America in the eye of Sauron

In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the great good wizard Saruman becomes slowly corrupted by a malign influence named Sauron. Hoping to look into the future, the distance and the past he gazes into a magical crystal ball called a palantir. He finds Sauron's great unblinking eye looking back at him, bending his will, subverting him, causing him to both compete with Sauron and become just like him. He slowly breeds foul creatures and converts his citadel of Isengard into a replica of the great furnace factory of death that is Sauron's own seat of power at Mount Doom.

The Obama administration's modern day flaming eye stares at us in part through its own crystal ball called PRISM, which appears to be a data integration product made by Palantir Technologies, a secret cybersecurity firm that got its start up funding from the CIA.

Through the looking (Google) glass

Mere hours after the revelation by the Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian.uk that Verizon had been handing over data on all its domestic subscribers to secret state police forces in the United States, an even more chilling story on domestic spying was broken. Mirroring the long term coordination between Bletchly Park and Fort Meade, the Washington Post and the Guardian released another story about domestic spying complete with classified documents confirming its existence.

The story detailed how the NSA, with the long term cooperation of the some largest tech giants, had built a database comprising the private internet communications of virtually everyone in America. These communications, including emails, videos, pictures, Skype conversations, Facebook likes, and a list of everyone’s Facebook friends has been slowly assembled and cataloged, to be reviewed as needed with the concurrence of a secret court based on an individual secret policeman's affirmation of a “reasonable suspicion.”

Syria: An awakening for the political Left

As the brutality in Syria begins to spread throughout the region, the United States can no longer afford to choose the time at which it confronts this crisis. The time is now. Bashar-al-Assad’s regime is committing intolerable war crimes against the Syrian people, who are demanding a long overdue change in power. Spilling into its bordering countries of Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, and Jordan, the violence in Syria exhausted at the expense of many innocent people deserves an informed discussion at the very least.

The Syrian struggle, by and large, boils down to a religious dispute. The divide exists within the ranks of Islam, and culminates in a separation between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Mohammed founded Islam in the 7th Century and installed the first Islamic state, known as a Caliphate, in 622. A theocracy by definition, that first Islamic state came to be in Medina, which is located in present-day western Saudi Arabia. According to Sunnis, the first four Caliphs (Mohammed’s successors) were legitimate religious leaders. Further, Sunnis considered these Caliphs’ heirs to be lawful.

Real law abiding patriotic cell phone subscribers tell Uncle Sam what they had for lunch

The Guardian.uk recently released a classified court order [pdf] detailing U.S. Justice Department instructions to Verizon Wireless to release information on their entire domestic customer base. While the actual recordings of calls were not released under this order, the government acquired data that includes who called whom, how long they spoke for, and up to the minute location data on every single subscriber.

It is not known if the veteran reporter Glenn Greenwald or editors at the Guardian will be facing indictment in the United States for releasing the full text of the classified order. It is also unknown if the release would have been permitted under the new secret rules now being developed by Eric Holder and cooperative, patriotic news organizations.

The United States government recently named a reporter at Fox News as an unindicted co-conspirator in a leaking case with much less sweeping implications. The warrant obtained granted the FBI access to virtually all his private communications.

Bradley Manning Is Guilty of “Aiding the Enemy” -- If the Enemy Is Democracy

Of all the charges against Bradley Manning, the most pernicious -- and revealing -- is "aiding the enemy."

A blogger at _The New Yorker_, Amy Davidson, raised a pair of big questions that now loom over the courtroom at Fort Meade and over the entire country:

* "Would it aid the enemy, for example, to expose war crimes committed by American forces or lies told by the American government?"

* "In that case, who is aiding the enemy -- the whistleblower or the perpetrators themselves?"

When the deceptive operation of the warfare state can't stand the light of day, truth-tellers are a constant hazard. And culpability must stay turned on its head.

That's why accountability was upside-down when the U.S. Army prosecutor laid out the government’s case against Bradley Manning in an opening statement: "This is a case about a soldier who systematically harvested hundreds of thousands of classified documents and dumped them onto the Internet, into the hands of the enemy -- material he knew, based on his training, would put the lives of fellow soldiers at risk."

The Lever of Social Action

"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world."

I think Archimedes was serious. I know _we_ need to be. Now is the time to choose our future, as the Earth Charter declares. This means thinking big: embracing a vision so enormous it overflows our sense of the possible. For instance:

"Beginning with even just a small group united behind a shared vision of how to end war by dismantling the war machine, it will be possible to rally the global community to the vision of a future in which war is no longer something we accept." So Judith Hand wrote recently at the blog A Future Without War [2].

"I believe," she went on, "the world is actually yearning for such a movement to begin. I also believe that when it does, we will move amazingly swiftly to achieve a worldview shift of epic, stunning, historical magnitude."

San Onofre is dead and so is nuclear power

From his California beach house at San Clemente, Richard Nixon once watched three reactors rise at nearby San Onofre. As of June 7, 2013, all three are permanently shut.

It’s a monumental victory for grassroots activism. it marks an epic transition in how we get our energy.

In the thick of the 1970s Arab oil embargo, Nixon said there’d be 1000 such reactors in the US by the year 2000.

As of today, there are 100.

Four have shut here this year. Citizen activism has put the "nuclear renaissance" into full retreat.

Just two of 54 reactors now operate in Japan, where Fukushima has joined Chernobyl and Three Mile Island in permanently scarring us all.

Germany is shutting its entire fleet and switching to renewables. France, once the poster child for the global reactor industry, is following suit. South Korea has just shut three due to fraudulent safety procedures. Massive demonstrations rage against reactors being built in India. Only the Koreans, Chinese and Russians remain at all serious about pushing ahead with this tragic technology.

Stop spying on Americans

Recent news stories have revealed the breathtaking scope of President Obama's indiscriminate spying on American citizens who aren't suspected of any wrongdoing. The government has been using data from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple, to spy Americans.

There is something fundamentally un-American and deeply undemocratic about this kind of government surveillance. But since 9/11, we have seen first George W. Bush and now Barack Obama engage in shockingly broad executive power grabs that undermine our constitutionally protected civil liberties, all in the name of "national security."

President Obama is a constitutional scholar who ran on the platform of transparency in government. We don't believe he has the constitutional right to collect and examine the telephone records of virtually all Americans. But if he thinks that he has the authority to spy on Americans, he should acknowledge these programs and provide his legal rationale for them.

Demand President Obama acknowledge his administration's spying programs and provide a full legal justification for indiscriminately spying on Americans.

Obama must see Africa in new light

When President Obama and the first lady travel to Africa at the end of this month, they will receive a rapturous greeting. The president’s deep roots in Kenya, the land of his father, resonate throughout the continent. His success in the United States evokes pride and joy in Africa.

I write this from Nigeria, a country that has just celebrated its 14th year of democracy. President Obama’s election enabled Africans to see America in a new light. I hope his visit will enable Americans to see Africa with new eyes.

We know the problems of Africa: its poverty, corruption and conflict. After 246 years of the slave trade, 100 years of colonialism, African suffering and struggle are known. But perhaps the president’s visit will enable us to see the possibilities.

China escalates drug war into southeast Asia's Mekong River

BANGKOK, Thailand -- After executing four killers from Thailand, Laos and Myanmar last year, China's security forces have extended their reach by uniting those countries along the Mekong River in a "war on drugs" and arrested 812 people in the narcotics-rich Golden Triangle.

China's new push into Southeast Asia is described as an anti-drug operation which began on April 19 and will end on June 20.

It includes protecting commerical and passenger ships on the Mekong River against thieves, kidnappers and guerrillas.

Up to now, security forces from China, Thailand, Myanmar and Laos said they confiscated more than two tons of drugs -- including heroin, opium and methamphetamines -- plus guns and ammunition.

The 812 arrests include citizens from all four countries, plus Vietnam, according to Lan Weihong, an officer at the Narcotics Department in China's powerful Public Security Ministry.

Mr. Lan made the announcement at their "command center...staffed by drug enforcement agents from all four countries," located in Jinghong, a Mekong River port in the southern province of Yunnan, China Daily reported on May 21.

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