasters" or "pervasive public health emergencies" coinciding with "unforeseen economic collapse." Such crises could lead to "loss of functioning political and legal order" leading to "purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency...

"DoD might be forced by circumstances to put its broad resources at the disposal of civil authorities to contain and reverse violent threats to domestic tranquility. Under the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of military force against hostile groups inside the United States. Further, DoD would be, by necessity, an essential enabling hub for the continuity of political authority in a multi-state or nationwide civil conflict or disturbance."

That year, the Pentagon had begun developing a 20,000 strong troop force who would be on-hand to respond to "domestic catastrophes" and civil unrest - the programme was reportedly based on a 2005 homeland security strategy which emphasised "preparing for multiple, simultaneous mass casualty incidents."

The following year, a US Army-funded RAND Corp study called for a US force presence specifically to deal with civil unrest.

Such fears were further solidified in a detailed 2010 study by the US Joint Forces Command - designed to inform "joint concept development and experimentation throughout the Department of Defense" - setting out the US military's definitive vision for future trends and potential global threats. Climate change, the study said, would lead to increased risk of:

"... tsunamis, typhoons, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and other natural catastrophes... Furthermore, if such a catastrophe occurs within the United States itself - particularly when the nation's economy is in a fragile state or where US military bases or key civilian infrastructure are broadly affected - the damage to US security could be considerable."

The study also warned of a possible shortfall in global oil output by 2015:

"A severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity. While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions."

That year the DoD's Quadrennial Defense Review seconded such concerns, while recognising that "climate change, energy security, and economic stability are inextricably linked."

Also in 2010, the Pentagon ran war games to explore the implications of "large scale economic breakdown" in the US impacting on food supplies and other essential services, as well as how to maintain "domestic order amid civil unrest."

Speaking about the group's conclusions at giant US defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton's conference facility in Virginia, Lt Col. Mark Elfendahl - then chief of the Joint and Army Concepts Division - highlighted homeland operations as a way to legitimise the US military budget:

"An increased focus on domestic activities might be a way of justifying whatever Army force structure the country can still afford."

Two months earlier, Elfendahl explained in a DoD roundtable that future planning was needed:

"Because technology is changing so rapidly, because there's so much uncertainty in the world, both economically and politically, and because the threats are so adaptive and networked, because they live within the populations in many cases."

The 2010 exercises were part of the US Army's annual Unified Quest programme which more recently, based on expert input from across the Pentagon, has explored the prospect that "ecological disasters and a weak economy" (as the "recovery won't take root until 2020") will fuel migration to urban areas, ramping up social tensions in the US homeland as well as within and between "resource-starved nations."

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was a computer systems administrator for Booz Allen Hamilton, where he directly handled the NSA's IT systems, including the Prism surveillance system. According to Booz Allen's 2011 Annual Report, the corporation has overseen Unified Quest "for more than a decade" to help "military and civilian leaders envision the future."

The latest war games, the report reveals, focused on "detailed, realistic scenarios with hypothetical 'roads to crisis'", including "homeland operations" resulting from "a high-magnitude natural disaster" among other scenarios, in the context of:

"... converging global trends [which] may change the current security landscape and future operating environment... At the end of the two-day event, senior leaders were better prepared to understand new required capabilities and force design requirements to make homeland operations more effective."

It is therefore not surprising that the increasing privatisation of intelligence has coincided with the proliferation of domestic surveillance operations against political activists, particularly those linked to environmental and social justice protest groups.

Department of Homeland Security documents released in April prove a "systematic effort" by the agency "to surveil and disrupt peaceful demonstrations" linked to Occupy Wall Street, according to the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF).

Similarly, FBI documents confirmed "a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector" designed to produce intelligence on behalf of "the corporate security community." A PCJF spokesperson remarked that the documents show "federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America."

In particular, domestic surveillance has systematically targeted peaceful environment activists including anti-fracking activists across the US, such as the Gas Drilling Awareness Coalition, Rising Tide North America, the People's Oil & Gas Collaborative, and Greenpeace. Similar trends are at play in the UK, where the case of undercover policeman Mark Kennedy revealed the extent of the state's involvement in monitoring the environmental direct action movement.

A University of Bath study citing the Kennedy case, and based on confidential sources, found that a whole range of corporations - such as McDonald's, Nestle and the oil major Shell, "use covert methods to gather intelligence on activist groups, counter criticism of their strategies and practices, and evade accountability."

Indeed, Kennedy's case was just the tip of the iceberg - internal police documents obtained by the Guardian in 2009 revealed that environment activists had been routinely categorised as "domestic extremists" targeting "national infrastructure" as part of a wider strategy tracking protest groups and protestors.

Superintendent Steve Pearl, then head of the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit (Nectu), confirmed at that time how his unit worked with thousands of companies in the private sector. Nectu, according to Pearl, was set up by the Home Office because it was "getting really pressured by big business - pharmaceuticals in particular, and the banks." He added that environmental protestors were being brought "more on the radar." The programme continues today, despite police acknowledgements that environmentalists have not been involved in "violent acts."

The Pentagon knows that environmental, economic and other crises could provoke widespread public anger toward government and corporations in coming years. The revelations on the NSA's global surveillance programmes are just the latest indication that as business as usual creates instability at home and abroad, and as disillusionment with the status quo escalates, Western publics are being increasingly viewed as potential enemies that must be policed by the state.

• Dr Nafeez Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and author of A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It among other books. Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed

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