The WSJ seems to have the same feel for this case as I have. Look, Zimmerman was an irresponsible idiot from the get-go, stalking someone in the night. Carrying around two fire-arms and following someone, looking for trouble, even after he’d been told to go home by the neighborhood watch. He was a trouble-maker.

So there’s definitely culpability.

But since there’s so much conflicting testimony about the confrontation and there is credible evidence that he feared for his life, man-slaughter might be the best option.

WSJ

Some states, but not Florida, recognize what’s known as “imperfect self-defense.” It applies when someone kills in self-defense but was overreacting and using excessive force.

So a defendant can try to reduce a murder charge to manslaughter by saying that he acted in self-defense even while conceding that he made a mistake. Alternatively, “imperfect self-defense” can offer prosecutors their best chance at a guilty verdict when a jury seems unlikely to convict a defendant of murder.

Florida law works differently. There’s no slicing and dicing of self-defense. The penal code doesn’t recognize “imperfect self defense.” The law forces juries to either believe that someone had a right to act in self-defense or is a murderer.

There is a loophole, however, as illustrated by Mr. Zimmerman’s trial, which entered into closing arguments Thursday.

In Florida, a judge can choose to give juries a middle-of-the-road option, saying it can convict someone of voluntary  manslaughter if it isn’t convinced that the defendant acted out of “ill will, hatred, spite, or evil intent.” Voluntary manslaughter is a catch-all offense that includes a killing caused by “culpable negligence.”

These have been exactly my thoughts about the trial.
Why do Florida’s stalking laws not apply to Martin?
Why does he have no right to throw a punch in reaction to a perceived threat, when Zimmerman is allowed to use a gun in self-defense?

CNN:

“This murder trial, in and out of the courtroom, has been boiled down to one question: Was Zimmerman in fear for his life and thus justified in defending himself by shooting and killing Martin?

It has been framed this way — in terms of Zimmerman’s mortal fear — since the shooting in 2012.

Zimmerman’s assumptions led to death, prosecutor argues

Some people have forgotten that Zimmerman was not even arrested initially. It took more than a month for the special prosecutor to bring the second-degree murder charge. And if not for mass protests across the country, he might not be the defendant in a murder trial at all.

The question that has not surfaced in the courtroom — the elephant in the room — is this: Did Martin fear for his life after being followed and confronted by a stranger while going to the store to buy candy and a soft drink? Was he, Martin, justified in standing his ground and defending himself when this stranger, an apparent stalker, approached him in a threatening manner?

Zimmerman didn’t identify himself and never said he was part of the neighborhood watch group.

Think about it: We’re told over and over that if Zimmerman was afraid of Martin, according to Florida law, he had the right to put a bullet in the chamber of his concealed handgun, get out of his car after being told not to by the 911 dispatcher and follow and confront Martin and shoot him to death.

At the same time, we are told that Martin, who had far greater reason to fear Zimmerman, practically and for reasons of American history, did not have the right to confront his stalker, stand his ground and defend himself, including by using his fists. We are told that this was entirely unjustified and by doing so, Martin justified his own execution.

The phrases “stand your ground” and “self-defense” have been repeated endlessly by anchors, pundits, analysts and experts, but rarely applied to Martin.

How could this be? Why is this other question ignored? Surely it will come up as we approach the trial, I thought. But it hasn’t. What’s going on here? How can the Florida law apply only to Zimmerman and not to Martin?”

“The alternative to authority is coercion.” – Erik von Kuehnelt Leddihn

1. Adam Kokesh – Hope he doesn’t have too hard a time of it, but, unfortunately, if you aren’t willing to have the Feds pounding down your door, don’t make rash statements about armed insurrections and egg people to march on DC.

2. Secession  – theoretically, nothing wrong with it. In practice, a globalist strategy. Smaller states are more easily dominated by Israel/Rothschilds than a large state like the US. Who do you suppose is behind all those think-tanks/info-tech companies in Virginia?

3. Greenwald, Snowden, Assange, Wolf etc. etc. Need you ask?  If you didn’t know before, you ought to know by now. No further comment.

4. Zimmerman-Martin trial.

A cop wannabe, who intimidated a stranger in the dark, wasn’t in shape, and then pulled out a gun when he couldn’t win mano-a-mano in a fist-fight, is a strange hero for libertarians.

The marijuana-smoking, public-school drop-out; the tough-talking, self-reliant teen, Trayvon, is closer to the libertarian model. Notice how dropping out of school is a plus point for libertarians when it’s alleged state operative Snowden, but not when it’s citizen Trayvon Martin.

Actually, from his own words,  Snowden is a fan of the public school system and obviously he sucked the security state’s teat all his life.

And, Martin’s decision to fight back at the man who was intimidating him is pretty libertarian too. Stalking people is a crime in Florida, if that means anything. It should be. It’s an act of physical intimidation. That is aggression. Someone comes up to your teen daughter at night, waves a gun in her face, threatens her, would you punch them? I might, even though technically no one committed a literal physical aggression.

Maybe, even if it’s in a public space, I might be tempted to strike.

Consider it. You’re walking around on the street in the dark and someone starts following you, even running after you. Maybe he’s yelling threats. Aren’t you going to get pumped and reach for the mace or the pepper spray? If you got really afraid, wouldn’t you throw a punch, if YOU thought your life might be at risk?

I haven’t read too much about the case, because it annoys me that with so much going on about surveillance, all we hear in the media is this case.

But, from my cursory reading of a few pieces, Zimmerman seemed to be asking for trouble.  Did he intend to murder anyone? Likely not. So, manslaughter sounds fair to me.  If Zimmerman thought his life was in danger, you can’t call it murder.

Manslaughter for the little citizen-spy and pseudo-vigilante.

4. For people who want to run with the hares (pose are truth-tellers) and hunt with the hounds (be cozy enough with the liberal media/globalist mouthpieces so that they have a media presence) – a quote:

“What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?”

5. Soul – that part of yourself that you don’t own (hint to Dr. Block).

Only two people can claim it, per Dr. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters. One by virtue of conquest (“Our Father Below”) and one by virtue of creation (“The Enemy”).

6.  Liberty: Your decision to which of these two you want to belong.

The only thing I could agree with in Dr. Block’s singularly misleading piece at LRC, is that indeed there is no constitutional right to privacy (the extrapolation from Roe is infamous among constitutional scholars).

I won’t say anything more about it, because some times people do a better job of refuting themselves on their own, without any help from outside. This is one of those times.

An old post from October 16, 2011, which prefigures the debate generated by William Binney and Snowden today about “turnkey tyranny.”

Gerald Celente Calls For Direct Democracy

Memewatchers (via Korey Snodgrass, from the comment section of The Daily Bell):

http://memewatchers.com/gerald-celente-calls-for-new-world-order

“Government is corrupt and abusive but it can be fixed all we need is transparent and direct democracy. Now thanks to the Internet it is all possible. Hurray!!! Big government is now finally gonna work. We are gonna create our own New World Order.

George Celente was interviewed by Alex Jones yesterday and during the interview he called for a New World Order controlled by Direct Democracy. Amazingly Alex failed to question him on this astounding proclamation, instead Alex simply replied ‘well it is no doubt our republic is broken’. Claims like these are very troublesome especially when they are coming from well known figures in the alternative media known to be allies in the fight against the New World Order.”

My Comment:

No, dear memewatchers. It is not “troublesome”.

It is to be expected.

Where have you been? Celente’s stuff is all over the net, he is interviewed on TV, and there is always a price for such acceptance and approval.

We have quoted Celente many times and we like what he says, when it is on specific topics. But we have seen how he picks up themes and even ideas that are in the air but never gets too concrete about anything. We said nothing, hoping for the best, but prepared for the worst.

Celente cannot change the terms of the debate.

The corporate-state cannot be fought on its own terms – mass acceptance, traditional outlets, PC-bounded debate. The medium will kill the message everytime.

James Altucher, the financial blogger, has already broached “Direct Democracy” (abolish the President and Congress and take referendums on the net directly). Gerald Celente is another. Both are from the financial media in New York. That is significant, surely. They are surely not outsiders in the financial media, however much they might adopt the language of outsiders.

And there will be many more such insider “outsiders” using the language of the politicians and the business classes.

This language – advertising, opinion-polling, perception- management, consumer satisfaction – is nothing more than the language of corporations and the methods of mass manufacture and distribution.

It is also the language of the state.

Government (posing as anti-government) will operate forcibly, through secret control of weaponry by agents of the NWO in each ostensibly sovereign state; through the infiltration and subversion of government organs on behalf of transnational rather than local interests; through the human rights regimes and NWOs; and through blackmail and bribery by the spy agencies and police forces of all kinds.

Anyone can see how this will enable the social media mafia (Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Digg, etc), the establishment media (CJR,  WashPo, NY Times, WSJ etc), the establishment alternatives (Nation, Democracy Now, Alternet etc), the speculator-hedge funds and banksters (Soros etc.), the psyops folks (probably Wikileaks, and other “controlled opposition” anti-empire and even anti-NWO mouthpieces) and the secret spy agencies (NSA, CIA etc) to come together to control what becomes an issue, what doesn’t, what the parameters of debate are, how problems are solved, and who profits.

With advertising, and behavior modification as highly developed as they are now, it will be nothing to sway the masses one way or other from behind the curtains. The wizard will be gone. But a whole team of puppet-masters will take his place.

Thus the corporate-communist convergence instantiated in Occupy Wall Street.

Local autocrats will be overthrown. In their place will come scientific tyranny, masquerading as Direct Democracy, Free Markets (if that’s your cup of tea) or Anarchist Socialism (if it’s not).

Different strokes, but the same folks.

There is no such thing as a large centrally-controlled republic.

There can only be federated republics.

A large centrally controlled republic is only another name for oligarchy.

Oligarchy, disguised as “direct participatory democracy” is secret rule by oligarchs.

Secret rule = Tyranny.

I do not  say that direct referendums necessarily lack merit. They might work, were we living in small city states…. and were the internet discontinuous, fragmented, and highly private…. and were most people rational, well-educated, self-critical and self-reliant.

But we aren’t, it isn’t, and they aren’t.

So Direct Internet Democracy will not be anarchism, right or left, and it won’t be Christian liberty. Nor will it be federalism or decentralization.

It will be the direct control of the masses through electronic networks, propaganda, surveillance, and co-option of alternative mouthpieces of all stripes, across the board.

Direct Electronic Democracy = Tyranny

I call it Direct Electronic Action for Tyrants and Demagogues

Which equals DEATH. The death of true liberty.

Still,  I let me be perverse and say that I don’t oppose OWS completely, because that is what the mass of people want.

The mass of people, of course, is not the majority of people. The mass of people is simply people acting as masses. Which is a different thing.

But nonetheless the masses are a lot of people.

Now, truth (little t) lives in some form in all people, no matter how far they seem to be from Truth (big t). And so the truth of this moment is exhaustion, fear, burden, terror. The truth of this moment is security.

People want security and are willing to give up their freedom for it.  So be it.

It cannot be too much worse than the nightmare that the corporate-state brought to the world in the 20th century.

Those who had liberty used it to worship power. State power and money power.

Now their worship of power is moving toward to its logical conclusion.

Yet, it isn’t for us to predict doom. We were not called to be Jeremiah.

So we will hold out some small hope.

OWS and Assange may be red flags, but red is as good a color as any. It beats being blue. Blue is sad, it’s fearful. You see red, you’re angry.

Anger is fear projected outward. It’s action. Even if the action is not so much direct action, as directed action.

Action –  good or bad, we’ll see.  Perhaps it will correct itself as it goes along..

Meanwhile, we tend our own garden and keep our distance, if not our silence..

Peter Hitchens, the Christian brother of famously atheistic writer/activist Christopher Hitchens, identifies the increasing power of the state with the decline of dad.

I’ve had the same thought. Here’s a Counterpunch piece, “Witches and Bastards” on the subject:

“But there is a difference between bastardy inside the imperial state and outside that is crucial. In the imperial state, the missing father is replaced by the state. Outside imperium, that is not yet the case.

In the imperium even those who do have a father end up overshadowed by the hyper-masculinized image created, manipulated, and projected by the imperial state. Under its domination, the hyper-masculine father cripples the growth of his child, either turning him into a replica of himself or a pale, emasculated shadow.

The hyper-masculine male is both beneficiary and sacrificial victim of the imperial machine which employs him as soldier, sailor, beggar-man, and thief as it suits its purposes. We talk of the nanny-state but really it’s the Daddy-State, the substitution of organic, biological fatherhood with the robotic state. The Daddy State teaches its progeny well – through the mythologizing of sports, war, and crime – the three horsemen of the imperial apocalypse. In video games and films, the cult of violence of the Daddy-State reigns – children of all classes slouch around in the baggy, beltless trousers of prisoners to the phallic throb of rap, the soul music of the ghetto war-zones where the unofficial violence of the underclass plays out; their older siblings wear army camouflage and olive drab and their parents cruise the highways in sports utility vehicles and the military’s own Hummer, celebrating the official violence of the over-class. Roughly a third or more of the American economy depends on the prison-military complex. Whole sections of the populace are imprisoned at rates second only to China in the world while other sections profit from the jobs that accompany the growth of the complex. In America, there can be no true bastards or true witches under the all-seeing eye of the Daddy-State.”

Peter Hitchens writes:

“The fundamental prayer of the Christian church begins with the words ‘Our Father’. Americans speak of their ‘founding fathers’. The father has since human society began been protector, provider, source of authority, bound by honour and fidelity to defend his hearth.

>If he is gone, who takes his place ? Of all people, D.H. Lawrence, author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, wrote of a man and his wife as ‘a king and queen with one or two subjects and a few square yards of territory of their own…true freedom because it is a true fulfillment for man, woman and children.’

But he warned of a great danger if marriage, which makes fatherhood what it is,  fell. ‘Break it, and you will have to go back to the overwhelming dominance of the State, which existed before the Christian era’.

And now we see his prophecy fulfilled. The state spends billions, and intervenes incessantly, to try to replace the lost force of fatherhood, and it fails.”

Comment:

Although I’ve read quite a bit of Lawrence, I don’t recall this particular line. I’ll have to go hunt for it.

It only reinforces my admiration for Lawrence. What didn’t he get right?

Dr. Stanley Monteith (via NewsWithViews):

“John Swinton was the editorial page editor of the New York Times from 1860-1870. When he addressed a group of journalists at the Twilight Club in New York City on April 12, 1883, he stated:

“There is no such thing in America as an independent press, unless it is in the country towns. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dare to write his honest opinions, and if you did you know beforehand they would never appear in print. I am paid $150 a week for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should permit honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, like Othello, before twenty-four hours, my occupation would be gone. . . . We are intellectual prostitutes.”[3]

Very little has changed since that time except for the fact that members of the secret cabal control more media outlets, and they have developed very sophisticated methods of controlling the reality of the American people.

(Lila: I have had seven years of first-hand observation of the way it is done today. You post a piece. It goes no where, but suddenly the points you raised are taken up by a bunch of people who massage its message so that it comes to mean a slightly different thing from what you intended. Slightly different, but none the less crucially different. Your piece vanishes into oblivion. The creators of the massaged message rise to prominence. Things go on as before, even while the massagers are awarded prizes for their exposes by Yale, Harvard and the rest.]

On rare occasions a courageous member of the media has tried to expose the influence of the secret cabal. Richard Harwood worked for The Washington Post for 22 years, and during those years he wrote what he was told to write, but after Richard Harwood retired, he wrote an article titled “Ruling Class Journalists” that exposed the totalitarian influence of the Council on Foreign Relations. Why is that important? It’s important because the CFR is one of the major “front organizations ” for the secret cabal that controls our nation.

On October 30, 1993, Richard Harwood wrote:

“The president is a member. So is his secretary of state, the deputy secretary of state, all five of the undersecretaries, several of the assistant secretaries and the department’s legal adviser. The president’s national security adviser and his deputy are members. The director of Central Intelligence (like all previous directors) and the chairman of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board are members. The secretary of defense, three undersecretaries and at least four assistant secretaries are members. The secretaries of the department of housing and urban development, interior, health and human services, and the chief White House public relations man, David Gergen, are members along with the speaker of the House and the majority leader of the Senate.”[4]

If Richard Harwood’s information is correct, why don’t the American people realize the CFR controls the American government? Richard Harwood’s article was published on a back page of The Washington Post, the article wasn’t mentioned on radio or television, and the article was never quoted by other newspapers. A similar fate has befallen every effort to expose the existence of the secret cabal.

you would like to verify the fact that most of the major media outlets are owned by “front organizations” affiliated with the secret cabal; i.e. the Trilateral Commission, the CFR, and the Bilderbergs, you should read Professor Ben Bagdikian’s book, “The New Media Monopoly” because it identifies the five (or six) international corporations that control 90% of the major media outlets in the United States, [5] and you should also read “The Membership List of the Brotherhood of Darkness,” compiled by Radio Liberty, or Robert Gaylon Ross’s book, “Who’s Who of the Elite.” [6] The major corporations are:

Times Warner (AOL) (Trilateral Commission)
Bertelsmann (Trilateral Commission)
Viacom (CBS) (Council on Foreign Relations) (CFR)
Disney (ABC) (CFR)
GE-Comcast (NBC) (CFR)
Fox News: Ruppert Murdoch (CFR)

Do you remember how Nafissatou Diallo, an immigrant maid in New York, was trashed as a whore because she accused famous establishment socialist, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, of rape?

That trashing was recycled even by at least one libertarian blog (EPJ), where I was commenting at the time. You’d think libertarians would love someone who lied to the Immigration & Naturalization Services, to commit the non-crime of emigrating to another country.

In fact, I was hoping that Diallo would be lauded by at least one American libertarian for her keen entrepreneurial ability, her resolution and drive in crossing continents and oceans to get to the US, and her indifference to legal niceties, in allegedly lying/exaggerating to the INS.

Had she been a New York financier setting up a shell company in the Virgin Islands in order to pump-and-dump stock, the same people would have been posting  long-winded theories about why her behavior was both morally correct and economically productive.

However, given that Diallo was an immigrant of the darker persuasion, her libertarian attitudes only got her what unconventional women usually get – the label of whore.

New York Daily News:

The hotel maid who claims she was sexually assaulted by would-be French president Dominique Strauss Kahn is poised to ink a multi-million settlement Monday to end her civil suit against the randy European.

In a sign that a deal is imminent, Bronx Supreme Court Justice Douglas McKeon has ordered up an interpreter for the maid, Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant, a court official said this weekend.

Strauss Kahn will not be there, the official said.

The settlement would bring a end to a saga that ended the career of the egotistical French politician known globally by his initials DSK.

In May, 2011, Diallo claimed Strauss-Kahn forced her to perform oral sex when he was a guest at the midtown Sofitel Hotel where she worked.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance eventually dropped the criminal case, citing inconsistencies in Diallo’s statements, so she sued Strauss Kahn in civil court.

In May, Strauss Kahn countersued, accusing Diallo, 33, of ruining his reputation with a claim that sent him falling from his post as head of the International Monetary Fund poised to become the president of France.

Last week, lawyers reached the broad outlines of a deal, sources said, though Strauss Kahn’s team denied a published report that he would shell out $6 million.

Meanwhile, Diallo has settled a defamation lawsuit against The New York Post, which reported she was a prostitute, citing sources close to DSK’s defense.

A court spokesman said the Post case was settled after McKeon incorporated that lawsuit into the settlement discussions between Diallo and DSK.

“The judge had the lawyers for the parties (Diallo and DSK) in his chambers trying to discuss a settlement. It only made sense for the sake of judicial economy to settle all of the related cases at one time,” said the spokesman, David Bookstaver.

The terms of the settlement are unclear because the parties have signed a confidentiality agreement, Bookstaver said.”

Comment: Well, feisty New York papers and big-name Socialist politicians do not settle claims for multi-millions of dollars, coupled with confidentiality agreements, without being GUILTY AS HELL.

ND could have no interest in confidentiality, since her life has already been publicly raked through and trashed.

I was very sympathetic to DSK, in so far as the state treated him like a perp from the get-go. And in sexual crime cases, I really find the public nature of the proceedings and the violation of privacy involved disgusting.  I commented as much at Wenzel’s EPJ. But I also said at the time that because ND might have lied in some proceeding with the INS (and since when do libertarians care about people lying to some bureaucratic paper-pushers, anyway?), it did not mean that she was a whore, and that most likely the NY papers (the NY Post is a Murdoch rag), were simply libeling her.

My theory was that both of them has been used in some way. DSK was perhaps set up by someone who knew he was given to assaulting maids. Most likely he called in for a hooker and then someone had a legit maid sent his way. She might not have known.

But, at the time, Wenzel ran triumphantly with the Post’s version….which was that she was a hooker. It always makes for a lot of hits to call a woman a whore….even if there’s no evidence.

Meanwhile, I notice the silence of that same blog on the character of Ms. Mees, also an immigrant, who after all is an alleged PERP, not an alleged VICTIM….. for whose crime there seem to be at least one thousand pieces of evidence (her emails).

That piece of obvious bias was the reason, along with Wenzel’s gratuitous hit-garnering attacks on Ayn Rand, that I stopped posting there. I returned the favor by applying the same critical eye to Mr. Rothbard on my blog, although with much more evidence and argumentative skill.

Hint to libs:

There is a way to advance the legitimate interests of men, without diminishing those of women.  Using the same tactics as the MSM only makes you like them, only less powerful.

Here are my comments:

From Stephen Lendman:

“It doesn’t surprise. On June 8, Haaretz headlined “What was the Israeli involvement in collecting US communications intel for NSA?” More on that below.

On April 3, 2012, James Bamford headlined “Shady Companies with Ties to Israel Wiretap for US for the NSA.”

He said NSA chief General Keith Alexander’s “having a busy year.” He’s “cutting ribbons at secret bases and bringing to life the agency’s greatly expanded eavesdropping network.”

“In January he dedicated the new $358 million CAPT Joseph J. Rochefort Building at NSA Hawaii, and in March he unveiled the 604,000-square-foot John Whitelaw Building at NSA Georgia.”

It’s for around “4,000 earphone-clad intercept operators, analysts and other specialists, many of them employed by private contractors.”

Spies “R” Us defines US policy. NSA’s “mammoth 1-million-square-foot, $2 billion Utah Data Center is far more sweeping.”

It’s located at Camp Williams. It’s a Utah National Guard training facility. Once fully operational, says Bamford, it’ll “become, in effect, the NSA Cloud.”

It’ll receive data from NSA satellites, overseas listening posts, and nationwide multipleNo telecom facility monitoring rooms. What’s planned is an unprecedented global spy network.

NSA operatives and hackers will harvest around 2.1 million gigabytes of data per hour. It’ll do so on the world’s most powerful computer.

It’s call Titan Supercomputer. It can handle over 20,000 trillion calculations per second or 20 petaflops. One petaflop = one quadrillion instructions per second.

Supercomputer power will be used to collect and analyze foreign and domestic communications from all possible sources.

Two Israeli companies are involved. High-tech firms Verint and Narus have longstanding US/Israeli intelligence connections. For many years, Verint was a majority-owned Comverse Technology subsidiary.

Both companies have about half their employees in Israel. In August 2012, Verint acquired Comverse. It now operates independently.

It makes security software. It calls itself “a global leader in Actionable Intelligence solutions.”

Narus calls itself a cybersecurity company. It’s an independent Boeing subsidiary. It provides real-time network traffic and analytics software. It does so with enterprise class spyware capabilities.

In 1997, it was founded in Israel. It created NarusInsight. It’s a supercomputer system. A previous article said AT&T uses it at their secret San Francisco facility. It lets NSA spy on its customers.

Verint’s software also is used to do it. Bamford called it “especially troubling that both companies have had extensive ties to Israel, as well as links to (its) intelligence service.”

A previous article discussed Israeli spying on America. The CIA calls Israel America’s main regional spy threat. An Israeli-based CIA operative once found food in his refrigerator rearranged.

Washington knows what’s going on. Publicly it’s ignored. Pre-9/11, the FBI uncovered a massive US-based Israeli spy ring. It remains active.

It betrays America. Numerous Israeli citizens are involved. They have close ties to foreign military, criminal and intelligence sources. They reportedly breach US laws with impunity.

Israel’s featured prominently in annual FBI reports. It actively seeks proprietary/secret US information. It’s mainly on military systems and advanced computer applications.

Proprietary commercial and industrial data are stolen. Israel recruits spies. Sophisticated methods are used. Computers are hacked for information.

Washington’s Government Accountability Office (GAO) said Israel “conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any US ally.”

The Pentagon accused Israel of “actively engag(ing) in military and industrial espionage in the United States. An Israeli citizen working in the US who has access to proprietary information is likely to be a target of such espionage.”

FBI whistleblower John Cole said Justice Department officials ordered dozens of Israeli espionage cases dropped. At issue was political pressure.

Washington gives Israel billions of dollars in annual aid, state-of-the-art weapons and technology, and numerous other special privileges. In return, it steals US state and commercial secrets.

Despite longstanding close ties, Washington considers Israel both ally and counterintelligence threat. In terms of technical capability and human resources, it matches America’s best.

It has access to the highest US political, military and intelligence sources. Bamford said NSA-developed advanced analytical/data-mining software was lawlessly given Israel.

An Operations Directorate technical director did so secretly. Apparently Israeli companies got access. Technology they got advanced their own.

Narus once boasted about being “known for its ability to capture and collect data from the largest networks around the world.” Unexplained was that stolen software facilitates is capabilities.

Retired Israeli General Hanan Gefen ran its secret Unit 8200. It’s Israel’s NSA equivalent. He admitted Israeli ties to Comverse.

At the time, it owned Verint. It owns other Israeli high-tech companies. They specialize in eavesdropping and surveillance. They operate globally.

According to Gefen, the “correlation between serving in the intelligence Unit 8200 and starting successful high-tech companies is not coincidental.”

Lila:

I’ve written about Israeli spying on all US telecommunications (and all Indian, as well) in this piece, as well as in LOE.