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In Latest NSA Spying Scandal, World Learns Obama Lied Again; Congress Furious it Was Spied On

In Latest NSA Spying Scandal, World Learns Obama Lied Again; Congress Furious it Was Spied On

In January 2014, during the scandalous aftermath of Edward Snowden’s NSA snooping revelations, one which revealed the US had been spying on its closest allies for years, Obama banned U.S. eavesdropping on leaders of close friends and allies and promised he would begin reining in the vast collection of Americans’ phone data in a series of limited reforms.

Below are the key highlights from his January 17, 2014 speech:

Our capabilities help protect not only our nation, but our friends and our allies, as well.  But our efforts will only be effective if ordinary citizens in other countries have confidence that the United States respects their privacy, too.  And the leaders of our close friends and allies deserve to know that if I want to know what they think about an issue, I’ll pick up the phone and call them, rather than turning to surveillance.  In other words, just as we balance security and privacy at home, our global leadership demands that we balance our security requirements against our need to maintain the trust and cooperation among people and leaders around the world.

The bottom line is that people around the world, regardless of their nationality, should know that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security, and that we take their privacy concerns into account in our policies and procedures.  This applies to foreign leaders as well.

The president lied, and the privacy concerns of “people around the world” have clearly never once been taken into account in Obama’s policies and procedures.

Just three days prior, on January 14 2014, Vermont Senator and current Democratic presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders had written an email to then NSA Chief Keith Alexander asking if the NSA has or is currently spying “on members of Congress or other American elected officials.” 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Three Fibs Premier Clark Uses to Sell LNG Dream

Three Fibs Premier Clark Uses to Sell LNG Dream

Sorry, it’s not clean. It won’t pay off. It’s not popular. Here’s why.

Why does Premier Clark keep saying LNG will bring a bonanza of jobs and revenues? Photo: Province of BC Flickr.

The more Christy Clark defends her dream of an LNG industry, the more she turns cold gas into hot air. The B.C. premier’s interview with Andrew MacLeod published last week in The Tyee is a case in point. As MacLeod pressed with many LNG-related questions, Clark resorted to three big, bloated fibs.

Fib #1: LNG is ‘clean’

While making our documentary Fractured Land about fracking in B.C., co-director Fiona Rayher and I journeyed to Cornell University to interview Dr. Robert Howarth. He is a global expert on the climate impacts of fracking.

CLARK’S SITE C INCONSISTENCIES

On the massive, taxpayer-funded Site C dam project, our premier remains where she’s always been: all over the map.

First, she told us the power was needed for the enormously energy-intensive LNG industry.

Then she creatively interpretedthe Clean Energy Act to mean that LNG plants could power themselves by burning some of their own gas, saving them money. That would produce three times the greenhouse gas emissions as would electric power. It also means her previous justification for Site C is gone.

Even BC Hydro recently admittedto the BC Utilities Commission that without powering LNG, we wouldn’t need the electricity from Site C until at least 2029.

This dam is therefore an unnecessary taxpayer-funded boondoggle of at least $9 billion that would flood or disrupt30,000 acres of some of the best farmland left in Canada, while violating First Nations’ treaty rights. — D.G.

We told him our premier has affixed the label “Cleanest Fossil Fuel on the Planet” to B.C. LNG (derived almost entirely from a massive increase in fracking in the province’s northeast).

 

Another Big Lie About Ukraine’s War

Another Big Lie About Ukraine’s War

What follows here, about the current U.S. government’s lying, is banned by all major news sites in the United States, and by most ‘alternative news’ sites, such as Common Dreams, Alternet, and Truthout (although some of those alt-news sites do issue watered-down reports from Robert Parry and a few other establishment journalists, about related matters):

Vladimir Kornilov posted to his facebook page on August 15th, a terrific question that’s getting increasing attention on other independent websites:

I wonder about this: When the army of the DNI [commonly called Ukraine’s ‘rebels’] are retired Russian military, the West immediately writes about “Russian aggression”. And if retired (believe that retired) military mercenaries from the EU are fighting on the side of the APU [commonly called the Ukrainian government], why do the same media not write about “the aggression of the European Union?” 

That’s a great question, because it laser-focuses upon a Big Lie in the Western press regarding the civil war in Ukraine: that the Russian army is itself participating in Ukraine’s civil war (not merely providing professional military advisors to a self-arisen civilian army who are protecting their own families from invasions and basically from a U.S.-sponsored ethnic cleansing campaign by an imposed Ukrainian government in Kiev, which the residents in the separatist region never even had any participation in democratically electing — and, after the man, for whom those residents had actually voted 90%+ in Ukraine’s last genuinely democratic election, was thrown out of office in a violent February 2014 U.S. coup).

The Russian armed forces are not participants in Ukraine’s U.S.-caused civil war: that’s a fact. The allegation to the contrary is a U.S.-Ukrainian government lie — nothing else.

The U.S. Government is simply trying to fool the public into believing that the Ukrainian government’s bombing that area of the former Ukraine doesn’t cause thousands of the residents there to take up arms against those invaders, and against that government — the government which calls all of these residents ‘terrorists.’

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

China Sends In Chemical Warfare Troops, Orders Tianjin Blast Site Evacuation After Toxic Sodium Cyanide Found

China Sends In Chemical Warfare Troops, Orders Tianjin Blast Site Evacuation After Toxic Sodium Cyanide Found

Four years ago, following the Sendai tsunami and resulting explosion at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, the Japanese government had just one goal: to minimize panic among the population, even if it meant blatantly lying about the resulting deadly radioactive fallout the public was exposed to. After all the top prerogative among government bureaucrats has always been to minimize social disturbance even if it means sacrificing countless individuals to a death that could have been avoided if only the government had told the truth from the beginning.

This was also the playbook followed by the Chinese government three days ago after the massive chemical plant explosion in China’s port of Tianjin where the casualty count is increasing with every passing day (85 dead at last check and rising fast), but where the real danger is that toxic gases and chemical fallout, just as dangerous and lethal as Fukushima’s beta and gamma waves, have spread in the air and water, and are jeopardizing the local population.

Initially the government did everything in its power to cover up the spread of deadly contaminants. As we reported yesterday, People’s Daily openly lied to the local population: “Authorities tasked with marine monitoring announced there were no hazardous chemicals detected in waters off the blast site in north China’s port city Tianjin on Friday.

A statement from the State Oceanic Administration (SOA) said major measurement of seawater composition did not show any anomaly compared with historical records.

Hazardous materials such as cyanide and volatile phenol were not detected, while the variety of zooplankton was not affected either, it added.

The problem is that the Chinese government long ago lost all credibility and as we reported yesterday, local residents “wondered if even the air was safe because of the smoke, still billowing hours later from vestiges of the inferno, which destroyed an industrial zone near the port. Many people wore masks.”

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Did Max Boot and Commentary Magazine Lie About Edward Snowden? You Decide.

Did Max Boot and Commentary Magazine Lie About Edward Snowden? You Decide.

In the neocon journal Commentary, Max Boot today complains that the New York Times published an op-ed by Edward Snowden. Boot’s objection rests on his accusation that the NSA whistleblower is actually a “traitor.” In objecting, Boot made these claims:

Oddly enough nowhere in his article — which is datelined Moscow — does he mention the surveillance apparatus of his host, Vladimir Putin, which far exceeds in scope anything created by any Western country. . . .That would be the same FSB that has taken Snowden into its bosom as it has previously done (in its earlier incarnation as the KGB) with previous turncoats such as Kim Philby. . . .

But of course Ed Snowden is not courageous enough, or stupid enough, to criticize the dictatorship that he has defected to. It’s much easier and safer to criticize the country he betrayed from behind the protection provided by the FSB’s thugs. The only mystery is why the Times is giving this traitor a platform.

It is literally the supreme act of projection for Max Boot to accuse anyone of lacking courage, as this particular think tank warmonger is the living, breathing personification of the unique strain of American neocon cowardice. Unlike Snowden — who sacrificed his liberty and unraveled his life in pursuit of his beliefs — the 45-year-old Boot has spent most of his adult life advocating for one war after the next, but always wanting to send his fellow citizens of his generation to die in them, while he hides in the comfort of Washington think tanks, never fighting them himself.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

More Probable Than Not

More Probable Than Not

My father was a doctor who spent his entire career in a small hospital built by the Tennessee Coal and Iron company in Fairfield, Alabama. He was an ER doc way before emergency medicine was its own thing, which meant that he saw a wide gamut of cases, from knife fights to car wrecks to heart attacks. But it also meant that he saw a lot of ordinary colds and various infectious diseases, as the emergency clinic then – as now – was the only on-demand medical facility available for people who couldn’t afford or didn’t have access to private physician practices. Now one of my father’s great joys in life was watching sports on our grainy black and white TV, miraculously upgraded to a grainy color TV when I was 12. I’m sure he spent hundreds, if not thousands, of happy hours watching sports. Unless, of course, the hapless TV commentator made the mistake of excusing the absence of, say, Larry Bird from a Celtics game by saying that Bird “had a touch of the flu” and so was too sick to play, which was guaranteed to send my father into a 10-minute tirade.

“A touch of the flu? A touch of the flu? You mean he has contracted the influenza virus? Are you out of your mind? Do you have any idea what it means to have the flu? Do you have any idea how sick you are if you have the flu? People DIE from the flu, you moron! What does that even mean … a touch of the flu? Is Larry Bird in the hospital? Because if he has influenza, you sure better get him to the hospital! I hope you’ve got a saline IV hooked up to Larry Bird’s arm right now! No, he’s not in the hospital. Do you know why? Because he has a COLD. That’s right, you idiot, he has a COLD! Not the flu!”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Seymour Hersh: Obama’s Entire Account Of bin Laden’s Death Is One Big Lie; This Is What Really Happened

Seymour Hersh: Obama’s Entire Account Of bin Laden’s Death Is One Big Lie; This Is What Really Happened

The last time famed US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh made news in the global media was with his massive, 5000-word expose from April of 2014 “The Red Line and the Rat Line” revealing the true motives behind the Syrian near-war of 2013 including what we had said from the very beginning: the very professionally created YouTube clips showing the consequences of what was said to have been an Assad poison gas attack, were nothing but a fake (subsequent reports identified the propaganda source as Rami Abdul Rahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, whose entire operation has been funded by an unidentified European country.)

Fast forward to today when in a report whose word count doubles his previous record for the London Review of Books, Hersh targets a topic near and dear to the hearts of many Americans: the story of the capture and death of Osama bin Laden. Or rather the completely false and, according to Hersh, fabricated story, one made up entirely by the US president and spoon fed for popular consumption with the aid of a Hollywood blockbuster whose entire plot line is, if Hersh is correct, one big lie as well.

In a nutshell, and one really needs to read Hersh’s magnum opus as no amount of abbreviation will do it justice, Hersh accuses Obama of not only taking credit for the al Qaeda leader’s death, but fabricating the story that resulted from what has been widely reported to have been a Navy seal incursion into bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound in Pakistan. As a result the military and intelligence communities were forced to scramble and then corroborate the president’s version of events.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

PART 15: THE ABUSE SYNDROME

PART 15: THE ABUSE SYNDROME

In answering the question in the title of this essay, the January 2015 segment — Learned Helplessness — reported on the conditioned responses of utter helplessness and hopelessness resulting from ongoing painful trauma or adversity that involves actual or perceived lack of control.

Here, in the March 2015 installment [there was no February installment, because the January piece appeared in the February newsletter], we continue Ms. Shure’s analysis with Part 15: The Abuse Syndrome.

BRUCE LEVINE: THE ABUSE SYNDROME

A dynamic that may help explain the “nothing we can do about it” reaction to the evidence that refutes the official 9/11 account is the “abuse syndrome,” as described by clinical psychologist Bruce E. Levine. To maintain control, abusive spouses, bosses, and governments shove lies, physical and emotional abuse, and injustice in their victims’ faces. When the victims continue to be afraid to exit from these relationships or fail to fight back, they get weaker, they feel humiliated by their passivity, they feel broken, and they feel shame.1

Our true nature does not harbor feelings of shame. Originating from trauma, shame is characterized by self-hatred and a fundamental sense that we are unworthy and unlovable.

Eventually, victims in a relationship marked by trauma can develop a deep-seated fear that they cannot survive without the abuser in their lives. This belief increases their feelings of helplessness.

An even more extreme form of this dynamic involves victims of captivity, who may become attached to their captors, and may even defend them. Known as the “Stockholm syndrome,” this relationship can also apply to children who are, psychologically and physically, de facto captives to abusive parents.2

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

As Stephen Lendman makes clear, the Obama regime is a congenital liar.

As Stephen Lendman makes clear, the Obama regime is a congenital liar.

It’s unprecedented in outrageous lies on Ukraine. Everything from calling US-installed Nazis democrats to phantom Russian hordes pouring across the border Wehrmacht-style.

US officials recite one Big Lie after another. Media scoundrels regurgitate  them like gospel. Mindless Americans believe whoppers anyone paying minimal attention would reject.

Wars without end persist. Millions die. Survivors suffer horrifically. Ukraine is in the eye of the storm.

It’s just a matter of time before full-scale conflict resumes. Perhaps with US combat troops involved and/or shock and awe terror-bombing. Maybe setting the entire continent ablaze.

Megalomania and delusions of grandeur define US ambitions. George Clemenceau once said “(w)ar is too important to be left to the generals.” He should have added rogue politicians like Obama and neocons infesting his administration.

In his State of the Union address, Obama shamelessly accused Russia of “aggression” in Ukraine.

Earlier he said it’s “provable” that “Russian combat forces and tanks” moved into Ukraine.

“(T)hese are the facts. They are provable. They’re not subject to dispute.” No proof whatever was presented. Not earlier. Not now. None exists.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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