The Snowden Thing As Farce -- or Is It All An Elaborate Hoax?

Mark your calendars and put stars by it! Young Snowden gives his First American Interview (whut?) Exclusively to NBC and Brian Williams tonight!!!!! at 10pm Eastern Time, 9pm Central, wherein he reveals that he's a fricking CIA Spy!!!!  Bet you never imagined that!!!!

Let chaos and confusion reign!

From the outset of the Snowden Thing, I've suspected that it could be a hit on the NSA by the CIA, done in order to establish Security State pre-eminence. Throughout, it seemed that the NSA was being held up to ridicule and contempt within the Spy-State and Government, while the CIA -- which actually performs a lot of the surveillance and wet-work going on in the world -- got an entirely free pass.

This was made clear as crystal when both the #1 (Keith Alexander, Starfleet Commander) and the #2 (John "BigBooté" Inglis) were forced out of the Agency through early retirements. Meanwhile John Brennan at CIA and James Clapper, DNI, went on and on, despite their appalling lies and dissimulations. It didn't matter -- for them -- what they did or said in public. Only Alexander and Inglis were made to pay for the Snowden revelations, which were of course focused on NSA information gathering, mostly signals intelligence... which was done for the military, for the CIA, for the DEA, for the FBI, for the DHS and for god-knows-who-all.

Anybody with enough clout, it seems, could become a "customer" or "client" of the NSA.

Good to know.

"Out of control..." is the appropriate way to look at it. Indeed, the term was repeated over and over again. The NSA was out of control, and there was no effective oversight from any quarter, and Oh, didja know that this Alexander mook is kinda whack? Didja see his Starfleet Center? Never mind that it was ordered up by Hayden, Alexander's predecessor, who was then assigned to CIA.


Jeebus.

Let's be clear. NBC is a CIA conduit, as is the New York Times and WaPo, indeed as is most all of the mainstream -- and a good deal of the alternative -- media.

We've known this, haven't we, for a long-long-long time, but since we don't have an abundance of non-compromised news sources -- much as Soviet citizens didn't have much in the way of non-government news sources back in the day -- we let the knowledge of the propaganda we're constantly exposed to percolate in the backs of our minds, and we pay attention to those parts of the mainstream and mass media that 1) confirm our biases; or 2) entertain and amuse us.

"Truth" is not really an element of the process, because "truth" is subjective -- at least so it seems in the post-modern world.

So the fact is, we have no way of knowing what's "true" and what's not with regard to Snowden's story or Greenwald's story or really anyone's story when it comes to this matter. It's clear that a narrative has been constructed which the very makers of that narrative then jiggle and even shatter from time to time to induce cognitive dissonance. Lies? Some of it, sure. Deceptions? Certainly, why not? Story-telling, marketing, and above all drama? You got it.

Most people have not been able to use the knowledge they've gained from the Snowden Affair for any practical purpose. There is no sign whatsoever that the revelations have caused any part of the Surveillance/Security State to back off the people. All they've done is make some adjustments regarding precedence and priorities with regard to their corporate partners.

Apart from that?

Not much. Really not anything.

We are just as surveilled as ever, if not more so. The systems performing the surveillance get ever more sophisticated. And the transparency of those systems is ever more occluded.

But we've had quite a debate, haven't we? Who's the Top Dog is now settled. Right?

Pfft.

Let the Fugs Explain It All For You -- Warfighters' Love Songs

"Kill for Peace"



"CIA Man" (Fuckin' A Man)



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NOTE: Boy does this stuff carry me back. During the Summer of Love, some friends moved to the Haight Ashbury to be part of the hippie scene, and they rented a house on (I believe it was) Haight Street, a large old Victorian place with high ceilings and carved woodwork and all the stuff that people love about those houses. When they scouted the place, they were struck by all the psychedelic murals painted on the walls and the wild colors used on the house inside and out. Come to find out, the house had been vacated by the Fugs who had lived there for about a year. The Fugs were never particularly famous, not like Janis or Country Joe or some of the others, but they were well-known enough at the time to be considered near the top of their satirical and often obscenity laced field. It was kind of neat to visit friends who lived in a house the Fugs themselves (so they said) had painted tho.... ;-)

Apocalypse Averted? How Can This Be?

Oh, I don't know that I'm going to hold my breath over the latest developments in the Syria Thing, but there are signs and portents that indicate we may have barely averted catastrophe once again.

It could be that the military solution to the Syrian Crisis is for the moment set aside while furious efforts are under way to secure whatever chemical weapons the Syrian government has from use, misuse, theft and dispersal.

Might-could-be. Hard to say.

I watched Charlie Rose's interview with The Devil Assad last night, and it seemed to me that the soft-spoken Assad was running rings around Rose, literally tying him in knots and forcing numerous errors as Rose was exposed again and again as simply acting as the spokesman for the Obama Regime, not as a journalist at all. He was clearly ignorant of anything about Syria that he hadn't been fed by the White House, DoD, and State Departments. Assad easily exposed Rose's ignorance and hypocrisy as he pointed out repeatedly that the US has presented no evidence whatever that the Syrian government used chemical weapons on August 21, the date of the alleged sarin gas attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. None. Zero. And he offered a plausible explanation for what happened: there may have been an accidental release of home-made sarin by the rebels. His point was that with current information, there is no way to tell for sure, but in any case, there is no compelling evidence that the Syrian government -- rather than some other interest involved in the Syrian civil war -- was responsible. There is only assertion. And in the end, even so-called "evidence" -- such as that presented by Colin Powell at the UN to justify attacking Iraq, can be false.

The US has no credibility in these matters in other words.

Meanwhile, diplomatic efforts, triggered by John Kerry's "rhetorical" offer to withhold missile strikes on the Syrian government if it agrees to turn over all its chemical weapons to "international control" within the week, are apparently underway in earnest as the Russians and Syrian government have agreed to attempt to comply. Oh my, who would have thought?

Some people are saying this is Obama's brilliance in action; I will withhold judgement on that. It's obvious to me that preparations for direct military intervention in the Syrian civil war by the United States have been under way since spring at the latest and were probably in work well before that. I recently read a series of stories in the Economist published in May that explored the possibilities and potentials of direct US military intervention in Syria, stories that indicated that preparations to intervene had been made long before.

The notion that the whole Syria Thing is nothing but a distraction from the NSA revelations has been taking hold among some of those who see the NSA Thing to be Bigger Than God. Well, I don't see it quite that way.

I'll put it this way: the government operates on numerous parallel tracks all the time. While it often seems to be responding to various pressures -- whether driven by the media or by its corporate partners or what have you -- in fact, the government is juggling a bunch of shit all the time, and it is quite capable of asserting and acting on its own interests as chosen (at the top) from a menu of options at any given moment.

In other words, the government can easily use something that's in the to do list pipeline to overwhelm something else that has been captivating the media -- especially captivating summer stories.

And so it is with the Syria Thing. Is it a "distraction"? Hardly. It's serious as fuck. It's Post Labor Day now, and the Summer Shark and Missing White Boy stories would have faded on their own -- because that's how the media works. Now the news cycle is dominated by the White House and the Serious Matters that the White House has to deal with. That would have happened with or without the Syria Thing.

Of course, the White House and whatever Spookery has been running the summer con (I say it's likely to be the CIA) are going to use Syria and whatever else is in the offing to tamp down the NSA story or at least make it a minor issue rather than a major one. Of course they are. How much the Congress gets its panties in a collective wad over domestic surveillance remains to be seen, but I suspect the only real upshot is that certain categories of the Overclass will be granted the exemptions and immunities they seek while everyone else will be subjected to ever more intrusive surveillance. That's what the indications have been since the opening salvos of the Story of the Century. Or Summer. Or whatever.

We should understand that the CIA has been operating in Syria at least since last year and probably well before that, attempting to undermine the Syrian government enough to enable their favored rebel factions to march into Damascus and take over. It's not been going well, and I wouldn't be surprised if the CIA didn't blame the difficulties they're having in Syria on bad intelligence from the NSA. And it would be surprising if they'd try to cripple the NSA and run their own intelligence operations as they've done in the past (to often disastrous results.) These sorts of Inner Party squabbles have been commonplace for many decades. What we can see of them is usually only a tiny portion of what's really going on.

Keeping the public focus on Syria or the NSA or what have you is useful to those who are squabbling over their prerogatives and powers behind the scenes. We won't be likely to know for years what this whole thing is really about -- if we ever find out. But what we are allowed to see is rarely more than a glimpse of the whole picture.

If the Apocalypse has actually been averted and the diplomatic solution to the apparent crisis is implemented, we can breathe a sigh of relief -- at least temporarily. But never forget, as the Bard once put it:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

And that's putting it mildly.

The Syria Thing, NSA, CIA and That Old Man's Hard On

I've been pretty strident about the NSA story that has dominated so much of the political media throughout the summer. I saw it and see it as a Summer Shark and Missing White Boy story that has been purpose made to obscure something else, something much more immediate and consequential -- and probably dreadful.

We now know what it is: A planned US attack on Syria which may well turn into an apocalyptic conflagration.

Jeebus Dancing Christo.

What the Holy Hell is wrong with these people?

While it's fun to make a whipping boy of the NSA -- or any other spookery -- the issue of domestic surveillance and the concomitant police state is far too serious for far too many people to let the singular issue of "NSA" surveillance overwhelm the reality of how deep-seated and pervasive the surveillance state really is in this country. It's far too serious to let NSA surveillance be seen as the only or even the most serious threat to privacy in the whole wide world -- as it has been promoted throughout the summer.

It's not. It's simply not. It never was. Other threats however...

We don't know what happened in Syria, nor do we know who was responsible. Because of the consistency of the falsehoods that emanate from our government and our spookeries, let alone the falsehoods that come from the Israeli "intelligence" (the source, apparently, for the claim that intercepted phone calls among Syrian officials were the "smoking gun" that "proved" the Assad regime was responsible for the CW attack), people must be skeptical of any pronouncement from On High about what they are doing, or anything they say about what anyone else has done.

They lie.

It's in their nature, and in the nature of the agencies and operations they have nominal charge of.

They lie, and they will do what they wilt, and they will do it without let or hindrance from We, the Rabble.

That Old Man's Hard On will have its release, no matter what.

Our government has now fully divorced itself from We, the Rabble.

The "intelligence" services will have their way. The MIC will have its way.

And that, as they say, is that.

When the CIA Admits to Doing Something Bad, It's Best to Denounce the Secrecy of the NSA

The United States of God Damn has had an abundance of Spookeries for many a long year, sixteen of which -- the last I heard -- are supposed to report to the "DNI," one General James Clapper, Head Spook and Liar.

These reporting Spookeries are said to include the CIA and the NSA, both of which are tasked with surveillance and clandestine operations abroad. Neither, whatever else they do, are supposed to target Americans or conduct operations on the Sacred Soil of the Homeland (I'm sure it sounded better in the original German), but according to the occasional revelation from various whistleblowers and others, sometimes they do.

Bad Agencies!

Well, lately -- very lately -- the CIA (the Spookery that's been mighty silent and on the sidelines during the whole Summer Sharkfest featuring the NSA) has been *coming clean* about operations it engaged in when time was. Such as the Mossedegh overthrow in Iran in 1953 which became the precipitating -- if not the proximate -- cause of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 which led to the, shall we say, tense relations between Iran and the USofGD ever since. Oh. The CIA now, 60 years later, admits what's been known for decades. What about Guatamala while we're at it? Indonesia? Vietnam? Korea? The undermining and dissolution of the Soviet Union? Laos -- don't even get me started -- and so on? Hm?

Speaking of Privilege: Obama Addresses His Constituency

Right. I got this.

It can be interesting to watch and to parse Presidential Press Conferences especially as they have become rarer and rarer.

His Serenity doesn't much do the formal Press Conference routine, preferring appearances on teevee gabshows and one on one interviews to get his message across, no matter how imperfect, muddled or irrelevant that message may be.

I've long been of the opinion, of course, that His Serenity is the willing tool of others, particularly those who own his ass. Which means the banks and Wall Street together with a shadowy group of corporate execs and government "retirees."

For example, it was obvious that Obama became a tool of House Cheney right quick, as soon as Miz Liz started yapping about whatever it was her father was telling her to yap about. The clue was that Obama yielded almost instantly and has never deviated from his assigned course, for he is corrected promptly.

Exactly what command and control House Cheney has over The Government would be interesting to learn, especially what agencies they use to accomplish their nefarious ends (many say they operate directly through the CIA, which gives some perspective on the whole NSA Thing... but that's getting ahead of myself.)

The Utter Confusion of Snowden's Asylum Search

Edith Piaf - Non,  je ne regrette rien by bebepanda

There's been some news from Moscow.

Edward J. Snowden has received many offers of political asylum and he announced that he has accepted all of them, but for reasons that aren't entirely clear, he claims he is unable to "enjoy" these offers because he cannot travel within Russia nor can he legally leave the transit zone of the airport where he has apparently been housed at the capsule hotel since he arrived from Hong Kong. So, as far as I can puzzle out from the rather elaborate legalese of his statements, he is once again requesting asylum in Russia (which request he previously withdrew due to unacceptable conditions placed on his asylum by Vladimir Putin) so that he may travel in country until such time as external travel arrangements can be made and safe conduct assured for his eventual departure to Latin America.

Where in Latin America is not exactly clear as a number of Latin American countries have granted him asylum including Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Ecuador -- or maybe not. Exactly what has been offered and by whom is quite as murky as Snowden's whereabouts and activities during his weeks-long disappearance before his brief semi-public presence at the meeting with human rights organization and legal representatives in Moscow today.

Snowden took the opportunity to denounce the United States and unnamed European governments for acting lawlessly to prevent him from "enjoying" asylum, and for their despicable acts in forcing down the airplane of a sovereign nation's head of state in order to search the plane for his presence.

It's not exactly clear what he is demanding. If I were trying to help him, I'd have no idea what he wanted me to do.

His main complaint seems to be that he is not allowed to travel legally from the transit zone because his passport was canceled by the US State Department, an arrest warrant has been issued for his apprehension, and he's afraid that the United States Government will not treat him well if he is apprehended.

Yet others have already pointed out that he can travel within Russia -- say from the airport to an embassy -- in a diplomatic car without a problem, and any nation that grants him asylum (as several have done) can also provide him with valid travel documents for his journey, wherever he wishes to go.

Nevertheless, he says he is trapped in the airport until... what?

What I gather from the statements he's made and the statements made on his behalf by WikiLeaks and the Guardian is that he seeks a status equivalent to diplomatic immunity from some country, whether Russia or some other, and a complete cessation of efforts by the government of the United States to extradite and apprehend him -- so that he may freely travel to some third country to enjoy their grant of asylum.

This is not as strange as it may sound -- of course, to his partisans, nothing he says or is said on his behalf sounds strange, but that's another topic for another day. Clearly he's been handled by WikiLeaks at least since his departure from Hong Kong, and WikiLeaks' posture has been that of a nation-state contending with other nation-states. WikiLeaks personnel have come close to demanding diplomatic immunity for themselves from other nation-states. Of course it is not granted, but they keep demanding.

Though Snowden is not a WikiLeaks factotum -- at least not so far as we know -- it appears that he is under the care and feeding of his WikiLeaks handler in Moscow, and much of what he is purported to have said or written himself since arriving in Moscow is widely believed to have been the product of WikiLeaks, or even of Julian himself. There have been reports that WikiLeaks is paying at least some of his expenses while he is on the run (or stationary in Moscow as the case may be).

His argument is so legally muddled, however, and is so compromised by propaganda and ritualized denunciations of the United States and its European handmaidens that interpretations of what he is saying and what he means and wants are required. They aren't much clearer than his own statements and those made on his behalf.

I've long believed that WikiLeaks was likely being run as a honeypot to attract would-be whistle blowers and extract whatever information they might have before turning them over to the appropriate authorities ("sorry about that!"). In that context, I saw Julian as an agency asset who went rogue when he got above himself and said he was going to release the bank docs that had come his way. All holy hell broke lose at that moment, and he became  a real fugitive and WikiLeaks was effectively neutered. Those promised bank docs were never released. Its revelations since that time have been minimal at best. But during its hey-day, WikiLeaks and Julian were media giants. Now, they're closer to pariahs as far as most of the media is concerned.

The advent of Young Snowden injected new life into Julian and WikiLeaks, though it didn't gain them much respect from People Who Mattered, respect that was largely pissed away some time ago. While Julian might be an asset that went rogue, the question has been, if he is an asset, for whom? We might be able to sort that out given the way the Snowden Thing has devolved.

It's obvious (to me) that Snowden is an asset, and it's not certain that he has actually gone rogue, but he may well be a limited hangout or even a mole. If so, there has been some speculation that he is an asset for the CIA out doing a number on the rival NSA -- and its partners. If so, that may be why, even now, the government has been somewhat reticent about rounding him up. The government is as factionalized as any other aspect of American life, and when powerful agencies and their corporate partners contend with one another for primacy, the fireworks show can be entertaining -- but very confusing. In these circumstances, we're not meant to know what's going on, and we usually don't.

I don't know what's going on here, but I doubt that little of what we're being told about it is true.