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Ecuador has ramped up its defiance of the US over Edward Snowden by waiving preferential trade rights with Washington even as the whistleblower's prospect of reaching Quito dimmed.President Rafael Correa's government said on Thursday it was renouncing the Andean Trade Preference Act to thwart US "blackmail" of Ecuador in the former NSA contractor's asylum request.Officials, speaking at an early morning press conference, also offered a $23m donation for human rights training in the US, a brash riposte to recent US criticism of Ecuador's own human rights record.Betty Tola, the minister of political coordination, said the asylum request had not been processed because Snowden, who is believed to be at Moscow airport, was neither in Ecuador nor at an Ecuadorean embassy or consulate. "The petitioner is not in Ecuadorean territory as the law requires."

The renunciation underlined divisions within Ecuador's government between leftists who have embraced Snowden as an anti-imperialist symbol and centrists who fear diplomatic and economic damage.Some in the government are believed to be annoyed that Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who has sheltered at Ecuador's London embassy to avoid extradition, has seized the limelight in the Snowden saga. Assange caught Quito by surprise last week when he announced Snowden had been given a safe conduct pass. Quito replaced its ambassador to London earlier this month in hope of better managing its famous guest.The waiving of preferential trade rights followed threats from members of the US congress to drop the ATPA in July, when it is due for renewal, unless Ecuador toed the line on Snowden."Ecuador does not accept pressure or threats from anyone, nor does it trade with principles or submit them to mercantile interests, however important those may be," said Fernando Alvarado, the communications secretary. "Ecuador gives up, unilaterally and irrevocably, the said customs benefits."

The fact that political candidates are closely coordinating with friendly Super PACs — making a mockery of a central tenet of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision — is one of the biggest open secrets in Washington. Super PACs are only allowed to accept unlimited contributions on the condition that the money is spent independently of specific campaigns. The Federal Election Commission hasn’t reacted for a variety of reasons, including a lack of hard evidence, vague rules, and a partisan divide among the commissioners so bitter they can’t even agree to investigate obvious crimes. But newly disclosed hacked campaign documents published by WikiLeaks and a hacker who calls himself Guccifer 2.0 reveal in stark terms how Hillary Clinton’s staffers made Super PACs an integral part of her presidential campaign.

The emails show consistent, repeated efforts by the Clinton campaign to collaborate with Super PACs on strategy, research, attacks on political adversaries and fundraising. The cache also reveal meetings between the campaign and Priorities USA Action, and that campaign officials have helped with the group’s fundraising. The files were apparently hacked from a variety of Clinton staffers and have been posted online in recent weeks by Wikileaks and Guccifer 2.0. Obama administration intelligence officials have alleged, without providing evidence, that the email hacks were conducted on behalf of the Russian government in an attempt to disrupt the U.S. elections.

Super PACs, known technically as “Independent Expenditure-Only Political Committees,” are a direct result of the Citizens United court decision. Justice Anthony Kennedy, the author of the decision, proclaimed that deregulating outside money would have no corrupting effect upon candidates because there would be strict firewalls between candidates and outside groups

rominent Republican donor Sheldon Adelson on Thursday said he would support Donald Trump for the US presidency. Get The Times

rominent Republican donor Sheldon Adelson on Thursday said he would support Donald Trump for the US presidency

“Yes. I’m a Republican, he’s a Republican,” Adelson said at a Manhattan event when asked if he would back Trump, according to The New York Times. “He’s our nominee. Whoever the nominee would turn out to be, any one of the 17 — he was one of the 17. He won fair and square.” The Jewish billionaire, and owner of the pro-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu daily Israel Hayom, said he believes Trump “will be good for Israel,” and noted, without elaborating, that the two spoke recently. Adelson donated tens of millions of dollars to Mitt Romney and organizations supporting the Republican challenger in the last election, and was by far the largest such donor. Adelson had previously declared Trump to be “very charming” after meeting him in December, but stopped short of endorsing him or supporting his campaign. Trump has prided himself in his campaign speeches on not needing the support of mega-donors like Adelson, whom other candidates, at the time, were assiduously courting. In October, Trump tweeted “Sheldon Adelson is looking to give big dollars to Rubio because he feels he can mold him into his perfect little puppet. I agree!”

A federal judge has ordered the U.S. State Department to accelerate its review of almost 15,000 previously undisclosed documents recovered by the FBI from private e-mail servers used by Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state.Those documents are among tens of thousands of records the State Department is sifting through to cope with the demands of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the conservative group Judicial Watch as the presidential race between Democrat Clinton and Republican Donald Trump enters a crucial phase.U.S. District James Boasberg on Monday ordered the State Department to process that first batch of records by Sept. 22 and report back to him that day. While he didn’t set a schedule for their being made public, a Justice Department lawyer proposed a phased release beginning Oct. 14, a rate that raised the ire of Judicial Watch lawyer Lauren Burke.

The slow trickle of disclosures virtually ensures Clinton’s private e-mail use during her term as the top U.S. diplomat will hobble her for the 78 days remaining until Election Day. Bloomberg poll results released Aug. 10 show at least 58 percent of likely voters say they are troubled by the issue, which has been a centerpiece of Trump’s attacks on her trustworthiness.FBI Director James Comey said last month that the agency had found what he described as “several thousand work-related e-mails” that weren’t among the 30,000 she had turned over from her time as secretary of state.While Clinton has said her lawyers provided all work-related e-mails and destroyed the remaining personal communications, Comey contradicted that account, saying the Federal Bureau of Investigation recovered documents from several servers that Clinton had used for her private e-mails as well as by scanning the archives of other U.S. officials.

He also said that Clinton’s lawyers had searched only the headings at the top of e-mails to find relevant messages, while agents looked at the entire communications. He said the FBI found no evidence that work-related e-mails were intentionally deleted to conceal them.Justice Department attorney Lisa Olson told Boasberg the State Department review process requires “appraisal” of the public records to determine whether they relate to official business, and a review for responsiveness to the Judicial Watch document demand and whether or not some or all of their content should be deemed exempt from disclosure.“The State Department has concocted a completely new review program under the Freedom of Information Act that we’ve never heard before,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told reporters after the hearing, adding that his organization wants as many documents as possible made public before election day.

Many moons ago, David Brock, now the head of a Hillary Clinton Super PAC, used every resource available to ruin the life of Anita Hill and anyone who supported her. He would lie, cheat, and blatantly misrepresent facts if it meant getting Clarence Thomas through the Supreme Court nomination process. Brock openly admitted it. Now, it appears Brock, who is no doubt great at what he does, is using his same old tools, but for a new cause in a new technological era.

As head of the Correct The Record Super PAC for Hillary Clinton, David Brock has launched something called Barrier Breakers — an online mob of paid trolls designed to attack any and every person who says one cross word about Hillary Clinton on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, or elsewhere.

This isn't a conspiracy theory. They openly spin their strategy on the Correct The Record website and state that they are putting over $1 million behind their efforts. As you likely know, Super PACs are allowed to raise and spend unlimited money on these types of efforts. What's ugly is that we have no idea who these paid operatives are online. According to Correct The Record, many will be former reporters, PR executives, bloggers, and others. We have no idea if they truly say what they mean or mean what they say. Are they even using their actual identities? The Sanders campaign openly stated that they have never paid for any online comments. All of this comes after the revelation from POLITICO that "NBCUniversal, News Corporation, Turner Broadcasting and Thomson Reuters are among more than a dozen media organizations that have made charitable contributions to the Clinton Foundation in recent years, the foundation's records show. The donations range from the low-thousands to the millions."

With only one week left before the US election, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has released heavily redacted files related to a 2001 investigation into the William J. Clinton Foundation.The investigation concerned former President Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich during his last days in office. "In accordance with the policy regarding Public Corruption investigations, the authority of the SAC is requested to open a Preliminary Investigation," one portion of the documents reads.

Both Rich and his partner, Pincus Green, were indicted on a number of charges, including mail fraud, wire fraud, tax evasion, and racketeering, and lived in exile in Switzerland before being pardoned.

"[Redacted] has been a major political donor to the Democratic Party, and these donations may have been intended to influence the fugitive’s pardon," the documents state, adding that "public records also indicate that [redacted] contributed approximately [redacted] to the William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation, a foundation to support the Clinton library. "Pursuant to testimony provided at the aforementioned hearings, it appears that the required pardon standards and procedures were not followed."

I have watched incredulous as the CIA’s blatant lie has grown and grown as a media story – blatant because the CIA has made no attempt whatsoever to substantiate it. There is no Russian involvement in the leaks of emails showing Clinton’s corruption. Yes this rubbish has been the lead today in the Washington Post in the US and the Guardian here, and was the lead item on the BBC main news. I suspect it is leading the American broadcasts also. A little simple logic demolishes the CIA’s claims. The CIA claim they “know the individuals” involved. Yet under Obama the USA has been absolutely ruthless in its persecution of whistleblowers, and its pursuit of foreign hackers through extradition. We are supposed to believe that in the most vital instance imaginable, an attempt by a foreign power to destabilise a US election, even though the CIA knows who the individuals are, nobody is going to be arrested or extradited, or (if in Russia) made subject to yet more banking and other restrictions against Russian individuals? Plainly it stinks. The anonymous source claims of “We know who it was, it was the Russians” are beneath contempt. As Julian Assange has made crystal clear, the leaks did not come from the Russians. As I have explained countless times, they are not hacks, they are insider leaks – there is a major difference between the two. And it should be said again and again, that if Hillary Clinton had not connived with the DNC to fix the primary schedule to disadvantage Bernie, if she had not received advance notice of live debate questions to use against Bernie, if she had not accepted massive donations to the Clinton foundation and family members in return for foreign policy influence, if she had not failed to distance herself from some very weird and troubling people, then none of this would have happened. The continued ability of the mainstream media to claim the leaks lost Clinton the election because of “Russia”, while still never acknowledging the truths the leaks reveal, is Kafkaesque.

I had a call from a Guardian journalist this afternoon. The astonishing result was that for three hours, an article was accessible through the Guardian front page which actually included the truth among the CIA hype: The Kremlin has rejected the hacking accusations, while the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has previously said the DNC leaks were not linked to Russia. A second senior official cited by the Washington Post conceded that intelligence agencies did not have specific proof that the Kremlin was “directing” the hackers, who were said to be one step removed from the Russian government. Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange, called the CIA claims “bullshit”, adding: “They are absolutely making it up.” “I know who leaked them,” Murray said. “I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things. “If what the CIA are saying is true, and the CIA’s statement refers to people who are known to be linked to the Russian state, they would have arrested someone if it was someone inside the United States. “America has not been shy about arresting whistleblowers and it’s not been shy about extraditing hackers. They plainly have no knowledge whatsoever.” But only three hours. While the article was not taken down, the home page links to it vanished and it was replaced by a ludicrous one repeating the mad CIA allegations against Russia and now claiming – incredibly – that the CIA believe the FBI is deliberately blocking the information on Russian collusion. Presumably this totally nutty theory, that Putin is somehow now controlling the FBI, is meant to answer my obvious objection that, if the CIA know who it is, why haven’t they arrested somebody. That bit of course would be the job of the FBI, who those desperate to annul the election now wish us to believe are the KGB. It is terrible that the prime conduit for this paranoid nonsense is a once great newspaper, the Washington Post, which far from investigating executive power, now is a sounding board for totally evidence free anonymous source briefing of utter bullshit from the executive.

Now both Julian Assange and I have stated definitively the leak does not come from Russia. Do we credibly have access? Yes, very obviously. Very, very few people can be said to definitely have access to the source of the leak. The people saying it is not Russia are those who do have access. After access, you consider truthfulness. Do Julian Assange and I have a reputation for truthfulness? Well in 10 years not one of the tens of thousands of documents WikiLeaks has released has had its authenticity successfully challenged. As for me, I have a reputation for inconvenient truth telling. Contrast this to the “credible sources” Freedland relies on. What access do they have to the whistleblower? Zero. They have not the faintest idea who the whistleblower is. Otherwise they would have arrested them. What reputation do they have for truthfulness? It’s the Clinton gang and the US government, for goodness sake. In fact, the sources any serious journalist would view as “credible” give the opposite answer to the one Freedland wants. But in what passes for Freedland’s mind, “credible” is 100% synonymous with “establishment”. When he says “credible sources” he means “establishment sources”. That is the truth of the “fake news” meme. You are not to read anything unless it is officially approved by the elite and their disgusting, crawling whores of stenographers like Freedland.

Messages found stored on Clinton’s private email server show that Berger – a convicted thief of classified documents – had been advising Clinton while she served as secretary of state and had access to emails containing classified information. For example, in an email dated Sept. 22, 2009, Berger advised Clinton advised how she could leverage information to make Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu more cooperative in discussions with the Obama administration over a settlement freeze.

Law firm ties Berger, Lynch, Mills Berger worked as a partner in the Washington law firm Hogan & Hartson from 1973 to 1977, before taking a position as the deputy director of policy planning at the State Department in the Carter administration. When Carter lost his re-election bid, Berger returned to Hogan & Hartson, where he worked until he took leave in 1988 to act as foreign policy adviser in Gov. Michael Dukakis’ presidential campaign. When Dukakis was defeated, Berger returned to Hogan & Hartson until he became foreign policy adviser for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992. On March 28, WND reported Lynch was a litigation partner for eight years at Hogan & Hartson, from March 2002 through April 2010. Mills also worked at Hogan & Hartson, for two years, starting in 1990, before she joined then President-elect Bill Clinton’s transition team, on her way to securing a position as White House deputy counsel in the Clinton administration. According to documents Hillary Clinton’s first presidential campaign made public in 2008, Hogan & Hartson’s New York-based partner Howard Topaz was the tax lawyer who filed income tax returns for Bill and Hillary Clinton beginning in 2004. In addition, Hogan & Hartson in Virginia filed a patent trademark request on May 19, 2004, for Denver-based MX Logic Inc., the computer software firm that developed the email encryption system used to manage Clinton’s private email server beginning in July 2013. A tech expert has observed that employees of MX Logic could have had access to all the emails that went through her account.

A slip of the tongue from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last month is worthy of attention. In an unprepared response to a Likud Knesset member, Netanyahu said: “What I’m willing to give to the Palestinians is not exactly a state with full authority, but rather a state-minus, which is why the Palestinians don’t agree [to it].”

This almost never happens to Netanyahu. He is calculated, in contrast to Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman who once threatened to execute Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and destroy his movement. In his public appearances, Netanyahu’s statements are carefully worded. His mind operates mechanically, and it is for this reason that a slip of the tongue warrants attention. He has given away more than he intended to. Netanyahu’s words need to be tied back his stance during the negotiations with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, as part of the 2013-4 peace talks initiated by then-Secretary of State John Kerry. Netanyahu’s position was that even following an agreement, Israel would retain security control over the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea over the coming decades. The best case scenario for the Palestinians would have been a severely handicapped state. What would a less ideal scenario have looked like? In order to answer that question, we must also look at Netanyahu’s support for the Formalization Law and for settlement expansion, two processes he has pushed forward with since Donald Trump entered the White House. The significance of these processes, territorially-speaking, is the end of the “temporary” occupation and the effective annexation of around 60 percent of the West Bank.

Where Netanyahu differs from Jewish Home head Naftali Bennett is in the type and reach of annexation, not in the principle of annexation itself. Bennett wants to advance from legal to practical annexation as soon as possible. Netanyahu is more cautious. He first of all wants de facto annexation, and to do it in stages so that the world and the Palestinians can adjust to the new reality.

Some major U.S. corporations that support climate science in their public relations materials actively work to derail regulations and laws addressing global warming through lobbying, campaign donations and support of various advocacy groups, according to a new report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental and scientific integrity group.

The report provides the outlines of corporations’ activism, but much remains murky, the study’s authors said. Most notably, the report could not quantify how much money the companies give to so-called independent political groups that run ads supporting or bashing candidates because federal law doesn’t require corporations to disclose their giving.

Three of Britain’s most prominent campaign groups have today announced the launch of a legal challenge against the actions of GCHQ, alleging it has illegally intruded on the privacy of millions of British and European citizens. Big Brother Watch, the Open Rights Group and English PEN, together with German internet activist Constanze Kurz, have filed papers at the European Court of Human Rights bringing an action against the UK Government.

 They allege that by collecting vast amounts of data leaving or entering the UK, including the content of emails and social media messages, the UK’s spy agency has acted illegally. When details recently emerged in the media about the Prism and Tempora programmes, codenames for previously secret online surveillance operations, it was revealed that GCHQ has the capacity to collect more than 21 petabytes of data a day – equivalent to sending all the information in all the books in the British Library 192 times every 24 hours. The disclosures have raised serious parliamentary concerns both in Britain and at the EU level. Deighton Pierce Glynn solicitors represent the applicants, instructing Helen Mountfield QC of Matrix Chambers and Tom Hickman and Ravi Mehta of Blackstone Chambers. The legal action will be funded through donations at www.privacynotprism.org.uk

For more than six months, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have been pouring out from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Germany’s Der Spiegel, and Brazil’s O Globo, among other places.  Yet no one has pointed out the combination of factors that made the NSA’s expanding programs to monitor the world seem like such a slam-dunk development in Washington.  The answer is remarkably simple.  For an imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSA’s latest technological breakthroughs look like a bargain basement deal when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line -- like, in fact, the steal of the century.  Even when disaster turned out to be attached to them, the NSA’s surveillance programs have come with such a discounted price tag that no Washington elite was going to reject them.

What exactly was the aim of such an unprecedented program of massive domestic and planetary spying, which clearly carried the risk of controversy at home and abroad? Here, an awareness of the more than century-long history of U.S. surveillance can guide us through the billions of bytes swept up by the NSA to the strategic significance of such a program for the planet’s last superpower. What the past reveals is a long-term relationship between American state surveillance and political scandal that helps illuminate the unacknowledged reason why the NSA monitors America’s closest allies. Not only does such surveillance help gain intelligence advantageous to U.S. diplomacy, trade relations, and war-making, but it also scoops up intimate information that can provide leverage -- akin to blackmail -- in sensitive global dealings and negotiations of every sort. The NSA’s global panopticon thus fulfills an ancient dream of empire. With a few computer key strokes, the agency has solved the problem that has bedeviled world powers since at least the time of Caesar Augustus: how to control unruly local leaders, who are the foundation for imperial rule, by ferreting out crucial, often scurrilous, information to make them more malleable.

Once upon a time, such surveillance was both expensive and labor intensive. Today, however, unlike the U.S. Army’s shoe-leather surveillance during World War I or the FBI’s break-ins and phone bugs in the Cold War years, the NSA can monitor the entire world and its leaders with only 100-plus probes into the Internet’s fiber optic cables. This new technology is both omniscient and omnipresent beyond anything those lacking top-secret clearance could have imagined before the Edward Snowden revelations began.  Not only is it unimaginably pervasive, but NSA surveillance is also a particularly cost-effective strategy compared to just about any other form of global power projection. And better yet, it fulfills the greatest imperial dream of all: to be omniscient not just for a few islands, as in the Philippines a century ago, or a couple of countries, as in the Cold War era, but on a truly global scale. In a time of increasing imperial austerity and exceptional technological capability, everything about the NSA’s surveillance told Washington to just “go for it.”  This cut-rate mechanism for both projecting force and preserving U.S. global power surely looked like a no-brainer, a must-have bargain for any American president in the twenty-first century -- before new NSA documents started hitting front pages weekly, thanks to Snowden, and the whole world began returning the favor.

NEW YORK -- Convicted hacker Jeremy Hammond was sentenced Friday to 10 years in prison for stealing internal emails from the global intelligence firm Stratfor.

Hammond, 28, has a lengthy criminal record for his protests both online and off against targets like the 2004 Republican National Convention and pro-Iraq War activists. But stealing Stratfor files as part of the online hacking collective Anonymous gave him a new level of notoriety. In May, he pleaded guilty to one conspiracy charge for hacking the Texas-based private intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor. The security breach resulted in the theft of employee emails and account information for approximately 860,000 Stratfor subscribers and clients, including information from 60,000 credit cards. Although Hammond did not use the credit cards himself, he urged supporters to use them to make donations to charities. The resulting fraudulent charges led to headaches for nonprofits and for the private individuals who had their phone numbers and email addresses exposed. The government charges originally added up to 30 years in prison, but Hammond took a plea deal for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a federal anti-hacking law also used to prosecute internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz. He admitted to hacking several other websites, including the Arizona Department of Public Safety, Special Forces Gear, the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association, and the sheriff's office in Jefferson County, Ala.

Nearly 5 million emails obtained in the Stratfor hack were turned over to WikiLeaks by Hammond and published as the “Global Intelligence Files.” They revealed domestic spying on activists, including Occupy Wall Street. The resulting media publicity led some, including 4,000 online petition backers and Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, to hail him as a whistleblower. But to the federal government, he was little more than a common thief. “While he billed himself as fighting for an anarchist cause, in reality, Jeremy Hammond caused personal and financial chaos for individuals whose identities and money he took and for companies whose businesses he decided he didn’t like," United States Attorney Preet Bharara said in a May statement. On Friday, Hammond, who has been in detention for 20 months, struck back. While apologizing to the innocent people who had their personal information exposed as a result of his leaks, he lashed out at the FBI, and Hector Xavier Monsegur, an informant widely known by his online name "Sabu." For months, Hammond claimed, Sabu guided him as he hacked the Stratfor website and thousands more around the world.

Washington, DC, November 22, 2013 – The final shipment of highly enriched uranium from former Soviet nuclear warheads to the U.S. on November 14, and President Obama's award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to former Senator Richard Lugar on November 20, have brought new public attention to the underappreciated success story of the Nunn-Lugar initiative — the subject of a new research project by the National Security Archive, which organized the first "critical oral history" gathering this fall of U.S. and Russian veterans of Nunn-Lugar. The former Soviet Union in the 1990s achieved an unprecedented "proliferation in reverse" with the denuclearization of former republics and the consolidation of nuclear weapons and fissile material inside Russia. Notwithstanding the well-grounded fears of policymakers on both sides of the waning Cold War in 1990-1991, the dissolution of the Soviet Union did not result in a nuclear Yugoslavia spread over eleven time zones. Instead, the "doomsday clock" of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists marched backwards, in its largest leaps ever away from midnight. Key to this extraordinary accomplishment was the U.S.-Russian Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, colloquially known as Nunn-Lugar after its two leading sponsors in the U.S. Senate, Sam Nunn of Georgia and Richard Lugar of Indiana.

Unfortunately, this success did not get major publicity at the time, and remains largely unknown today outside the expert communities in both countries. This lack of appreciation culminated in 2012 with Russia's withdrawal from the program and assertion of independence from foreign aid. Yet below the radar the cooperation continued, for example with the February 2013 U.S.-Russian removal of enriched uranium from the Czech Republic, and the September 2013 agreement to work together to destroy Syrian chemical weapons — clear signals of the continuing relevance of the two-decade-long Nunn-Lugar experiment.

One week earlier, on November 14, the Washington Post reported from St. Petersburg, Russia: "Take a canister, fill it with down-blended uranium worth $2.5 million, secure it and 39 others to the deck of a container ship, send it off toward Baltimore, and you've just about completed a deal that provided commercial uses in the United States for the remains of 20,000 dismantled Russian nuclear bombs." The story, headlined "U.S.-Russia uranium deal sends its last shipment," by Will Englund, reported: "The program provided jobs to nuclear technicians at a time when Russia was in chaos; it sparked the development of a dilution process than enables bombs to become fuel for power plants; and it may have helped to keep poorly secured nuclear materials out of the wrong hands — at least that's what Americans say. Russians strongly deny that the materials were not secured."

In response to documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden, the congressional committees in charge of overseeing the government's intelligence operations have come to the defense of the surveillance and data collection programs, and the agencies that administer them. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have rejected attempts to reform the programs while advancing legislation to bolster their legal status and providing a funding boost to the National Security Agency (NSA) to protect their secrecy. The U.S. intelligence budget for 2013 is $52.6 billion. According to the Washington Post, "top secret spending" is divided into four main spending categories: data collection, data analysis, management, facilities and support, and data processing and exploitation. Seventy percent of the intelligence budget is used to pay private contractors. Several of the companies receiving intelligence contracts are major donors to members of the intelligence committees, including L-3 Communications, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Honeywell International. Data: MapLight analysis of campaign contributions from political action committees (PACs) and individuals from the top 20 intelligence services contractors working with the Department of Defense, ranked by total value of contracts received, to members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Data source: Federal Election Commission from January 1, 2005 - October 4, 2013. Department of Defense intelligence services contracts source: USASpending (contract totals as of September 26, 2013)

In total, members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have received $3.7 million from top intelligence services contractors since January 1, 2005. Members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence from Maryland -- home of NSA headquarters -- led the committees in money received from top intelligence contractors. Representative C.A. "Dutch" Ruppersberger, D-Md., is the largest recipient, having received $363,600 since January 1, 2005. Senator Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., is the second largest recipient, having received $210,150. Republican members of House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have received $1.86 million since January 1, 2005, while Democrat members have received $1.82 million over the same time period. Members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence have received $2.2 million since January 1, 2005 from top intelligence services contractors, while members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have received $1.5 million. Lockheed Martin has given $798,910 to members the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence since January 1, 2005, more than any of the other top 20 intelligence service contractors. Northrop Grumman has given $753,101, the second highest amount, and Honeywell has given $714,913, the third highest amount.

TOP 20 INTELLIGENCE SERVICES CONTRACTORS CONTRIBUTIONS TO CONGRESSIONAL INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEES

It is alleged that some of the bail money that released Sturgis and the other Watergate burglars was drug money from the CIA asset turned drug trafficker, Manuel Artime, and delivered by Artime’s money-launderer, Ramón Milián Rodríguez. After the Iran-Contra scandal went public, Milián Rodríguez was investigated by a congressional committee – not for Watergate, but because, in support of the Contras, he had managed two Costa Rican seafood companies, Frigorificos and Ocean Hunter, that laundered drug money.6

In the 1950s Wall Street was a dominating complex. It included not just banks and other financial institutions but also the oil majors whose cartel arrangements were successfully defended against the U.S. Government by the Wall Street law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, home to the Dulles brothers. The inclusion of Wall Street conforms with Franklin Roosevelt’s observation in 1933 to his friend Col. E.M. House that “The real truth … is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.”18 FDR’s insight is well illustrated by the efficiency with which a group of Wall Street bankers (including Nelson Rockefeller’s grandfather Nelson Aldrich) were able in a highly secret meeting in 1910 to establish the Federal Reserve System – a system which in effect reserved oversight of the nation’s currency supply and of all America’s banks in the not impartial hands of its largest.19 The political clout of the quasi-governmental Federal Reserve Board was clearly demonstrated in 2008, when Fed leadership secured instant support from two successive administrations for public money to rescue the reckless management of Wall Street banks: banks Too Big To Fail, and of course far Too Big To Jail, but not Too Big To Bail.20

since its outset, the CIA has always had access to large amounts of off-the books or offshore funds to support its activities. Indeed, the power of the purse has usually worked in an opposite sense, since those in control of deep state offshore funds supporting CIA activities have for decades also funded members of Congress and of the executive – not vice versa. The last six decades provide a coherent and continuous picture of historical direction being provided by this deep state power of the purse, trumping and sometimes reversing the conventional state. Let us resume some of the CIA’s sources of offshore and off-the-books funding for its activities. The CIA’s first covert operation was the use of “over $10 million in captured Axis funds to influence the [Italian] election [of 1948].”25 (The fundraising had begun at the wealthy Brook Club in New York; but Allen Dulles, then still a Wall Street lawyer, persuaded Washington, which at first had preferred a private funding campaign, to authorize the operation through the National Security Council and the CIA.)26 Dulles, together with George Kennan and James Forrestal, then found a way to provide a legal source for off-the-books CIA funding, under the cover of the Marshall Plan. The three men “helped devise a secret codicil [to the Marshall Plan] that gave the CIA the capability to conduct political warfare. It let the agency skim millions of dollars from the plan.”27

mage: ISIS clearly did not materialize spontaneously within Iraq, it hasclearly redeployed from its NATO-sponsored destruction of Syria to northern Iraq, perhaps in an attempt to justify a NATO incursion and thecreation of a buffer zone straddling Syrian, Iraqi, and even possibly Iranian territory with the goal of targeting Iran directly with ISIS.   June 13, 2014 (Tony Cartalucci - LD) - Heavily armed, well funded, and organized as a professional, standing army, the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) swept southward into Iraq from Turkey and northeastern Syria, taking the cities of Mosul and Tikrit, and now threaten the Iraqi capital city of Baghdad itself. The United States was sure to prop up two unfounded narratives - the first being that US intelligence agencies, despite assets in Iraq and above it in the form of surveillance drones, failed to give warning of the invasion, and that ISIS is some sort of self-sustaining terror organization carving out a "state" by "robbing banks" and collecting "donations" on Twitter. The Wall Street Journal in its report, "Iraqi Drama Catches U.S. Off Guard," stated: The quickly unfolding drama prompted a White House meeting Wednesday of top policy makers and military leaders who were caught off guard by the swift collapse of Iraqi security forces, officials acknowledged.

mage: ISIS has convoys of brand new matching Toyota's the samevehicles seen among admittedly NATO-armed terrorists operatingeverywhere from Libya to Syria, and now Iraq. It is a synthetic, state-sponsored regional mercenary expeditionary force.

The question remains, if a Lebanese newspaper knew ISIS was on the move eastward, why didn't the CIA? The obvious answer is the CIA did know, and is simply feigning ignorance at the expense of their reputation to bait its enemies into suspecting the agency of  incompetency rather than complicity in the horrific terroristic swath ISIS is now carving through northern Iraq. Described extensively in the full New Eastern Outlook Journal (NEO) report, "NATO’s Terror Hordes in Iraq a Pretext for Syria Invasion," the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, have funded and armed terrorists operating in Syria for the past 3 years to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars - coincidentally the same amount that ISIS would require to gain primacy among militant groups fighting in Syria and to mobilize forces capable of crossing into Iraq and overwhelming Baghdad's national defenses.

What many other communities across America have learned since is that we're living in what the writer Radley Balko calls the age of the "warrior cop". And when warrior cops want a straight-outta-Baghdad toy, it's increasingly and unnecessarily simple for them to use a federally enabled slush-fund to wreak havoc – particularly against minorities, and even at a pumpkin festival. It's also pretty simple to start accounting for all the high-tech violence."Before another small town's police force gets a $700,000 gift from the Defense Department that it can't maintain or manage," Rep Hank Johnson of Georgia told me this week, "we need to press pause and revisit the merits of a militarized America."

The ACLU released a devastating report this week examining more than 800 incidents of Swat team deployments conducted by 20 law enforcement agencies between 2010 and 2013. It's a small sample of the estimated 45,000 deployments that occur in the US each year (up from 1,400% from the '80s), but the report reveals a picture of law enforcement as flash-bang assault unit, with hardly an actual suspect in harm's way: pandemonium in a baby's crib; a grandfather of 12 killed by a discharged gun; Swat officers gunning down a mother as she died, child in her arms. According to the ACLU study, 79% of the incidents surveyed involved a Swat team searching a person's home, and more than 62% of the cases involved searches for drugs. That's not what Swat teams were made for.America is winding down wars abroad – depending on what the hell happens in Iraq, of course – but we are fueling an addiction to armed conflict here at home.As Balko notes in his book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop, "America's cops have increasingly come to resemble ground troops."

But the federal government has been enabling even more localized branches of law enforcement to get its hands on heavy-duty artillery for the last 20 years, when the Reagan administration formalized the Pentagon's so-called 1033 Program. It sends "excess" military equipment to local police departments, and combined with the Homeland Security operation that provides grants to purchase such equipment, we've got a veritable firearms sale funnelling from Washington on down to the local station house. And when local law enforcement is making hundreds of thousands of dollars off seized drug money – sometimes illegally – you've got the makings of a War Zone on Main Street.Rep Johnson has plans to introduce a bill that would reform the 1033 Program, which donated at least $500bn per year in military gear to virtually every police department in the country. "We not only lack serious oversight and accountability," Johnson wrote me in an email on Tuesday, "but we need some parameters put in place for what is appropriate." His legislation would put limitations on the transfer of certain kinds of military-grade equipment, and require the Pentagon to account for transfers of all such equipment in an annual report to Congress.

The Irish High Court has ordered a review of the decision by the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (ODPC) not to investigate Facebook’s links To PRISM and the US National Security Agency (NSA), after it was contested by a group of law students from Austria. The group calling itself ‘Europe-v-Facebook’ had previously demanded a full investigation into the relationship between Internet companies and the US intelligence agency as it accuses Facebook of breaking the law in supplying NSA with personal information about its European users.

The Irish High Court has ordered a review of the decision by the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (ODPC) not to investigate Facebook’s links To PRISM and the US National Security Agency (NSA), after it was contested by a group of law students from Austria. The group calling itself ‘Europe-v-Facebook’ had previously demanded a full investigation into the relationship between Internet companies and the US intelligence agency as it accuses Facebook of breaking the law in supplying NSA with personal information about its European users.

The Irish High Court has ordered a review of the decision by the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (ODPC) not to investigate Facebook’s links To PRISM and the US National Security Agency (NSA), after it was contested by a group of law students from Austria. The group calling itself ‘Europe-v-Facebook’ had previously demanded a full investigation into the relationship between Internet companies and the US intelligence agency as it accuses Facebook of breaking the law in supplying NSA with personal information about its European users.

Some 60 nations and partner organizations have made commitments to help counter the Islamic State with military forces or resources, according to a new report from the Congressional Research Service. But coalition efforts suffer from a lack of coherence, CRS said. “Without a single authority responsible for prioritizing and adjudicating between different multinational civilian and military lines of effort, different actors often work at cross-purposes without intending to do so.” CRS tabulated the contributions of each of the coalition partners by country and capability. “Each nation is contributing to the coalition in a manner commensurate with its national interests and comparative advantage, although reporting on nonmilitary contributions tends to be sporadic,” the report said. “Some illustrative examples of the kinds of counter-IS assistance countries provided as the coalition was being formed in September 2014 include: Switzerland’s donation $9 million in aid to Iraq, Belgium’s contribution of 13 tons of aid to Iraq generally, Italy’s contribution of $2.5 million of weaponry (including machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and a million rounds of ammunition), and Japan’s granting of $6 million in emergency aid to specifically help displaced people in Northern Iraq.” See Coalition Contributions to Countering the Islamic State, August 4, 2015.