o New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and former Times executive editor Bill Keller are both saying that the massive NSA spying program on all Americans’ communications is a needed thing because if they don’t do it, then maybe there could be another major terrorist strike on the US, and democracy would be erased in the US.

What’s wrong with this argument?

What’s wrong is that it is news organizations like the New York Times that make that kind of twisted calculus work.

When 9-11 happened, the New York Times was an enthusiastic cheerleader for the ensuing undermining of civil liberties, was an integral part of the conspiracy to convince Americans that there was a grave threat to the US posed by Al Qaeda, that Saddam Hussein was linked to Al Qaeda and that he was developing nuclear, chemical and germ weapons that could be targeted against the US, and that we needed the Constitution-gutting PATRIOT Act, as well as invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, to protect us from this supposedly existential threat.

It could well be correct that if there were another major mass-casualty terrorist attack, even a fraction of the size of the one on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, on some iconic target in the US, democracy would go down the tubes here, but the reason that could happen is because news organizations like the Times, judging by past history, would be braying for it to happen.

If the corporate news media would do their assigned "Fourth Estate" Constitutional job of questioning authority -- for example demanding to know why the FBI lied brazenly to the 9-11 commission about (for instance, the fact that it actually had found and has in its possession the four black boxes from the two planes that hit the World Trade Center towers), if the news media asked questions about why the Tsarnaev brothers are being tagged as the lone-wolf bombers of the Boston Marathon, when the two backpacks they were wearing look nothing like the exploded backpack in the FBI’s evidentiary photos, and also do not look in the surveillance photos like they have any significant weight in them -- certainly not the weight of a fully-loaded 6-liter steel pressure cooker, if the media demanded answers now about the administration’s alleged evidence claiming to prove that the Syrian government is using Sarin gas, and about a report in the British Daily Mail that a British military contracting firm’s email appears to show it was asked to provide poison gas to the Syrian rebels to stage a “Washington-approved” false flag poison gas attack to justify US military intervention in Syria -- if the US media were to do these things instead of just parrot the fear-mongering garbage spread by the Obama administration and by the war-mongers of both parties in Congress, we wouldn’t have the problem of our democracy being on the chopping block. http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1812

Its called taxes Mr Conrad its what makes for a descent society. Schools, teachers, police, fireman. Would you prefer a mad max world?

Sadly we have billions if not trillions to spy apon ourselves yet nothing for the poor, mentally ill, senile, etc etc.

Your arguments are not reality based, come to reality Mr Conrad we will welcome you.

The governments are running out of funds because the "John Gaults" are hiding their incomes in offshore tax shelters starving the system that has been so very good to them and profiting from the fascist police state the government is building with its privatized eaves dropping and phone tapping. What a disaster the west has become. Not the land of the free and home of the brave at all.

Think its funny our basic rights as americans are being crapped on? I thought it was common knowledge that in this country our private matters sacred.

Its a sad day for america when dissidents have to flee this country.

Who can defend this? its most moronic, we do have a bill of rights.

The ones who should be afraid are the ones who betrayed our laws!

dward Snowden may go down in history as one of this nation’s most important whistleblowers. He is certainly one of the bravest. The 29-year-old former technical assistant to the CIA and employee of a defense intelligence contractor has admitted to disclosing top secret documents about the National Security Agency’s massive violation of the privacy of law-abiding citizens.(Photo: Ewen MacAskill/The Guardian/Reuters)

Like Daniel Ellsberg, who disclosed the Pentagon Papers, Snowden is a man of principle. “The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to,” he told interviewers. “There is no public oversight. The result is that [NSA employees] have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to.” For example, he said, he could have accessed anyone’s e-mail, including the president’s.

This is not the first time that the American people have learned that their intelligence agencies are out of control. I revealed the military’s surveillance of the civil rights and anti-war movements in 1970. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post disclosed the Watergate burglary by White House operatives, which led Congress to created two select committees to investigate the entire intelligence community.

Among other things, the committees discovered that the National Security Agency had a huge watch-list of civil right and anti-war protesters whose phone calls it was intercepting. The FBI had bugged the hotel rooms of Martin Luther King and tried to blackmail him into committing suicide rather than accept the Nobel Peace Prize. The CIA had tried to hire the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro. President Richard M. Nixon used the Internal Revenue Service to audit the taxes of his political enemies. His aides tried to destroy Daniel Ellsberg for leaking a history of the War in Vietnam, both by prosecuting him and by burglarizing his psychiatrist’s office for embarrassing information. The FBI opened enormous amounts of first-class mail of law-abiding citizens in direct violation of the criminal law.

Since then the technology has changed. The old Hoover vacuum cleaner has been redesigned for the digital age. It is now attached to the Internet, where it secretly collects the contents of everyone’s “audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs” from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. It also siphons billions of telephone communications and Internet messages off the fiber optic cables that enter and pass through the United States. None of us has a reasonable expectation of privacy any more.

The Fourth Amendment used to require specific judicial authorization before the government could undertake a seizure. No longer, according to the secret FISA court. Secret seizures of “metadata” now precede individualized searches. Starting this fall, this information will be stored in a huge warehouse at Camp William, Utah, where it can be searched by computers whenever the military decides to re-label one of us a “person of interest,” like a reporter, a suspected leaker, or a Congressman it doesn’t like.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), claims not to be worried, but he should be. Before Watergate, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had 24 file cabinet drawers full of dirt on politicians just like Graham. Hoover let each politician know that the Bureau had found the compromising information while on some other search, but promised not to reveal it. Not surprising, Hoover’s abuses of power were not challenged until he died. New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who used to prosecute Wall Street swindlers, was driven from office when data miners at the U.S. Treasury Department leaked news that he had laundering money to pay call girls. If General David Petraeus, the CIA director, could not trust the privacy of his own e-mails, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Instead of combating “Communism,” the government now claims to be protecting us from “terrorism.” Maybe. But what it is also protecting is its ability to invade anyone’s privacy and to use that power, if it wishes, for good or ill and without supervision. From his position at NSA, Snowden says, he and his colleagues could wiretap just about anyone.

Now that the story is out, President Barack Obama “welcomes” a “conversation” about them. Baloney. The function of secrecy is to prevent conversation, not welcome it. The Obama administration is a great supporter of privacy, but only for itself.

That’s why it prosecuted former NSA executive Thomas Drake for trying, first through channels, and later through the Baltimore Sun, to stop an earlier data mining project. Operation Trailblazer was not just a gross invasion of privacy; it squandered a billion dollars, mainly on private contractors, and never worked. But rather than give Drake a medal, the government shut the program down, classified reports confirming his claims, and prosecuted him under the Espionage Act. The trumped up charges failed; he had been careful not to disclose classified information. But the prosecution saddled him with $100,000 in legal unpaid bills. Snowden can expect similar treatment but, like Bradley Manning, might actually get more popular support.

The president insists that no one is listening to our phone calls, but Snowden said he could. Of course, we now know that President George W. Bush lied us into the War in Iraq, and falsely denied authorized a massive program of warrant-less wiretapping, then a felony under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The NSA and FBI both denied their illegal wiretapping and mail opening programs in the 1950s and 1960s. In 2004, the Justice Department assured the Supreme Court that our government did not torture people, just a few hours before the torture photos from Abu Ghraib were broadcast on national television. Why should we believe such people now?

Secret government was curbed in the 1970s. President Nixon was driven from office. The NSA’s watch-list was shut down; the FBI was returned to law enforcement. Wiretapping was brought under the supervision of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Assassinations were forbidden by executive order, and the campaign to punish leakers ended when White House aides were caught trying to suborn Ellsberg’s judge. Both Houses of Congress created intelligence committees to oversee our secret agencies.

Unfortunately, these efforts at oversight have largely failed. Judge Vinson’s order to Verizon proves beyond cavil that the secret FISA court is a rubber stamp for the indiscriminate seizure of all sorts of personal records. President Obama would have us believe that all members of Congress have been properly briefed, but even Dianne Feinstein (D-Cal.), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, admits that she does not know how the data being siphoned off fiber optic cables and out the side doors of Internet servers is actually being used. Classified briefings, of course, are the perfect way to silence critics. Once briefed, however vaguely, committee members are bound to secrecy. They can’t talk about what they learned, even with members of their own staff.

Seventy percent of the federal government’s intelligence budget now goes to private contractors. Far from overseeing the agencies, members of Congress court them, hoping to obtain business for companies that contribute generously to their campaigns. House Intelligence Committee member Randy “Duke” Cunningham and CIA Executive Director Kyle Foggo both went to prison for illegally steering government contracts to the same defense contractor. Senator Feinstein was embarrassed in 2009 when one of her fundraisers invited fellow lobbyists to lunch with her and boasted -- in writing, on the invitation -- that the intelligence committee’s work would be “served up as the first course.”

Americans can no longer trust the President, Congress, or the courts to protect them, or the reporters, whistleblowers, and politicians on whom our democracy relies. Our government has been massively compromised by campaign contributions and executive secrecy.

At this stage, the only remedy is for more employees of the NSA, CIA, and FBI to undertake Thomas Drake’s kind of whistleblowing. This is what Edward Snowden has done: “I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest. There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”

No doubt the Obama administration will come after Snowden, as it did Drake. If it is going to defend our corrupt system of secrecy, it has to. But if it does, it will further discredit itself, again proving Justice Louis Brandeis’s dictum that, in politics, “sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
Christopher H. Pyle

Christopher H. Pyle teaches constitutional law and civil liberties at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author of Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics and Getting Away with Torture. In 1970, he disclosed the U.S. military’s surveillance of civilian politics and worked as a consultant to three Congressional committees, including the Church Committee.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/06/10-6

Logic will not break down the programing some people are just to far gone.

n recent weeks, we’ve learned some very disturbing truths about glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s broad-spectrum herbicide Roundup, which is generously doused on genetically engineered (GE) Roundup Ready crops.

GE crops are typically far more contaminated with glyphosate than conventional crops, courtesy of the fact that they’re engineered to withstand extremely high levels of Roundup without perishing along with the weed.

A new peer-reviewed report authored by Anthony Samsel, a retired science consultant, and a long time contributor to the Mercola.com Vital Votes Forum, and Dr. Stephanie Seneff, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), reveals how glyphosate wrecks human health.

In the interview above, Dr. Seneff summarizes the two key problems caused by glyphosate in the diet:

Nutritional deficiencies
Systemic toxicity

Their findings make the need for labelling all the more urgent, and the advice to buy certified organic all the more valid.
The Horrific Truth about Roundup

In 2009, a French court found Monsanto guilty of lying; falsely advertising itsRoundup herbicide as “biodegradable,” “environmentally friendly” and claiming it “left the soil clean.”

Mounting evidence now tells us just how false such statements are. I don’t believe that Monsanto is one of the most evil companies on the planet for nothing. The company has done absolutely nothing to improve their worldwide influence on human and environmental health.


In the video above, Jeffrey Smith, author of the bestseller Seeds of Deception,says Monsanto, during some reflective moment, must have asked “What would Darth Vader do?” Because what they’ve come up with is a way of pretending that they’re beneficial and then insinuating themselves into the food and agriculture industry, and now it turns out that what they have is very, very dangerous.

Indeed, according to Dr. Seneff, glyphosate is possibly “the most important factor in the development of multiple chronic diseases and conditions that have become prevalent in Westernized societies,” including but not limited to:
Autism Gastrointestinal diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease, chronic diarrhea, colitis and Crohn’s disease Obesity
Allergies Cardiovascular disease Depression
Cancer Infertility Alzheimer’s disease
Parkinson’s disease Multiple sclerosis ALS, and more
How Glyphosate Worsens Modern Diseases

While Monsanto insists that Roundup is as safe to humans as aspirin, Seneff and Samsel’s research tells a different story altogether. Their report, published in the journal Entropy1, argues that glyphosate residues, found in most commonly consumed foods in the Western diet courtesy of GE sugar, corn, soy and wheat, “enhance the damaging effects of other food-borne chemical residues and toxins in the environment to disrupt normal body functions and induce disease.”

Interestingly, your gut bacteria are a key component of glyphosate’s mechanism of harm.

Monsanto has steadfastly claimed that Roundup is harmless to animals and humans because the mechanism of action it uses (which allows it to kill weeds), called the shikimate pathway, is absent in all animals. However, the shikimate pathway IS present in bacteria, and that’s the key to understanding how it causes such widespread systemic harm in both humans and animals.

The bacteria in your body outnumber your cells by 10 to 1. For every cell in your body, you have 10 microbes of various kinds, and all of them have the shikimate pathway, so they will all respond to the presence of glyphosate!

Glyphosate causes extreme disruption of the microbe’s function and lifecycle. What’s worse, glyphosate preferentially affectsbeneficial bacteria, allowing pathogens to overgrow and take over. At that point, your body also has to contend with the toxins produced by the pathogens. Once the chronic inflammation sets in, you’re well on your way toward chronic and potentially debilitating disease. In the interview above, Dr. Seneff reviews a variety of chronic diseases, explaining how glyphosate contributes to each condition. So to learn more, I urge you to listen to it in its entirety. It’s quite eye-opening.

http://www.fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/monsantos-roundup-herbicide-may-be-most-important-factor-in-development-of-autism-and-other-chronic-disease/46918

Three years and it earned me free checking from Chase bank. :)

Its so hard to break into a mind so conditioned by a decade of propaganda and lies. Maybe one should go watch american Idol or a sporting game and leave politics to the adults.

I am sure this topic assaults your reality, I remember when I was a kid and found out Santa Clause was a fraud.

Clearly this student was not paying attention in Biology Class.

Revoke her diploma.

So you think its funny? How absurd.

Lets all sing together now.

Land of the free and the home of the brave.........

WORST National Anthem EVER.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3F7FeRhclM

The government really is gathering all your information.

Hackers affiliated with the Anonymous collective have leaked a US Department of Defense memo relating to the PRISM program, revealing that the National Security Agency has secretly gathered intelligence on millions of Americans for years.

The hacktivists, who have long sought complete transparency online and elsewhere, published a total of thirteen documents, one of which outlines the US government’s “NetOps Strategic Vision” for monitoring the Internet.

The documents are mostly pulled from 2008, just after when the government reportedly began using PRISM to mine servers at technology companies including Microsoft and Yahoo. An NSA slideshow published Thursday by the Guardian and the Washington Post reveals the intelligence community first gained access to Google in January of 2009 and Facebook in June of the same year.

http://rt.com/usa/anonymous-leaks-prism-nsa-docs-395/

Its a fact we signed at Nuremburg, its a fact we signed the Geneva conventions and its a fact the military operates under the Military code of Justice. Read them......

Dude you are so wrong and misinformed on so many levels its hardly worth the words. The Geneva convention and Terms of Nuremburg binds this country to certain standards and if it makes you feel better our entire government Dems amd repubs are both guilty as hell. Lets not leave out our so called media watchdogs, what a wretched joke this country has become.

That is a total fabrication I saw the video please post your link to your version love to see it..........

Enshrined in the US Army Subject Schedule No. 27-1 is "the obligation to report all violations of the law of war." At his guilty plea hearing, Manning explained that he had gone to his chain of command and asked them to investigate the "Collateral Murder" video and other "war porn," but his superiors refused. "I was disturbed by the response to injured children," Manning stated. He was also bothered by the soldiers depicted in the video who "seemed to not value human life by referring to [their targets] as 'dead bastards.' "
http://truth-out.org/news/item/16731-bradley-mannings-legal-duty-to-expose-war-crimes
We need no further proof of our mainstream media being the propaganda arm of the "government".

BS on that we the american people would never had known of these atrocities had it not been for wiki leaks and nothing was done to the savages who committed the war crimes.

Enough evidence exists to raise questions without the shameless charge of "conspiracy theorists"