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"People say, we have to do it because this is what Israel wants." - "The Neocons are winning this battle here at home and they're controlling our foreign policy"

"People say, we have to do it because this is what Israel wants." - "The Neocons are winning this battle here at home and they're controlling our foreign policy"

If there is one word missing from the United States government’s post-9/11 lexicon it is “accountability.” While perfectly legal though illicit sexual encounters apparently continue to rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors, leading to resignations, no one has been punished for malfeasance, torture, secret prisons, or extraordinary renditions. Indeed, the Obama administration stated in 2009 that it would not punish CIA torturers because it prefers to “look forward and not back,” a decision not to prosecute that was recently confirmed by Attorney General Eric Holder in two cases involving the deaths of detainees after particularly brutal Agency interrogations. What the White House decision almost certainly means is that the president would prefer to avoid a tussle with the Republicans in congress over national security that would inevitably reveal a great deal of dirty laundry belonging to both parties.

The bipartisan willingness to avoid confrontation over possible war crimes makes the recently completed 6,000 page long Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture an extraordinary document. Though it is still classified and might well never see the light of day even in any sanitized or bowdlerized form, its principal conclusions have been leaking out in the media over the past two weeks. It directly addresses the principal argument that has been made by Bush administration devotees and continues to be advanced regarding the CIA torture agenda:  that vital information obtained by “enhanced interrogation techniques” led to the killing of Osama bin Laden. According to the report, no information obtained by torture was critical to the eventual assassination of the al-Qaeda leader, nor has it been found to be an indispensable element in any of the other terrorism cases that were examined by the Senate committee.

What exactly does that mean? It means that torture, far from being an essential tool in the counter-terrorism effort, has not provided information that could not be obtained elsewhere and using less coercive methods. Senator Diane Feinstein, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee and has had access to the entire classified document, elaborated, explaining that the investigation carried out by the Senate included every detainee held by CIA, examining “the conditions under which they were detained, how they were interrogated, the intelligence they actually provided and the accuracy or inaccuracy of CIA descriptions about the program to the White House, Department of Justice, Congress and others.” It “uncovers startling details about the CIA detention and interrogation program…” The report has 35,000 footnotes and investigators perused 6 million pages of official records, which is why it has taken more than two years to produce. The Senate inquiry’s conclusions inevitably lead to the assumption that there has been a whole lot of lying and obfuscation going on in connection with the so-called war on terror.

the ultimate bait-and-switch."

The White House and leaders of both parties actually agreed to this preposterous document, but it died in the House when 95 Democrats lined up against it.

Borrowers are discovering that their foreclosed homes are coming back to haunt them -- long after they have moved out. In these "zombie foreclosures," borrowers move out after their bank schedules a foreclosure auction only to learn months or years later that the auction never took place or the bank never transferred the deed. That means the borrower still technically owns the house and is on the hook for property taxes, fees and homeowners' association dues. Since the housing bubble burst seven years ago, almost two million properties have started but never completed the foreclosure process, according to RealtyTrac. While no one knows the exact number, it's estimated that tens of thousands could be zombie foreclosures. Many of these homes are in low-income communities where foreclosures are so difficult to sell that lenders sometimes delay taking possession to save on taxes and other costs that then stay under the borrower's name. Those debts can then go unpaid for years because the borrower is unaware they owe them, further slamming their credit score and making life after foreclosure even harder.

HONG KONG - So it's going to be Our Man in Quito. The narrative may not be as elegant as Graham Greene's, but the plot certainly beats the Bourne trilogy - because it's happening live, in real time, right in front of our eyes. It takes a former CIA asset to beat US "intelligence" - more like intel deprivation. The story of Edward Snowden's escape from Hong Kong is textbook. This correspondent, at dim sum on Sunday, was alerted by a source; "Get ready for something big; he's leaving soon." That was about 12:30 pm Hong Kong time. In fact Snowden had already flown from Chek Lap Kok on SU 213 <a href='http://asianmedia.com/GAAN/www/delivery/ck.php?n=a9473bc7&cb=%n' target='_blank'><img src='http://asianmedia.com/GAAN/www/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=36&cb=%n&n=a9473bc7&ct0=%c' border='0' alt='' ></a> bound for Moscow at 11:00 am. But nobody knew it yet. Hong Kong was still digesting the front page of the South China Morning Post displaying yet more devastating evidence of US cyber-spying of China.

Asia Times Online had also learned from another source close to Snowden's tight circle that a short stint in Hong Kong was always part of Plan A; he never intended to ask for political asylum in either Hong Kong or China. He was already focused on a "third country". What he did was to use Hong Kong as an ideal platform to unveil the inner workings of the Orwellian/Panopticon US surveillance state. First a set of general revelations to The Guardian. Then he went underground to prepare his escape - as he knew Washington would come after him with all guns (drones?) blazing. And then, a final set of revelations to the South China Morning Post closely focused on Asia and China. When Washington woke up to it, he was already out of the building. Jason Bourne, eat your heart out. Snowden was not "allowed to slip away". It all revolved around a meticulously timed operation involving Snowden, the Hong Kong government and WikiLeaks mediation.

So the US government thought it could simply intimate to Hong Kong to do it "our way or the highway" - while at the same time news of US serial hacking of Hong Kong and China was front-page news. Once again, five hours into Snowden's flight to Moscow, US corporate media was still parroting the official narrative - stressed by Obama's National Security Adviser Tom Donilon - that the noose was tightening around his neck. Whether Beijing had a subtly indirect input on the Hong Kong government's decision is open to a South China Sea of speculation. The fact is, not only was this a perfect solution for Hong Kong - which would be facing relentless pressure from the US government to extradite him - but also for Beijing, which maintains its upper-hand, furiously demanding a lot of explanations about the NSA targeting Chinese phone companies, the Asia-Pacific fiber-optic network and even Beijing's Tsinghua University.

Last week’s post by Megan Graham is certainly a welcome contribution in explaining the implications of the Max Schrems case by the European Union Court of Justice, and specifically how it relates to the Safe Harbor arrangement between the US and the EU. Let me add a different perspective: Irrespective of its consequences for Safe Harbor, last week’s ruling is hugely important on a more general level, namely for the understanding of what the right to privacy entails in Europe and what this means for mass surveillance. Through its ruling in Max Schrems the EU’s highest court has established that: Mere access by public authorities to confidential or group-specific communications data constitutes an intrusion into the right to privacy, even without any further processing of that data; and While indiscriminate intrusion into “metadata” may constitute a particularly serious intrusion into the right to privacy, access to “content” data will affect the essence of the right to privacy.

These findings were made under Article 7 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, a broad provision on the right to respect for one’s private life. This provision of the EU Charter, which is a part of the foundational treaty framework of the European Union, is almost identical to Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, a treaty legally binding for broader Europe and routinely a part of domestic legal orders. It remains to be seen whether the guardian of the latter framework, the European Court of Human Rights, will also be courageous enough to determine that indiscriminate mass surveillance that provides access to “content” data breaches the essential core of the right to privacy. The highest EU court already took that bold step. One of the most important implications of identifying government access to content as breaching the essence of the right to privacy, is that it negates the need for a proportionality assessment. Measures that compromise the essence of privacy have already crossed a red line, and there is no need for any further “balancing” between privacy and security. Therefore, the Max Schrems ruling is a huge blow to many of the current methods of electronic mass surveillance, including those practiced by the US and several European countries (including the United Kingdom).

Several additional points from my earlier post in Verfassungsblog about this case are also worth noting. First, the EU court did not really dwell on the separate Article 8 provision of the EU Charter on Fundamental Rights, concerning the right to the protection of personal data. This was perhaps because that provision is triggered by the “processing” of data, while the general privacy (Article 7) impact comes into play through mere “access.” Another point is that while it was easy to establish the jurisdiction of the EU court over data transfers from Europe to Facebook’s servers in the US, it may be much harder to bring a case before that court concerning “upstream” methods of mass surveillance, such as the NSA’s tapping of transatlantic fiber optic telecommunications cables. Perhaps most importantly, the substantive ruling in the Schrems case is formulated in a way that it would apply to any method of mass surveillance that gives public authorities access to the content of ordinary people’s private communications, including communications intended for a group of people but not for the authorities. Hence, the ruling is a major contribution as to what the right to privacy substantively means in Europe.

The CIA’s inspector general has accidentally deleted its only copy of a controversial Senate report about the agency’s history of brutal interrogation techniques, opening a new front in the long battle over the document.Like many federal agencies across Washington, the spy agency watchdog was handed a copy of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s full, 6,700-page report about the CIA’s former methods shortly after it was completed. The full version of the report remains classified, however a 500-page executive summary was released to the public in late 2014.ADVERTISEMENTBut at some point last summer, both the electronic copy and a hard disk were destroyed, the watchdog told Congress.Sen. Dianne FeinsteinDianne FeinsteinCIA watchdog ‘accidentally destroyed’ copy of ‘torture report’ Overnight Energy: Senate rejects Iran measure, clearing way for energy spending bill Senate votes down Iran amendment to energy spending bill MORE (D-Calif.), the driving force behind the 2014 report, sent letters to the CIA and Justice Department on Friday confirming that the spy agency’s inspector general “has misplaced and/or accidentally destroyed” its copy of the report.According to Yahoo News, which first reported the development, the deletion was described as “inadvertent.”

Most Americans don’t even know how many countries their government is currently bombing (it was at least seven by 2014). Obama dropped 23,144 bombs in Middle Eastern countries in 2015 alone. By that count, you’d think ISIS would be erased from the face of the planet. Instead, more and more “boots” are being placed “on the ground” in Iraq and Syria all the time. Just because no one has said it’s an official “war” doesn’t make it anything less… and people aren’t even paying attention anymore to whether or not the wars our government is waging are actually Constitutional or not. Now an Army Captain with “ISIS Operation Inherent Resolve” stationed at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait has filed a lawsuit against his Commander-in-Chief over the Unconstitutional war Obama is waging against ISIS. “To honor my oath, I am asking the court to tell the president that he must get proper authority from Congress, under the War Powers Resolution, to wage the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria,” Army Capt. Nathan Michael Smith says in the 53-page document he filed today in the DC US District Court.

As the fifteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks draws closer, family members of those lost in the attacks are making an emotional appeal to Congress to clear the way for their lawsuit against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for its alleged financial and logistical support of the hijackers. In an effort led by the September 11th Advocates—five women who lost loved ones in the attacks—surviving family members and other concerned members of the public are posting videos to a Facebook page and a YouTube channel in which they urge the House of Representatives to promptly pass the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) when they return from summer recess on Tuesday, September 6.

The bill, which would modify U.S. sovereign immunity law to allow suits against foreign government sponsors of terrorism, passed the Senate by unanimous voice vote. Now, the September 11th Advocates are pressing Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy to schedule a vote on the measure before the 15th anniversary of the attacks.

Though the measure passed the Senate unanimously, Breitweiser says JASTA faces formidable opposition down the stretch. Saudi Arabia has warned Congress and the White House that it may be compelled to divest upwards of a $750 billion dollars in U.S. assets if the measure passes, and President Obama has expressed reluctance to sign the bill if it advances to his desk.

WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange on Wednesday night promised to leak “thousands” of document pages pertaining to Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee and the presidential election. Speaking to Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, the mysterious Assange claimed an upcoming leak would have a “significant” impact on the coming general election. Story Continued Below “We have a lot of material, thousands of pages of material,” said the WikiLeaks leader, who remains in exile at Ecuador's embassy in London. “There's a variety of different types of documents and different types of institutions that are associated with the election campaign, some quite unexpected angles that are, you know, quite interesting, some even entertaining.”

While refusing to unveil a timetable for the leak, Assange addressed whether the documents in the group’s position could be damaging to the Democratic nominee. “I think it's significant,” he said. “You know, it depends on how it catches fire in the public and in the media.”

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s latest report on the alleged “election hacking” by Russia includes a substantial section focused around the idea that Russian government-funded channel RT is overtly anti-American. This is a common enough accusation, but when set out in a multi-page report format, a lot of the charges fall remarkable short. Nowhere was this more apparent, however, than on the first page of the Annex on RT, which presented the fact that RT America hosted US presidential debates which included third-party candidates. There has of course been long-standing annoyance among many in the US that the “mainstream” US media’s debates consistently exclude all but the Democratic and Republican candidates. US spy agencies, however, see this exclusion as such a core aspect of US democracy that they are presenting more inclusive debates as inherently anti-American. In 2012 RT hosted a third-party candidates debate which included Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein. In 2016 RT ran a pair of primary debates for the same two parties focusing on foreign policy as well as electoral reform. Beyond giving third parties an avenue of debate, the Annex also accuses RT of myriad other “misdeeds” of a similarly dubious nature, complaining RT introduced the show “Breaking the Set” in 2012 with an eye toward “the promotion of radical discontent,” and ran stories critical of the environmental fallout of fracking.

While anti-fracking news is common across a lot of media outlets, the report concluded that the only reason RT could possibly be concerned with the practice was that they were trying to protect the profits of major Russian natural gas giant OAO Gazprom. The report also notes RT coverage of police brutality in the US, its sympathy for the Occupy Wall Street movement, and criticism of mass surveillance as signs they were trying to “undermine viewers’ trust in US democratic procedures.”

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.

This was a great year for adoption of HTTPS encryption for secure connections to websites. HTTPS is an essential technology for security and privacy on the Web, and we've long been asking sites to turn it on to protect their users from spying (and from censorship and tampering with site content). This year, lots of factors came together to make it happen, including ongoing news about surveillance, advances in Web server capacity, nudges from industry, government, and Web browsers, and the Let's Encrypt certificate authority. By some measures, more than half of page loads in Firefox and in Chrome are now secured with HTTPS—the first time this has ever happened in the Web's history. That's right: for the first time ever, most pages viewed on the Web were encrypted! (As another year-in-review post will discuss, browsers are also experimenting with and rolling out stronger encryption technologies to better protect those connections.)

Sites large and small took turned on HTTPS in 2016, often using certificates from the Let's Encrypt certificate authority (sometimes with EFF's Certbot software, or a range of other options). In just a single year of broad public availability, Let's Encrypt has now helped enable secure connections for over 21 million websites, most of which never had certificates before.

A sizeable part of the growth in HTTPS came from very large hosting providers that decided to make HTTPS a default for sites that they host, including OVH, Wordpress.com, Shopify, Tumblr, Squarespace, and many others. Sites they host, and visitors to those sites, can get a boost in security without having to do anything. (And we're getting ongoing benefits from providers like CloudFlare who made the switch in previous years.) A single hosting provider's decision can result in enabling encryption for hundreds of thousands or millions of customers; we hope others will take the plunge too! U.S. government sites also made significant progress adopting HTTPS this year, responding to the administration's guidance in support of HTTPS—a clear and practical explanation of why secure connections should be the default. A caveat: data from Google shows that use of HTTPS varies significantly from country to country, remaining especially uncommon in Japan. We've also heard that it's still uncommon across much of East and Southeast Asia. Next year, we'll have to find ways to bridge those gaps.

WikiLeaks on Wednesday released a trove of documents detailing previously unknown pro-corporate provisions and updates to the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), exposing the extent to which the U.S.-driven deal will force signatory nations to privatize public services and deregulate corporations. As the 52 nations involved in TISA comprise a full two-thirds of global GDP, the deal is poised to impact billions of lives around the world. The 18th round of negotiations on TISA resumed Thursday. Released for the very first time on Wednesday was TISA’s annex on “State-Owned Enterprises” (SOEs), which mandates that public services must be treated like private businesses. The documents reveal that the annex was introduced only two days after the U.S. successfully forced through similar text in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP) in October 2015.

Trade expert Jane Kelsey, who teaches law at the University of Auckland, described how the U.S. pushed through such provisions in order to target other nations’ public services—and China’s in particular: When the [TPP] negotiations began in 2010 the U.S. made it clear that it required a chapter on SOEs. The goal was always to create precedent-setting rules that could target China, although the U.S. also had other countries’ SOEs in its sights—the state-managed Vietnamese economy, various countries’ sovereign wealth funds, and once Japan joined, Japan Post’s banking, insurance and delivery services. All the other countries were reluctant to concede the need for such a chapter and the talks went around in circles for several years. Eventually the U.S. had its way. “The U.S. proposal for TISA adopts and adapts key parts of the [TPP] chapter that force majority-owned SOEs to operate like private sector businesses,” Kelsey added. “The most extreme, complicated and potentially unworkable provisions in the [TPP] relating to state support are not included—yet. But there is an extraordinary power for a single TISA party to require the development of those rules if another TISA country, or a country seeking to join TISA, has too many large SOEs.”

Observers have long taken note of the implicitly anti-China stance of the several U.S.-backed pro-corporate “free trade” deals being negotiated now. While TISA is perhaps the least well-known of these agreements, together with the TPP and the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Pact (TTIP), the deals “form not only a new legal order shaped for transnational corporations, but a new economic ‘grand enclosure,’ which excludes China and all other BRICS countries,” as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange put it last year. The leaked documents also showed new, multinational-friendly updates to sections of the deal titled “Domestic Regulation,” “Transparency,” and “New Provisions.” The latest versions, argues WikiLeaks, have further advanced towards the ‘deregulation’ objectives of big corporations entering overseas markets. Local regulations like store size restrictions or hours of operations are considered an obstacle to achieve ‘operating efficiencies’ of large-scale retailing, disregarding their public benefit that foster livable neighbors and reasonable hours of work for employees.