Poli-sli 101: Follow$the$money

The Huffington Post  |  By Luke Johnson Posted: 07/26/2013 12:58 pm EDT  |  Updated: 07/26/2013 4:51 pm EDT

  Amid the Obama administration’s crackdown against whistleblowers, Change.gov, the 2008 website of the Obama transition team laying out the candidate’s promises, has disappeared from the internet.

The Sunlight Foundation notes that it last could be viewed on June 8, which was two days after the first revelations from Edward Snowden (who had then not yet revealed himself) about the NSA’s phone surveillance program. One of the promises Obama made on the website was on “whistleblower protections:"

Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.

The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment on why the page was deleted. The site had offered a way to compare Obama’s promises and administration actions and still can be viewed on the Wayback archive.

The page has long had a link to whitehouse.gov along with a note saying that “the transition has ended and the new administration has begun;" however, the website’s pages have recently become inaccessible from the site.

Prior to the Snowden leaks but after Pfc. Bradley Manning gave classified information to WikiLeaks, the Obama administration launched the Insider Threat program to combat leaks, in part by asking coworkers to keep a close eye on their fellow employees. The program also ordered more protections for those who use proper channels, but four national security whistleblowers have said that they became targets of Justice Department investigations after bringing concerns to the Department of Defense Inspector General.

The ‘aiding the enemy’ charge has fallen away. It was only included, it seems, to make calling journalism ‘espionage’ seem reasonable. It is not.

Bradley Manning’s alleged disclosures have exposed war crimes, sparked revolutions, and induced democratic reform. He is the quintessential whistleblower.

This is the first ever espionage conviction against a whistleblower. It is a dangerous precedent and an example of national security extremism. It is a short sighted judgment that can not be tolerated and must be reversed. It can never be that conveying true information to the public is ‘espionage’.

President Obama has initiated more espionage proceedings against whistleblowers and publishers than all previous presidents combined.

In 2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama ran on a platform that praised whistleblowing as an act of courage and patriotism. That platform has been comprehensively betrayed. His campaign document described whistleblowers as watchdogs when government abuses its authority. It was removed from the internet last week.

Throughout the proceedings there has been a conspicuous absence: the absence of any victim. The prosecution did not present evidence that – or even claim that – a single person came to harm as a result of Bradley Manning’s disclosures. The government never claimed Mr. Manning was working for a foreign power.

The only ‘victim’ was the US government’s wounded pride, but the abuse of this fine young man was never the way to restore it. Rather, the abuse of Bradley Manning has left the world with a sense of disgust at how low the Obama administration has fallen. It is not a sign of strength, but of weakness.

The judge has allowed the prosecution to substantially alter the charges after both the defense and the prosecution had rested their cases, permitted the prosecution 141 witnesses and extensive secret testimony. The government kept Bradley Manning in a cage, stripped him naked and isolated him in order to crack him, an act formally condemned by the United Nations Special Rapporteur for torture. This was never a fair trial.

From the report:

Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 162,000 in July, and the unemployment rate edged down to 7.4 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment rose in retail trade, food services and drinking places, financial activities, and wholesale trade.

Karl Denninger of Market ticker has this analysis:

Annualized, and population-corrected, we’re still in the hole… that figure is now -415,000 jobs annualized adjusted for population changes.  So no, we’re not “growing" employment — we’re stagnant.

Part-time for economic reasons workers (those who want full-time jobs but can’t find them) was flat annualized and up only slightly compared to last month.  Non-economic part-timers (by choice) was up 84,000 on the month and also up annualized.

Discouraged workers were up about 135,000 annualized.

Weekly hours were down a tenth and hourly earnings were off 2 cents.  If you look at the average weekly earnings loss ($3.09) and multiply it by the total employed (145,113,000) then divide by the average weekly earnings the imputed job loss due to hourly earnings and hour declines is 543,573, massively dwarfing the so-called “gains."

The NSA program Xkeyscore essentially makes available everything you’ve ever done on the Web — browsing history, searches, emails — at the tap of a keyboard.

Momentous change almost always begins with the courage of people taking back their own lives against the odds.

New Statesman - John Pilger - July 25th

I have known my postman for more than 20 years. Conscientious and goodhumoured, he is the embodiment of public service at its best. The other day, I asked him, “Why are you standing in front of each door like a soldier on parade?”

  “New system,” he replied. “I am no longer required simply to post the letters through the door. I have to approach every door in a certain way and put the letters through in a certain way.”

  “Why?”

  “Ask him.”

  Across the street was a solemn young man, clipboard in hand, whose job was to stalk postmen and see they abided by the new rules, no doubt in preparation for privatisation. I told the stalker my postman was admirable. His face remained flat, except for a momentary flicker of confusion.

  In Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley describes a new class conditioned to a normality that is not normal “because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does”.

  Surveillance is normal in the Age of Regression – as Edward Snowden revealed. Ubiquitous cameras are normal. Subverted freedoms are normal. Effective public dissent is now controlled by the police, whose intimidation is normal.

  The traducing of noble terms such as “democracy”, “reform”, “welfare” and “public service” is normal. Prime ministers lying openly about lobbyists and war aims is normal. The export of £4bn worth of British arms, including crowd control ammunition, to the medieval state of Saudi Arabia, where apostasy is a capital crime, is normal.

  The wilful destruction of efficient, popular public institutions such as the Royal Mail is normal. A postman is no longer a postman, going about his decent work; he is an automaton to be watched, a box to be ticked. Aldous Huxley described this regression as insane and our “perfect adjustment to that abnormal society” a sign of the madness.

  Are we “perfectly adjusted” to all of this? No, not yet.

Manning faces up to 136 years in prison .  .  .

The former intelligence analyst was convicted of 20 of 22 charges for sending hundreds of thousands of government and diplomatic secrets to WikiLeaks, but he was found not guilty of aiding the enemy, which alone could have meant life in prison without parole.

An eyewitness to the crash says that Hasting’s body was not burnt below the shoulders, which raises even more question as to why the body was cremated. Something of the same sort of cremation occurred in a mysterious shoot down of a  helicopter in Afghanistan that resulted in the deaths of 30 Americans, including Seal Team 6 members that took part in the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s residence. Infowars reports:

The Pentagon told the families that all the bodies were cremated due to the fact that they were badly burned in the crash. However, pictures have emerged that show some deceased SEALs without bad burns. “The body I saw didn’t need to be cremated,” said Rep. Chaffetz, [who is investigating the shoot down in his role as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on National Security].

Ron Paul (Source)

Oliver Stone for ACLU

Tell Congress To Act Now To End The Surveillance State

Following the revelations of the NSA scandal, Oliver Stone has made a great short video about ”the government’s gigantic surveillance machine that is eating our freedom."

In the video Stone explains why the NSA program matters for every American, and asks whether this means we control our government or they control us.

Watch it now.

Here are the key points from Edward Snowden’s statement to human rights groups at Sheremetyevo airport, as published by WikiLeaks.

• He said that his revelations of his professional “capability without any warrant to search for, seize, and read your communications, anyone’s communications, at any time” had drawn attention to “a serious violations of the law”, under the US constitution and the universal declaration of human rights. He hit back at US claims that secret court rulings legalised such surveillance, saying: “These rulings simply corrupt the most basic notion of justice – that it must be seen to be done.”

• He invoked the second world war and the crimes of the Nazis by claiming he was acting according to principles set down at the Nuremburg trials, namely that individuals have a duty to humanity over and above their duty to their country. “individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring,” he said.

• Snowden said that he had not aimed to enrich himself by passing on his secrets, and nor had he “partnered” with any foreign government to guarantee his safety.

• He said the US had violated international laws in putting pressure on other countries not to take him in, something he said represented a threat to “the basic rights shared by every person, every nation, to live free from persecution, and to seek and enjoy asylum”.

• He said nations including Russia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador had offered him asylum and said he accepted all of the offers and any others he may be given in the future. Referring specifically to Venezuela, he said his “asylee status” was now formal and said no country had a right to limit his right to take up that offer. But because of the “unlawful threat” of the US and European countries it was currently “impossible” for him to travel to Latin America to take up such an offer.