“(An old post from my archives (May 2007):

“Just watching – intermittently – Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) – with Montgomery Clift in the role of the mentally defective man questioned by Maximilian Schell (who won an Academy Award for his performance) about his sterilization under the Nazis. Clift is riveting in his scene but to my mind Schell is even better as counsel for the defense.

In the scene following, there is a dialogue about the culpability of ordinary people in the government’s actions. I don’t necessarily agree, given the power of the government to propagandize and coerce and its apparent immunity to criticism. But it still makes you think..

“There are no Nazis in Germany – the Eskimos invaded and took over the country. It wasn’t the fault of the Germans; it was the fault of those damn Eskimos…. “

And in a later scene about the concentration camps:

“They say we killed millions of people..millions..how could it be possible? How?”

And the response:

“It’s not the killing that’s the problem..it’s the disposing of the bodies…”

And after Marlene Dietrich denies knowing anything about what was going on,

“As far as I can tell, there was no one who knew anything…”

A lot of interesting performers in the film – Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich, Burt Lancaster, Spencer Tracy, William Shatner and the son of the conductor Otto von Klemperer. (A friend writes to tell me that he is T.V.’s Colonel Klink (in Hogan’s Heroes). I’ll take his word for it… 

Other quotes stand out:

“Once again it was done for love of country..”

“Maybe we didn’t know the details. But if we didn’t know, maybe it was because we didn’t want to know….”

“But if he is to be found guilty, there are others who went along who also must be found guilty”

“Why did we succeed, your honor? What about the rest of the world? Did it not know the intentions of the Third Reich, did it not read the words of Mein Kampf? Where is the responsibility of the Soviet Union….where is the responsibility of the Vatican…….where is the responsibility of Winston Churchill? Where is the responsibility of those American industrialists who helped Hitler?Is Germany alone guilty…

the whole world is as responsible for Hitler as Germany is.

Ernst Janning said he was guilty..if he was guilty, then his guilt was the world’s guilt no less, no more.. ”

More:

“What difference does it make if a few political extremists lose their rights? What difference does it make if a few racial minorities lose their rights?”

And this, again, about the camps:
“Break the body, break the spirit, break the heart..”

But the best line may be at the end, when Burt Lancaster calls Spencer Tracy into his cell and says, “I never thought it would come to this,” and Spencer Tracy responds,

“The first time you convicted an innocent person you knew it would come to this.”

Ilana Mercer has the guts to say what Paula Deen apparently can’t:

“Ms. Deen appears to be a productive person who works hard and leads a good life. The Food Network, Wal-Mart and Caesars Entertainment have purged Paula, but her fans—hungry for the treacle of her voice and cooking—are packing into the “Paula Deen Cruise” liner, and buying up her latest cookbook from Amazon.

“Go to hell” is what Ms. Deen should tell her detractors and wishy-washy, condescending defenders alike. The latter, it would seem, are offering up in her defense nothing but mitigating circumstances, the kind that attach to a crime.”

Comment:

The entire globe is being spied on at all hours of day and night by a totalitarian network; the financial system is in slow-motion collapse everywhere; and the outrage du jour is some woman saying n***** aeons ago…or maybe, once to an employee…or thereabouts.

Who cares?  On the street, n***** is the least of the things I’ve heard.  Call a women a “c***”, a “b****” and a “whore” all day long, and you’re ready for prime-time. No smelling salts needed.

Crawl through the forums on Asian sites and you’ll see us brown devils outdoing each other in PUBLIC name-calling.

I haven’t noticed any apologies….

Black people say “cracker” and “honky” all the time.  Tamils call Europeans and Americans “vellakaras” (whites in a slightly derogatory fashion). Maybe you think “whitey” doesn’t carry the history of degradation that the “n” word does.

True. But if I ask you to stop using the “n word” then I must be prepared to fore-go “cracker,” “honky,” “polack,” “kike,” “wog”…. and all the rest.

Something tells me most of us aren’t prepared to do that.

People use nasty language when they feel mad about something. It’s normal and it’s human.

Some of us do it more than others, for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with growing up white in the pre-Civil Rights South.

Afterthought:

Question for Ms Mercer.  After posting the video of a white woman beaten up during a horrific home invasion by a black man, you write:

“The hate crime you endured will not mitigate or explain any future slip-of-the-tongue. You may stereotype an elderly, highly successful white woman, based on her tribe’s past wrongdoing; but you dare not attach statistical significance to the misdeeds of a black man, because of his group’s considerable contribution to crime.”

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/06/paula-deen-tell-em-all-to-go-to-hell/#GfpgKais1EVLhdfJ.99

If, after a video of the financial crimes of Mr. Blankfein, Mr. Greenberg, Mr. Paulson, Mr. Cohen, Mr. Madoff, Mr. Milken, Mr. Boesky, Mr. Soros…..and after another video of the “shock-and-awe” treatment of Baghdad, the bombing of Libya, the attack on the USS Liberty, and, for good measure, the espionage of Mr. Pollard, I were to write in the same vein of other groups, would you still stick with your brave argument?

Business Insider:

“Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, described the

Snowden’s disclosures — which amount to the first concrete evidence of the NSA’s domestic surveillance apparatus — as the most important leak in American history.”

So, now girls and boys, since I know you aren’t all as juvenile as you sound (“It’s a hero!…. it’s a spy!….it’s super—man!”), here’s a little run-down from the world of boring non comic-book adults. To wit, here’s

a brief history of the public exposure of the surveillance state, prior to the apotheosis of Edward Snowden, formerly of Fort Meade, Maryland, now of Russia, Ecuador, Hongkong, etc. etc.:

In 1996 ( that would be 17 years before Snowdon), Nicky Hager, a New Zealand journalist, exposed New Zealand’s involvement in Echelon, a satellite network, run by the Western powers, that had the ability to intercept practically all communications across the globe.

I blogged about it at length way back in 2010  here: – http://mindbodypolitic.com/2010/06/27/echelon-the-global-spy-system/.

“ECHELON links together all these facilities, providing the US and its allies with the ability to intercept a large proportion of the communications on the planet.

The computers at each station in the ECHELON network automatically search through the millions of messages intercepted for ones containing pre-programmed keywords. Keywords include all the names, localities, subjects, and so on that might be mentioned. Every word of every message intercepted at each station gets automatically searched whether or not a specific telephone number or e-mail address is on the list.

The thousands of simultaneous messages are read in “real time” as they pour into the station, hour after hour, day after day, as the computer finds intelligence needles in telecommunications haystacks.”

Mind you, Hager’s book, based on an article for the magazine, Covert Quarterly, was itself late in the game, as she herself he himself acknowledged. Here’s the relevant part from the my blog post in 2010:

“Per Cryptome, the earliest public report on Echelon is in 1972. The first reporter to write on it is British intelligence reporter, Duncan Campbell: “They’ve Got It Taped,” New Statesman, August 12, 1988 (republished at Cryptome.org). Campbell testified before Congress on the subject in 1999 and prepared a report for the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) that was refused by EPIC’s director Marc Rotenberg, on the grounds that much of the information hadn’t been substantiated (see this correspondence between Rotenberg and Young). After that, there was debate between Campbell and Bamford over what the main focus of the espionage was.”

That would place the earliest public exposure of Echelon in 1972, which would be, let’s see, only FORTY TWO YEARS before the one by the TrueHooha (Snowden’s nick-name on the Ars Technica forum).

To be fair to the lad, he hadn’t yet been born..

But Hager is a journalist, not a whistle-blower from within the system, so maybe Snowdon, or, at least, his real-life predecessor, William Binney, are first off the mark there?

No.

It turns out that as far back as the 1970’s, Margaret Newsham, who designed programs for Echelon’s network, had described her work to Congress in 1988 and, in 1999, to the press:

[thanks to a commentator at American Everyman for alerting me to Newsham]

In interviews with Denmark’s Ekstra Bladet in 1999  (posted by the real American hero who runs Cryptome.org) Newsham stated:

“I know Echelon exists, because I helped make the system.”

Here’s an excerpt from one of the interviews with her, forwarded on the cypherpunk list and published at Cryptome, “I Sold My Life To Big Brother”

“For the second day running, former Echelon spy Margaret Newsham tells about the ‘Black World’ of espionage – and the fatal consequences it is had on her life. Half of her espionage colleagues are dead today.

“The surveillance was incredibly target-oriented. We were capable of singling out an individual or organization and monitoring all electronic communication – real time – and all the time. The person was monitored without ever having a chance to discover it, and most of the information was sent with lightening speed to another station using the enormous digital capacity at our command. Everything took place without a search warrant.”

Was all the information forwarded to NSA headquarters at Fort George Meade in Maryland?

“Not all of it, but quite a lot.”

Does the system use programs that are capable of virtually scouring the airwaves based on certain categories and trigger words?

“That’s one of the ways it functions, yes. It’s like an Internet search engine. By restricting your search to specific numbers, persons or terms, you get results that are all related to whatever you enter.”

Tell me, what did Snowden reveal that wasn’t revealed by Newsham?

This and dozens of equally devastating pieces are freely available at Cryptome.org, which is where I read them a few years ago. They’ve been there a lot longer, and so far as I know, the USG hasn’t hunted the authors or publishers across the globe.

Censorship doesn’t operate that way in the US. The powers-that-be have no objection to exposes appearing in small-circulation sites or in academic journals. To some extent they welcome it, since it blunts any charge of “censorship.”

But try and get a larger audience, and then the iron hand of the state emerges, as Nicky Hager found, when her his book, after initially creating a sensation, simply vanished from the public view.

From the same site, Cryptome, here is Duncan Campbell, the earliest journalist on the story:

“They spy on companies and interest groups,” says Duncan Campbell, who has looked at the listening post at Aflandshage near Copenhagen in Denmark. “The facilities at Aflandshage are hardly distinguishable from the Echelon installation in New Zealand.”

Physicist and technology expert Duncan Campbell has no doubt. Denmark is involved in illegal surveillance together with the other primary participants in the so-called Echelon system, the US, England, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong and New Zealand.

“My best guess is that the facilities at Aflandshage were additionally expanded shortly after the end of the Cold War. In 1990 or perhaps a little later.”

What does that mean?

“Well it means that Aflandshage is in any case not part of NATO’s defense against Russia and the other East Bloc countries like it was before. Everything indicates that the large parabolic antennas and accompanying buildings are used in the same way as the facilities in the other countries: to intercept communication from commercial satellites that transmit the phone and fax conversations of ordinary people. And to forward the intercepted information.”

And in this excerpt, also dated 1999, the Danish Minister for Defense admits that Denmark participates in a network of surveillance and has been doing so since World War II, and refuses to rule out the possibility that all civilian communications might be included as targets:

“Denmark participates in a global surveillance system,” admitted the Minister for the Defense Hans Hækkerup under heavy pressure.

As one of the first governments in the clandestine Western intelligence cooperation, Hækkerup acknowledged during a joint council in the Danish Parliament’s Europe Committee last Friday that the FE (Intelligence Agency of the Danish Armed Forces) participates in the interception of electronic communication.

Does this occur in cooperation with the NSA, which manages the so-called Echelon?

“I can’t confirm that, but I can tell you that the FE has been intercepting signals ever since the Second World War – and we’re still doing it.”

Bruce Fein, a constitutional lawyer closely associated with Ron Paul, who has recently gone from denouncing to supporting the Tamil Tigers, is now counseling the father of Edward Snowden:

“The father of Edward Snowden, the former defense contractor accused of disclosing details about secret U.S. surveillance programs, is concerned that his son’s recent association with the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks is being used by its founder Julian Assange to raise the organization’s public profile for fundraising purposes.

Attorney Bruce Fein, who represents Lonnie Snowden, said Friday that Snowden’s father is worried that the legal counsel and travel expenses provided by WikiLeaks are part the plan to “keep (Edward Snowden) from doing the right thing” by returning to the USA to confront the espionage charges filed against him.

“They are using him to raise money,” Fein said in an interview with USA TODAY.”

LRC finally understands where the libertarian talking up of blackmail gets us:

LRC:

“Other whistleblowers say the same thing. When the former head of the NSA’s digital spying program – William Binney – disclosed the fact that the U.S. was spying on everyone in the U.S. and storing the data forever, and that the U.S. was quickly becoming a totalitarian state, the Feds tried to scare him into shutting up:

[Numerous] FBI officers held a gun to Binney’s head as he stepped naked from the shower. He watched with his wife and youngest son as the FBI ransacked their home. Later Binney was separated from the rest of his family, and FBI officials pressured him to implicate one of the other complainants in criminal activity. During the raid, Binney attempted to report to FBI officials the crimes he had witnessed at NSA, in particular the NSA’s violation of the constitutional rights of all Americans. However, the FBI wasn’t interested in these disclosures. Instead, FBI officials seized Binney’s private computer, which to this day has not been returned despite the fact that he has not been charged with a crime.

[Lila: That means the Feds can implicate him…or  you…. in some cooked up wrong-doing, in which they can be prosecutor, judge and jury….and hold all the “evidence” – i.e. emails you didn’t know you wrote, conversations and words torn from their context, phone calls strung together into a circumstantial daisy-chain of the kind that convicted Rajat Gupta]

Other NSA whistleblowers have also been subjected to armed raids and criminal prosecution.”

Webster Tarpley on how to tell a limited hang-out artist from a truth-teller:

Limited hangout artists are instant media darlings

which was hatched first here (June 13: “Edward Snowden=Sophie Scholl or you’re a fink,”

and also posted at Scott Creightons’ blog.

Creighton took up the the Poitras conspiracy on June 15 and he is referenced, but not me.

Very interesting. Have I joined the list of non-persons? I kind of think so.

Ever since, I began “not playing ball” (2007) this has been the case.

Not that I care.  I’ll just add it to my long list of stories about the underworld of blogging…stories that shine the light on the sewer that is the international “free” press.

Yes, free to lie, plagiarize, manipulate, brainwash, and finally justify mass murder and enslavement.

Some freedom.

Just from what I know so far (and I’m always open to changing my mind if I find anything new), I’ve kind of concluded that this is a “good-guy” intel operation.

See what it accomplishes:

1. Gets to bring up the US gripe with Chinese hackers against the US, while simultaneously giving the Chinese a bit of a fright, with indications of how far they’ve been hacked. Lots of room here for swinging between arm-twisting and the kind of  hugging boxers do before matches

2. Brings out of the closet the massive extent of the US surveillance state and does it in a colorful “sexy” way, replete with pole-dancing, a little gender-tweaking, spy versus spy. Desensitizes the public to some of it, while alerting it about some of its dangers.

3. Lets the “bad guys” and terrorists know that the USG has their number.

4. Scares away any minor trouble-makers from joining “the revolution” (Wolf’s point). Creighton’s point is exactly the opposite – that Snowden is a provocateur.

5. Now comes my favorite explanation –  “maps” social networks and assesses real-time responses, in a  form of cyber war-gaming or, if your prefer it, a kind of opinion poll.

6. Informs people of the need to encrypt communications. This is the good guy part. The government is concerned that a lot of its data bank is being used by criminals and private contractors for their own purposes. So mom and pop need to be told it’s a good thing to encrypt (it is, if you can).

However, even Snowden admits tacitly that the NSA can get its hands quite easily on anything you write, even encrypted, by spying at other points in the chain of communication.

7. Separates bloggers/activists/other trouble-makers into groups:

a. Those who will support their fearless leader, not matter what. And those who won’t.

b. Those who will play the game, and those who aren’t into game playing, generally.

c. Those who can be allowed a greater voice. And those who can’t.

8. Feeds bogus information about the NSA into the internet to confuse foreign intelligence agencies (and my heart is not breaking for any of them)…. because the “battle-field is everywhere”.

9. Feeds bogus information to activists at home who might otherwise inadvertently disclose sensitive security matters.

10. Possibly hurts another agency or department (i.e. interdepartmental outing, a favorite sport of the government (think State versus CIA or FBI versus Military Intelligence).

11. Payback against Booz Hamilton or maybe this is a government versus contractor pay-back?

12.  Creates a credible and popular voice in the alternate media.

UPDATE:

I want to clarify that I don’t mean by this that anyone who supports Snowden is a tool. Not at all.

But, unless they have inside information that they can’t or won’t disclose (or even indicate they have), they cannot possibly be so sure, since what we know so far about Snowden is so sketchy and contradictory.

I have to infer that they are be taking things on authority from Greenwald (or Binney or Ellsberg) and tying their own credibility to his.

Or they are simply digging themselves in, because it’s “for the team,” so to speak.

That might suit, if you think this is all about Team A versus Team B…

But I don’t buy that as a working model for blogging. I just don’t.

So, no, you can support Snowden and not be a tool.

And conversely, you can oppose him and not be a fink. How’s that for fair?

ORIGINAL POST

Just as I pointed out the loss of credibility involved with activists in backing to the hilt this Snowden figure before all the facts have been parsed, Scott Creighton, writing from the left, makes the same point, at much greater length here.

Notice that Creighton too is troubled by  Laura Poitras’ role in this affair, a point I made on June 10 in, “Edward Snowden=Sophie Scholl…or You’re A Statist Fink”.

Bob Wenzel, at EPJ, is now looking at the Poitras angle as well.

To give him credit, Anthony Wile did get it right from the start….courtesy of Creighton.  Give him credit for reading everyone, not just his ideological pals.

Foundation-funding is a big red flag, as I’ve said a  number of times on this blog, and it’s been found stirring up “popular movements” all over the world as I’ve blogged before (eg.  “Barry Zwicker, Noam Chomsky, and the Left-Gate-Keepers,” June 17, 2010 and  “Left-Gate Keeping on Controversial Topics,”April2, 2009).

Foundation-funded activism and “gate-keeping” by the left (and by the right) is one of the premier reasons that real journalism gets subverted, so I’m very happy to read this post, especially as this is an argument best made by native-born Americans.

Scott Creighton:

“Poitras has a long history of making films that expose various horrific aspects of our new Global War OF Terror… to a point. Her preoccupation with the “blow back” meme is troubling to me as is her recent payday (more in the quote below) and to my knowledge she doesn’t focus on the fact that we own and support many of the terrorist destabilization campaigns across the globe. How can an investigative journalist have that much access, that many frequent flier miles and not know the most basic fundamental foundation of the manufactured War Of Terror? For that matter, how does she explain being such a thorn in the side of the establishment and keep flying around the world without a care talking to “terrorists”? Oh yeah, they take her aside when she goes through customs sometimes. That’s her credibility story.

Most recently she did a film featuring a real whistle-blower, William Binney. The NSA just couldn’t WAIT to tar and feather her or at least to appear to.

“But her role as the first point of contact for disclosures about U.S. surveillance programs has drawn the glare of attention to the independent filmmaker who, abruptly, has pushed documentaries deeper into the realm of journalistic immediacy.

For peers and backers of Poitras, the 2012 recipient of a $500,000 “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, it’s unsurprising that she has seized a story worth telling. However, her crucial involvement with a confidential source and two newspapers on the same big exclusive is extraordinary.” Huffington Post

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is a 5.6 billion dollar slush fund financing NGOs in over 60 countries across the world. MacArthur was a banker owning  Bankers Life and Casualty and other businesses. Their focus is on the media and public affairs.

When you want to silence an outspoken critic, the best and least troublesome way to do it is to buy them off with a foundation grant. Just ask Amy Goodman about that. And Poitras got a half million dollars last year?

Curiously, it was Poitras herself who reportedly brought in the Post reporter and Greenwald on this story after having been anonymously emailed by Snowden back in Jan of this year.

Snowden understands that no email is absolutely untraceable and he sent her and Greenwald emails explaining his desire to snitch out the NSA?

Greenwald has had a target painted on his back for a long time. At least since the Stratfor files leaks and the HBGary scandal. They’ve wanted to  shut Glenn up for years. Now’s their chance……”

AND

“With Obamagod talking about “welcoming the discussion” and saying things like “you can’t have 100% security and 100% privacy” it seems pretty clear that what is happening isn’t about exposing the NSA but rather modifying the public opinion toward the Big Brother state we live in.

And for the record, the NSA may have predicted this would be the real CHANGE of the Obama presidency, but so did MANY of us while independent journalists like Greenwald welcomed the ushering in of George W Obama.

[Lila: I, on the other hand, spotted Obama as the hedge-funds’ candidate in 2007 and voted for no one, although I supported in Ron Paul in 2008.

In 2012, I supported the Paul candidacy on educational grounds until December 2011 and then stopped supporting him too. I finally supported the excellent candidate NOBODY, who so far, hasn’t let me down one bit…]

SCOTT CREIGHTON:

“So that wasn’t too difficult to see even back then… meaning you didn’t need to work for the NSA to figure it out.

The only question surrounding this story at this point, at least for me, as a not-so Obama-loyal democrat, is how much does Greenwald really understand about all of this crap he’s found himself in and how deep is he willing to dig himself into the sludge before he can bring himself to admit he’s been set-up with a Bush gone AWOL document?

Does he have his own MacArthur Foundation paycheck? Is he just too damn proud to admit he’s been had? Is he fighting to push this thing beyond it’s reasonable limits because he fears it will destroy the last remaining opposition to our slide toward Big Brother or has he just gone full retard in his effort to finally land that big ground-breaking world changing story?

The trouble with passion sometimes is that it can be manipulated by people skilled at doing so in ways that leave you blind to reason. The harder you try to defend what you feel passionate about, the looser your grip becomes on the rational. Ask any fundamentalist religious fanatic how that works. Ask any of the remaining Obamaites. Or a Redskins fan (not really fair now that we have RG3… but for two decades it was an apt comparison)

So Mr. Greenwald, you never go full retard. Not as a journalist. And I know I don’t qualify because I don’t get weekly direct deposits from such noble institutions like the Guardian that supported NATO’s merciless bombing of Libya and the ongoing terrorist destabilization campaign in Syria (to say nothing of the WMD claims of yesteryear)

But take the advice of a little lowly blogger who got it right back in 2008 when so many others didn’t… this is not about exposing the NSA. It’s about exposing you Mr. Greenwald and us by association.

In short, the question isn’t is Edward Snowden a legitimate whistle-blower… the question is whether or not Glenn Greenwald is a legitimate journalist or just another tool?”

Lila: Yes. Of course, that’s what it’s all about. So why don’t activists with a great deal of intelligence and far more political and marketing savvy than me figure that out? You tell me.

http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2013/06/is-edward-snowden-agent-of-state-or.html

Hmm. Ole Wenzel at EPJ wakes up and smells the freshly-brewed Langley Java, now that dissent diva, Naomi Klein Wolf says it’s OK to be suspicious….

Well, we forgive him. The boy works hard.

Thus, yours truly again saves the credibility of free-marketers, much tarnished from ill-conceived enthusiasms caught by sticking too close to each other and not close enough to the facts.