My gratitude belongs to all of those who have reached out to their friends and family to explain why suspicionless surveillance matters. It belongs to the man in a mask on the street on a hot day and the women with a sign and an umbrella in the rain, it belongs to the young people in college with a civil liberty sticker on their laptop, and the kid in the back of a class in high school making memes. All of these people accept that change begins with a single voice and spoke one message to the world: governments must be accountable to us for the decisions that they make. Decisions regarding the kind of world we will live in. What kind of rights and freedoms individuals will enjoy are the domain of the public, not the government in the dark.
But that's exactly how corrupted politicians, such as Senator Dianne Feinstein, would prefer the public be left: In the dark.
Glenn Greenwald (Guardian) reports:
The Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday held a hearing, ostensibly to investigate various issues raised about the NSA's activities. What the hearing primarily achieved instead was to underscore what a farce the notion of Congressional oversight over the NSA is.
In particular, the current chair of the Senate Committee created in the mid-1970s to oversee the intelligence community just so happens to be one of the nation's most steadfast and blind loyalists of and apologists for the National Security State: Dianne Feinstein. For years she has abused her position to shield and defend the NSA and related agencies rather than provide any meaningful oversight over it, which is a primary reason why it has grown into such an out-of-control and totally unaccountable behemoth.
Underscoring the purpose of yesterday's hearing (and the purpose of Feinstein's Committee more broadly): the witnesses the Committee first heard from were all Obama officials - Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander, Deputy Attorney James Cole - who vehemently defended every aspect of the NSA. At the conclusion of their testimony, Feinstein announced that it was very, very important to hear from the two non-governmental witnesses the Committee had invited: virulent NSA defender Ben Wittes of the Brooking Institution and virulent NSA defender Timothy Edgar, a former Obama national security official. Hearing only from dedicated NSA apologists as witnesses: that's "oversight" for Dianne Feinstein and her oversight Committee.
Dianne Feinstein is not just corrupt, she's senile. She's the oldest member of the US Senate -- so old that they were still making and showing silent films when she was born. She needs to retire. Her refusal to do so -- understandable, her daughter doesn't care for her and would her husband stay were it not for the contacts she steers his way? -- is the best argument for a mandatory retirement or for term limits.
If she survives her term (there are rumors of health problems), she'll be 85 at the end of it. At 80, we wouldn't trust her behind the wheel, but we're trusting this corrupt politician, who barely understands what's going on, with whether or not our rights should be trampled?
The press is a joke. We'll note Seymour Hersh in a second calling it out. But there are articles all over the news cycle about NSA workers exposed for using their jobs to spy on others. This isn't love. And the idiots who keep promoting it as such justify abuse -- usually abuse of women. One NSA-er in the 'love' story used his job to look up the e-mails of an ex-girlfriend. That's stalker, not love. Don't confuse the two. The difference can be very deadly for women.
That the press doesn't grasp that, that they're too busy filing with one hand while jerking off with the other to grasp the dangerous message they are broadcasting and reinforcing goes the vast immaturity of journalist and the failure of journalism.
They'd rather be 'cute' than actually report.
They'd rather waste everyone's time with crap, then get honest.
Lisa O'Carroll (Guardian) reports Seymour Hersh's take on
The Obama administration lies systematically, he claims, yet none of the leviathans of American media, the TV networks or big print titles, challenge him.
"It's pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama]," he declares in an interview with the Guardian.
"It used to be when you were in a situation when something very dramatic happened, the president and the minions around the president had control of the narrative, you would pretty much know they would do the best they could to tell the story straight. Now that doesn't happen any more. Now they take advantage of something like that and they work out how to re-elect the president.
[. . .]
Hersh returns to US president Barack Obama. He has said before that the confidence of the US press to challenge the US government collapsed post 9/11, but he is adamant that Obama is worse than Bush.
"Do you think Obama's been judged by any rational standards? Has Guantanamo closed? Is a war over? Is anyone paying any attention to Iraq? Is he seriously talking about going into Syria? We are not doing so well in the 80 wars we are in right now, what the hell does he want to go into another one for. What's going on [with journalists]?" he asks.
This week an animated program showed more guts than most news outlets as Cartman took on the illegal spying in this week's SouthPark :
Cartman: I'm telling you guys, the government thinks they can do whatever they want and we don't have any privacy anymore. Just between you and me, I think people are too stupid to see what this is all leading to. Did you guys read 1984? I didn't read it either but I saw the puppet show version at Casa Bonita.
James Hibberd (Entertainment Weekly) notes:
South Park. It’s the 17th season. And yet Wednesday night’s premiere delivered the animated comedy’s biggest rating in years.
The Comedy Central hit came back to 4.3 million viewers across three telecasts, with the first airing delivering the most viewers for the show since 2011 and the highest young male demo ratings since 2010.
The following community sites -- plus Jody Watley, Ms. magazine's blog, NPR's music, Antiwar.com and Cindy Sheehan -- updated:
We'll close with this from David Swanson's "College Protests Against Absence of War Led by Professors" (War Is A Crime):
Today college professors lead teach-ins to protest the absence of an all-out U.S. war on Syria. Back then, the public and the government trailed behind the activists. Now the public has grown enlightened, and in a significant but limited way won over the government, blocking the missile strikes, but it's not just the U.S. President who looks mad enough to spit over the casus belli interruptus. Professors are pissed.
The University of Virginia's law school has another law school next door belonging to the U.S. Army. The University has built a research "park" next door to the Army's "Ground Intelligence Center." State funds are drying up, and the Pentagon's tap has been left all the way open. This Central Virginian military industrial academic complex is where Washington finally had to turn to find anyone willing to pretend the famous aluminum tubes in Iraq might be for scary, scary nukes. In defense of that record, this week is Iraq War Beautification Week at the University of Virginia's Miller Center, always a gung-ho proponent of militarism.
Much of this is expected and typical of U.S. academia these days. But the promotions of attacks on Syria have become slicker and more insidious. Here's an announcement of an event held on Thursday:
Teach-In on Syria & Fundraiser for Refugees
Thursday, Sept 26, 6:00pm - 7:00pm
University of Virginia: Nau 101
Moderator: Joshua M. White, History
Panelists: Ahmed H. al-Rahim, Religious Studies, "Islamist Ideologies in Syria"
Hanadi al-Samman, MESALC, "The Syrian Revolution and the Plight of Refugees Today"
Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl, Politics, "Civil War in Syria"
Elizabeth Thompson, History, "Religion and War since 1913"
David Waldner, Politics, "Syria, Before: Dictatorship and the Growth of Public Opposition to the Regime"
And a film presentation on the refugee experience
Co-sponsored by the Arab Student Organization
This announcement doesn't advertise a pro-war event aimed at promoting the deaths of large numbers of people. Peace groups sent around this announcement. I sent it around. I attended. And here's what happened:
Thompson spoke well about World War I and sat silently as her colleagues promoted a new war as barbaric as what she described from a hundred years earlier.
Waldner described the early, non-violent Arab Spring in Syria, breaking into tears, and then sat silently as his colleagues pushed for greater violence, using his stories of early nonviolence to justify it. (Somehow the opposite never happens: we never have to justify nonviolent activism on the grounds that its participants once killed a lot of people.)
The other panelists demanded more weapons for Syrian rebels, more U.S. military involvement, more war, and the violent overthrow of the government.
Students sat there silently. Professors in the audience who say they oppose war sat there silently and told each other afterwards that their complaints about what just happened should remain confidential. It wouldn't be polite to speak up.
I spoke up at the event. I questioned the panelists' fantasies about the glory of violence, their willingness to see many more people die in order to overthrow a government that would not thereby be replaced with something better.
The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
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entertainment weekly
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