So true.

The issue is not what Snowden did but what what he exposed and any thinking person should know this.

This is a modern fascist state we live in. This country is a fraud.

In a few days, we will all have an opportunity to peacefully inflict a major psychological blow on the rapidly coalescing police state by the simple but powerful act of refusing to play along with the absurd pantomime on the 4th of July that we live in an even nominally free country – one with the rule of law, an operative Constitution and respect for individual rights.




There is no longer any meaningful limit to the power of the government over our lives. Illustration: Wikimedia Commons

In a few days, we will all have an opportunity to peacefully inflict a major psychological blow on the rapidly coalescing police state by the simple but powerful act of refusing to play along with the absurd pantomime on the 4th of July that we live in an even nominally free country – one with the rule of law, an operative Constitution and respect for individual rights.

One that isn’t a thugocracy.

We can turn our backs on the flag. Decline to participate when urged to cheer and sing. No fireworks. No barbeques.

We can sit down – and bow our heads.

We can mention the unmentionable: That there is no longer any meaningful limit to the power of the government over our lives. No line beyond which it may not tread. That it lies, spies and tyrannizes.

We can admit to ourselves the shoddy – and frightening – reality bubbling up all around us.

By so doing, we can shatter the illusion that this government operates with anything remotely approximating our consent.

This is absolutely essential. The 4th of July pantomime requires that we deny the obvious – that we instead pretend we’re free people living in a free country; one in which the government is accountable to the people, one in which the government is limited by law. One in which people can’t simply be dragooned into prisons without due process, held incommunicado, tortured. A country with a president who doesn’t have kill lists – or use the instruments of state power to punish and intimidate his political opponents. One in which citizens must be suspected of a crime before their personal correspondence is filched through and recorded for later use against them. One in which a traveler is free from arbitrary and random searches of his person and effects.

One in which the attorney general of the United States isn’t able to get away with providing guns to gangs or brazenly lie about his use of the power of his office to go after political “enemies” rather than pursue justice.
http://rinf.com/alt-news/breaking-news/turn-your-back-this-fourth-of-july/46460/

Mr Conrad I am surprised you would post something negative about Snowden after all you are the one promoting Atlas Shrugged and getting government off our backs, how about they get out of our Emails and off our phones?

he espionage charges against Edward Snowden for informing the American people and the world that the NSA has been conducting the most massive spying operation in history are completely baseless and absurd.


Snowden is not revealing information that places the national security of the nation at stake but information revealing the NSA has instead been tracking enemies of the national security state.

Those who seem to be the real targets of this surveillance program include veterans, Constitutionalists, NRA members, 9/11 Truthers, Ron Paul supporters, and any one else who might have both the courage, the integrity and the ability to resist the imposition of a new military police state under DHS. The latest figures about the “Main Core” list of political dissidents stands at around 8,000,000 today.

No domestic terrorist threat

We know from a report released by a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Intelligence on 3 October 2012 that, after surveying 680 “fusion center” reports gathered from 2009-2010, it had discovered that there were no indications of any terrorist activity: NONE. ZILCH. NADA. NOT ONE! Yet this astounding data has yet to be broadcast or published by ABC, NBC, CBS, or CNN.

This sample, which was obtained under conditions that insured if any domestic terrorist activity had been taking place it would have been revealed, supports the statistical extrapolation that domestic terrorist activity in the United States is virtually non-existent.

It also explains why DHS and the FBI have had to fabricate phony events such as those at Sandy Hook and the Boston bombing, which were staged.

Unwarranted justifications

Even the claim by General Alexander, the head of the NSA, that this program had foiled 50 terrorist plots appears to be hokum. Ron Paul, for example, explained that it was an ad hoc exaggeration and that it included some 40 trivial events that were alleged to have occurred not in the United States but abroad and a story of an attempt to blow up Wall Street that has all the signs of another FBI fabricated event.

So the existence of a bona-find domestic terrorist threat appears to be a cover-story to justify the most massive spying ever undertaking using enormous computer capabilities to accumulate information on our emails, our phone calls, our financial transactions and even (no doubt) our medical records. They want to know everything there is to know about each and every one of us to promote their own agenda.

DHS preparing for civil war

Everyone must know by now that DHS has acquired 2 billion rounds of .40 caliber hollow-point ammunition, which is not ever permissible in combat under the Hague Convention of 1899.

It has also obtained 2,700 light tanks of the kind deployed in Boston (in violation of Posse Comitatus) and 7,000 assault weapons (of the kind that gun control legislation has been proposed to ban). They are preparing for war.

DHS has even made special arrangements with funeral homes and mortuaries to handle “an excess of casualties” should hospitals and emergency care facilities be overwhelmed.

This can only be because the government is planning to take out or otherwise “neutralize” the enemies of the state that are being identified by means of its massive surveillance program, which Edward Snowden has revealed to us all.


(1) Violation of the 4th amendment

The first problem with this program is that blatantly violates the 4th amendment’s guarantee to freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures and a history of lower court decisions decreeing the right of citizens to privacy.

Rand Paul has spoken out eloquently about this and Snowden appears to have secret FISA court decisions that rule against the legality of the program that Obama is trying to defend.

Most Americans and others worldwide naively assume that the NSA scandal represents an excess of zeal in attempting to track down domestic terrorists who want to attack targets in America.


What they do not appreciate is that this has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with the national security state. They are not the same. From the perspective of DHS, veterans are potential terrorists.

(2) Potential for blackmail and manipulation

Those who say, “I have nothing to hide”, are being extremely naïve, because this surveillance program is complete. It was not designated as “Total Information Awareness” for nothing when first introduced by Admiral Poindexter.

The public outcry led to its re-designation as “Terrorist Information Awareness”, but that did not mean that anything had changed. The NSA wants to know everything about everyone so it can selectively use the information to control or modify our actions.

The use for the purpose of political blackmail ought to be obvious to anyone who knows, for example, that J. Edgar Hoover maintained sex dossiers on the members of Congress, while the Mafia kept one on him.

Relationships with girlfriends and mistresses, watching porn or having had an abortion are illustrations of the kinds of information that could be used to manipulate Senators, Presidents or the Courts.

(3) Surveillance programs privatized

Practically no one in the mass media has observed that Snowden had access to these records because he was working for a private firm, Booz Allen, which gave him opportunities to obtain data that a normal government program would not have allowed.

And most of our security and surveillance programs are run by Israeli companies, which is one of the mechanisms by which it controls our leaders.
When the US Senate voted 99-0 to support Israel should it decide to attack Iran in its own self-defense without adding that that would have to be in accordance with international law, it thereby violated not only the UN Charter but the US Constitution, which grants treaties, such as ours with the UN, the same status under the Constitution as the Constitution itself. It was a completely unjustifiable act given that Iran has no nuclear weapons program. But it was also an act of treason.



Real traitors

When Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) declares that the revelations by Edward Snowden are “not going to play out well for the national security interests of the United States”, therefore, she is not talking about the interests of the American people, who are entitled to have their privacy preserved and to be safe-guarded from blackmail and embarrassment. There is no legitimate national security interest than could not be better served by traditional procedures with warrants.

When Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA), Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), and (the usual suspects) Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham condemn Snowden for treason, they themselves are the ones who are violating the Constitution, their oaths of office and betraying the American people.

Edward Snowden is an American and international hero for speaking out against tyranny and the conversion of America into a fascist state. He deserves commendation, not prosecution. http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/06/25/310764/edward-snowden-an-international-hero/

If you put a label on genetically engineered food you might as well put a skull and crossbones on it." -- Norman Braksick, president of Asgrow Seed Co., a subsidiary of Monsanto, quoted in the Kansas City Star, March 7, 1994

"Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA's job." -- Phil Angell, Monsanto's director of corporate communications, quoted in the New York Times, October 25, 1998
http://www.alternet.org/story/154951/millions_against_monsanto:_the_food_fight_of_our_lives

That is exactly what happened and when the congressman who voted for it lose office they will work for them and be able to afford organic foods or have some peasant grow food for them......

No you dont because they are not even labled.

Wretched country we live in our government of war criminals and enablers who get exposed by whistleblowers are the same ones who can call him a "traiter"

Our subservient lapdog media is playing right along.

How can anyone forget the Bush years....while the real left was howling bout the patriot act and its effects on our way of life the republicans claimed "Bush kept us safe" Lets face it our elected officials do not represent anyone except the 1% they do not even care if they do not get re elected they will just go work for the corporations they have been writing laws for.

That's how our system works pathetic isn't it?

What? The freaking conservatives were the cheerleaders for the patriot act and followed like little sheep and would never even consider criticising Bush/Cheney now they pretend outrage.

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.