Obama uses national security excuse to cover up embarrassing information

President Obama’s Nixonian assault on the press is rooted in the mistaken belief that leaks of “national security” information can do great harm to the country’s security. Therefore, Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, a former District of Columbia judge who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan and vetted by the ultra-conservative Federalist Society, have brought the government’s immense surveillance capabilities on reporters for The New York Times, the Associated Press, The Smoking Gun website, Fox News, and now, according to one of its Washington reporters, CBS News.

According to insiders at the National Security Agency, WMR has been the subject of a secret grand jury probe, a National Security Letter, and subpoenas for phone and email records to determine the identities of our sources inside NSA and other U.S. intelligence agencies.

It is clear that Obama is trying to implement in the United States a British-style Official Secrets Act. In Britain, the government can issue what is known as a “D-Notice” and prohibit the publication of any information the government deems “classified” or “sensitive.” British journalists who publish classified information and those who leak such information face jail terms if found guilty. Obama, knowing that President Bill Clinton vetoed such a provision during his administration and not wanting to inflame civil libertarians any more than he already has, is creating a de facto American Official Secrets Act and “D-Notice” system through executive fiat and using the powers granted to the Justice Department pursuant to the USAPATRIOT Act.

The draconian British system of censorship by prior restraint controls on the press has always been used, in part, to prevent British government officials from being embarrassed by revelations of incompetence or illegal or immoral acts.

In fact, Obama’s Executive Order 13526, issued on December 29, 2009, bans the classification of documents to “conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error” or “prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency.” However, Obama is not following his own Executive Order. The FBI’s seizure of the phone records of Fox News’s James Rosen and those of his parents who live on Staten Island for a one-month period in 2009, as well as the phone records of at least five other Fox reporters, was to prevent the disclosure that sanctions applied against North Korea directly resulted in its plans to test fire missiles. That disclosure had nothing toi do with U.S. national security, merely that Washington’s fetish for trade sanctions were powerless against countries like North Korea. However, for the image-conscious White House, the revelation was embarrassing.

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NDAA 2014: Congress to fund Pentagon's 'War Machine'

Antiwar.com vs. the FBI

In order to give our readers some essential background on the lawsuit against the FBI we launched today [5/21/13], we are reprinting this column by Justin Raimondo originally published on August 11, 2011.

The phone rang.

It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon and it was my day off. Sitting in my rather neglected garden, as the late afternoon light sparkled golden on the tops of the plum trees, I put down my book – the 1995 edition of The Year’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois – with more than a little annoyance. I was smack dab in the middle of a short story, “Asylum,” by Katharine Kerr, a tale about a future military coup in the US, written from the point of view of a particularly earnest liberal with faintly radical leanings. The main character is a woman writer who is abroad when the generals take over, and is marked as an enemy of the state on account of her book, Christian Fascism: Its Roots and Rise. Her San Francisco office is raided and her files carted away. She gets a call from a friend before the coup plotters cut off all communications with the outside world: “It’s seven days in May – stay where you are!” She stays, but is tortured by the prospect of her daughter being in harm’s way: when communications with America are finally restored, she wrestles with the question of whether to pick up the phone and make a call that might endanger her daughter. After all, what if the Christian Fascists are listening?

The phone kept ringing. I picked it up with annoyance: it was our webmaster, Eric Garris, telling me about this – FBI documents recovered through the Freedom of Information Act that detail surveillance of Antiwar.com, the staff, and specifically yours truly.

A word about the authenticity of the documents and their provenance: they were posted on a public website, Scribd.com: their form, including the extensive redactions, the acronymic bureaucratese, and the lunk-headed cluelessness which dominates the FBI’s corporate culture, so to speak, combine to verify their authenticity.

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Adam Kokesh Denied Phone Call!

Families of Navy SEALs killed in 2011 attack blame Obama for making them a target

The families of the 17 Navy SEAL Team 6 members killed when their Chinook helicopter was downed in Afghanistan in August 2011 blame the US command and the Obama administration for the tragedy and want an official investigation into what they are calling a whitewash.

The family members, speaking at the National Press Club last Thursday, tried to reopen the book on the crash, in which a total of 38 were killed, including the SEALs who belonged to the same unit as those who carried out the raid on Osama bin Laden earlier that year. The Chinook helicopter was shot down by the Taliban.

During the event organized by Freedom Watch, founded by lawyer Larry Klayman, and StandUpAmericaUS.org, founded by retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul E. Vallely, family members and former military personnel claimed President Obama turned the SEALs group into a Taliban target after the administration revealed they had conducted the bin Laden raid. The raid on Osama’s compound was also depicted in the Academy Award nominated film Zero Dark Thirty.

In fact, the much talked about film won only one award. An industry publication remarked, “Zero Dark Thirty, about the decade-long US hunt for Osama bin Laden, has received more attention in the US Congress than it did at the Oscars on Sunday, amid political fallout over its depiction of torture and the leaking of classified intelligence leaks to the movie’s makers.”

Doug Hamburger, whose son Patrick was killed, called the incident “an ambush” that could have been prevented.

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The Psychology of Authority

The Major Sea Change in Media Discussions of Obama and Civil Liberties

Due to the controversies over the IRS and (especially) the DOJ's attack on AP's news gathering process, media outlets have suddenly decided that President Obama has a very poor record on civil liberties, transparency, press freedoms, and a whole variety of other issues on which he based his first campaign. The first two paragraphs of this Washington Post article from yesterday, expressed in tones of recent epiphany, made me laugh audibly:

"President Obama, a former constitutional law lecturer who came to office pledging renewed respect for civil liberties, is today running an administration at odds with his résumé and preelection promises. 

"The Justice Department's collection of journalists' phone records and the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative groups have challenged Obama's credibility as a champion of civil liberties - and as a president who would heal the country from damage done by his predecessor."

You don't say! The Washington Post's breaking news here is only about four years late. Back in mid-2010, ACLU executive director Anthony Romero, speaking about Obama's civil liberties record at a progressive conference, put it this way: "I'm disgusted with this president." In the spirit of optimism, one can adopt a "better-late-than-never" outlook regarding this newfound media awakening.

As a result of the last week, there is an undeniable and quite substantial sea change in how the establishment media is thinking and speaking about Obama. The ultimate purveyors of Beltway media conventional wisdom (CW), Politico's Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei, published an article yesterday headlined "DC turns on Obama", writing that "the town is turning on President Obama - and this is very bad news for this White House" and "reporters are tripping over themselves to condemn lies, bullying and shadiness in the Obama administration." The Washington Post's political reporter, Dan Balz, another CW bellwether, wrote that these controversies "reflect questions about the administration that predate the revelations of the past few days". About the AP story, Balz wrote that "no one can recall anything as far-reaching as what the Justice Department apparently did in secretly gathering information about the work of AP journalists."

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Keys to Defeating Monsanto

What No One Wants to Hear About Benghazi

Congressional hearings, White House damage control, endless op-eds, accusations, and defensive denials. Controversy over the events in Benghazi last September took center stage in Washington and elsewhere last week. However, the whole discussion is again more of a sideshow. Each side seeks to score political points instead of asking the real questions about the attack on the US facility, which resulted in the death of US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

Republicans smell a political opportunity over evidence that the Administration heavily edited initial intelligence community talking points about the attack to remove or soften anything that might reflect badly on the president or the State Department.

Are we are supposed to be shocked by such behavior? Are we supposed to forget that this kind of whitewashing of facts is standard operating procedure when it comes to the US government?

Democrats in Congress have offered the even less convincing explanation for Benghazi, that somehow the attack occurred due to Republican sponsored cuts in the security budget at facilities overseas. With a one trillion dollar military budget, it is hard to take this seriously.

It appears that the Administration scrubbed initial intelligence reports of references to extremist Islamist involvement in the attacks, preferring to craft a lie that the demonstrations were a spontaneous response to an anti-Islamic video that developed into a full-out attack on the US outpost.

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Kansas Nullifies All Federal Gun Laws!

The Basel Committee and the Global Banking Mafia

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (hereinafter – the Committee) is closely associated with supranational organisations like the Bank for International Settlements in Basel (BIS), which is often called the «club», the «headquarters» of central banks or the «Central Bank of Last Resort». The Committee’s office is situated in the BIS building. At the end of 1974, following the disequilibrium of international currencies and banking markets caused by the collapse of the Herstatt Bank in West Germany, the heads of central banks in the G10 countries established the Committee under the auspices of the BIS to develop common international rules with regard to banking supervision. The Committee formulates common standards for banking supervision and recommendations for their implementation, on the assumption that national authorised bodies (first and foremost central banks) will push them forwards in their own countries. With regard to G10, this is the group of countries that signed a general agreement on borrowing with the IMF in 1962 (Belgium, Great Britain, West Germany, Italy, Canada, the Netherlands, France, Sweden, the USA and Japan). Switzerland, which was not a member of the IMF, joined in 1964, but the name of the group remained as before. Representatives from Luxembourg were also included in the Basel Committee from the very beginning and, from 2001, the Committee has included representatives from Spain. At present, the Committee includes representatives from central banks and national authorities on banking supervision from 27 countries (the 13 countries already mentioned along with Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa and Turkey, which all joined the Committee in 2009). Over almost four decades of its activities, the Committee has published tens of documents on different areas of activity, including general issues on the organisation of supervision, capital adequacy, all kinds of risk, the corporate governance of lending and borrowing organisations and so on.

The Committee’s key area of activity is the definition of standards on capital adequacy for banks. All of the Committee’s documentation is centred around an incredibly simple ratio: equity : a bank’s capital = capital adequacy ratio.

Kabbalists of the money world are looking for this ratio’s magic number, which would guarantee the stability of the banking system. In fact, the Committee is seeking to legitimise what is a crime. In Europe, a system of so-called partial, or incomplete, coverage of obligations by banks as borrowing and lending organisations has already existed for a long time (at least since the 18th century). Figuratively speaking, this system allows banks to make money «out of thin air». For example, for every 1 dollar of lawful money that depositors place in a deposit account, banks are allowed to release 5 or 10 dollars of non-cash (credit) money by way of credit. This used to be called counterfeiting and was strictly punishable by law. Nowadays, it is called the «norm» or «principle» of banking, legalised by national laws, and in economic textbooks it is known as the «money multiplier». The principle of «partial» coverage (reservation) is «protected» by a supranational structure called the «Basel Committee on Banking Supervision», which lends the principle an appearance of respectability.

No cunning standards and formulae will remove the main effect of the «partial» coverage (reservation) of obligations – the banking crises. In the almost four decades that the Committee has existed, the world has been witness to a countless number of banking failures and crises. In order to prevent such problems, obligations need to be covered 100 percent, but then banks would be deprived of the opportunity to engage in their own «financial alchemy». There is a strict taboo on the honest and frank discussion of «partial» reservation both in central banks and the Committee: they are trying to convince the public that it is possible to invent a «magical formula» for capital adequacy so that banks can continue to make money «out of thin air» as before. This is outright deception.

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Wayne Madsen: Is Benghazi Testimony Obama's Watergate Moment?

Creating the Stasi American

The Palm Beach, Florida police program is the first of its kind in America. The Community Partners Against Terrorism (CPAT) initiative sprang out of the half-billion dollars dropped into Urban Area Security grants by the Department of Homeland Security. CPAT's founder Sheriff Ric Bradshaw explains the purpose of the new police hot line that solicits anonymous tips:

“We want people to call us if the guy down the street says he hates the government, hates the mayor, and he’s gonna shoot him. What does it hurt to have somebody knock on a door and ask, ‘Hey, is everything OK?’”

Bradshaw wants to know who mutters against “the system” and who hangs a “Don't Tread on Me” banner on a bedroom wall. A video on his website urges local citizens to report on suspicious activity such as the photographing of a bridge.

Local authorities can often perform functions that are legally forbidden to the federal DHS. In 2002, President George W. Bush introduced a domestic-spying program called Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) by which average citizens reported suspicious activity.

It especially appealed for information from workers who had access to private dwellings such as plumbers or television repairmen. TIPS was eventually abandoned due to a backlash that persistently compared the program to the domestic spy structure of the Stasi in communist East Germany.

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Obama Tells Graduates to Reject Voices Warning of Government Tyranny

The Israeli-Jihadist Alliance

It’s seems counterintuitive, to say the least. Indeed, it seems quite mad. And yet we now have all the evidence we need to point to a de facto Israeli alliance with Al Qaeda. The bombing of Damascus suburbs by Israeli jets – purportedly in order to prevent the Syrians from supplying Hezbollah with long range missiles – at precisely the moment when the Syrian “rebels” are demanding Western intervention on their behalf highlights one of the most bizarre alliances in history.

Bizarre, yes, but inexplicable? Not at all.

The Syrian government is claiming the Israelis “coordinated” their attack with the rebels, but this seems problematic – and is largely irrelevant. Yes, a rebel spokesman “blessed” the Israeli strike, but I rather doubt there’s ongoing communication between the rebel leadership and Tel Aviv. It’s simply not necessary: after all, their goals in the region are complementary, if not identical. The Sunni extremists who comprise Al Qaeda have been in the front lines in the battle against Bashar al-Assad, and are also bitterly hostile to the mullahs of Tehran, whom they consider heretics: Israel, for its part, has launched its own holy war against Iran for quite different reasons, and is eager to take out Assad: regardless of motives their goals do coincide. Both want chaos in Syria – the Israelis, in order to eliminate a longstanding thorn in their side, and the jihadists because they thrive in failed states, like Lebanon.

Why would the Israelis aid a “rebel” army made up almost exclusively of hardened jihadists who supposedly hate Israel and want to see its non-Arab inhabitants driven into the sea? For the same reason they initially nurtured Hamas – because they believe it serves their long range purposes. The reason the Israelis granted official legal status to the group that eventually morphed into one of the Jewish state’s most implacable enemies was simple: to divide the Palestinian resistance, and therefore weaken it. At the time, Fatah, the largest component of the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization, was the most effective opposition to the Israeli occupation. The Israelis thought aiding an Islamist competitor would achieve certain desired ends: the decline of the PLO’s influence, the alienation of Arab governments from the Palestinian cause, and the marginalization of that cause in Western eyes. All three goals have since been achieved.

The Israelis are assisting the Syrian jihadists for similar reasons: because it fits in rather neatly with their long-range goals. For a look at those goals, all you have to do is peruse a 1996 document prepared for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by leading neoconservatives, proposing a radical new Israeli “defense” strategy. Reading “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” is like reading a timeline of events in the Middle East for the past ten years. As I wrote in October of 2003, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War – a day when Israel bombed alleged “terrorist camps” in Syria:

“The paper, co-authored by Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser, portrayed Syria as the main enemy of Israel, but maintained the road to Damascus had to first pass through Baghdad:

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