It looks like the Obama administration has gone into full-court press mode to lay the groundwork for taking military action in Syria. The ostensible reason is the allegation that the Syrian government used chemical weapons, a charge that enables the US to preach sanctimoniously of the evil of such an action, conveniently ignoring the many times in the recent past when it was the US that used, or condoned the use, of chemical weapons against civilians on a massive scale. [Read more…]

As the Obama administration and congress and the media in the US get all sanctimonious about the allegations of chemical weapons use in Syria as a prelude to ramping up fervor for a bombing campaign (today’s rationale as the equivalent to Iraq’s WMD), Foreign Policy magazine comes out with an exclusive report on how it was the CIA that facilitated Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons back in the 1980s. [Read more…]

The editor of The Guardian Alan Rusbridger revealed that on July 20, an extraordinary event took place in his newspaper’s London offices. After a series of increasingly threatening demands from the British government to hand over the materials that Edward Snowden had given them, they arrived at an agreement that in return for the government not taking legal action to stop further publication of the materials, which under the UK’s legal system could have held up the process, the editors would agree to physically destroy the computers and other hardware that contained the information, although they pointed out that in this electronic age, such an action was purely symbolic since copies existed in other countries. [Read more…]

Today the German news magazine Der Spiegel has released more information based on NSA revelation by Edward Snowden that the US has been systematically spying on UN governments and delegations.

Der Spiegel said the European Union and the U.N.’s Vienna-based nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), were among those targeted by U.S. intelligence agents. [Read more…]

I have written before of how one failing of our politics is that it focuses more on how we feel about the people who are on the side of the issues, and less on the issues themselves. Here is another example of that phenomenon, with a contributor to the liberal website Balloon-Juice smacking down Noam Chomsky. [Read more…]

More revelations have emerged that despite the NSA’s claims of strict safeguards to prevent abuse of its spying capabilities, the it systematically violated its pown privacy requirements in thousands of cases and committed even more illegal acts, with a judge ruling back in 2011 that the NSA had also been deliberately misleading the courts about what it has been doing. What a surprise! This information emerged as a result of the declassification of some documents in the wake of the uproar over what the Snowden revelations told us about the government spying on its own citizens. [Read more…]