At a rally for Barrett Brown and Jeremy Hammond on Monday night, Wikileak‘s lawyer Michael Ratner spoke of the utter desperation exhbited by the government as US citizens learn more than the Intelligence Community ever intended them to.

Now, in an attempt to appear more transparent a part of the conversation about transparency, the Intelligence Community‘s Tumblr (icontherecord.tumblr.com) has been launched by the Director of National Intelligence. Like those Manhattan Mini-Storage ads, which try in the most awkward of ways (I still don‘t get this) to belong in an unlikely context, this Tumblr is one of the more boring, off-topic, piece-of-shit Tumblrs ever.

Textron Defense Systems, Wilmington, Mass., has been awarded a $640,786,442 modification (PZ00001) to a firm-fixed-price contract (FA8213-12-C-0064) for 1,300 cluster bomb units. Work will be performed at Wilmington, Mass., and is expected to be completed by Dec. 31, 2015. This contract involves foreign military 6sales (FMS) for Saudi Arabia. FMS funds in the amount of $410,218,248 are being obligated at time of award. Air Force Life Cycle Management Center/OO-ALC/EBHKA, Hill Air Force Base, Utah, is the contracting activity.

by John Glaser

Even as they condemn the Syrian regime’s use of cluster munitions, the U.S. is selling Saudi Arabia $640 million worth of American-made cluster bombs. Cluster munitions have been banned in 83 countries on account of their indiscriminate nature and their record of killing children.

‘Radicals, Idealists, Realists, Opportunists’

• Top-secret files show first evidence of financial relationship
• Prism companies include Google and Yahoo, says NSA
• Costs were incurred after 2011 Fisa court ruling

“We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted…the Patriot Act. As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.” – US Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall

The President, the Head of the National Security Agency, the Department of Justice, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, and the Judiciary, are intentionally keeping massive amounts of information about surveillance of US and other people secret from voters.

Die Q-5 stützte auf ein Maisfeld nahe der Stadt Dalian im Nordosten des Landes, wie chinesische Medien berichten. Statt sich mit dem Schleudersitz zu retten, lenkte der Pilot die abstürzende Maschine von dicht bewohnten Gebieten weg.

Writing for the National Post, Rob Huebert of the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute explained that, “One issue that has not received much attention is the need to discuss the growing militarization of the Arctic. While the Arctic Council is formally forbidden from discussing military security in the Arctic, the time has arrived to rethink this policy.”

In a short period of time, the Pacific Alliance has emerged as one of the leading economic integration projects in Latin America. It aims to succeed where others have failed by creating a gateway to Asian markets and building a Pacific-rim trade deal. The U.S. and Canada are both pursuing deeper ties with the group and have been granted observer status. This is part of efforts to revive and expand their presence in Latin America. In some areas of integration, the Pacific Alliance has surpassed NAFTA. By merging the two together, it could be used to fill the void left by the collapse of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

Dirty Wars ★★★★
Directed by: Rick Rowley
Starring: Jeremy Scahill
Running time: 87 minutes
Parental guidance: 14A, mature themes, disturbing content
Playing at: ByTowne Cinema

The sinking feeling comes around the midway point in Rick Rowley’s documentary, shortly after we’re presented with the images of dead babies and lifeless children stacked like cordwood in the dust.

They were members of a poor Yemeni tribe, and the movie alleges they were murdered by the U.S. military as part of a large-scale, but covert, war being carried out by drones and black ops in various parts of the Arab world.

“We’re getting more new evidence that this criminal act was of a provocative nature,” he stressed. “In particular, there are reports circulating on the Internet, in particular that the materials of the incident and accusations against government troops had been posted for several hours before the so-called attack. Thus, it was a pre-planned action.”

After recent reports that the Syrian government may have used chemical weapons against civilians, media figures have begun to push for U.S. military intervention in the region. But senior military leaders say that engagement could produce a negative long-term outcome.

Die USA verfügen vorläufig laut der Außenamtssprecherin Jen Psaki über keine Beweise für die jüngsten Meldungen über die Anwendung von chemischen Waffen in Syrien.

„Im Moment können wir nicht endgültig bestimmen, dass Chemiewaffen eingesetzt wurden. Aber wir nutzen alle Kanäle des Zusammenwirkens, um zu klären, was geschehen ist“, so Psaki.

„Der Präsident hat dem Nachrichtendienst aufgetragen, zu ermitteln, was geschehen ist. Dies beinhaltet eine Befragung von Zeugen, Beobachtungsdaten, die Prüfung offener Quellen sowie Laboruntersuchungen“, sagte Psaki.

This weekend came the extraordinary revelation that a former British special forces ‚Soldier N‘ knew, ‚it was the SAS who arranged Princess Diana‘s death and that has been covered up‘. His parents spelt it out in a letter to a senior military officer, which appeared in evidence in the case of another former SAS soldier, Danny Nightingale.

VOLLMANN said that he is “an American first and would never do anything to hurt this country.” — Department of Homeland Security,report of investigation, 2005 1. In 1966, John Steinbeck completed a book called America and Americans — an appropriate subject for the writer I have always considered the most American of us all. Ruefully clear-eyed and sometimes furious about our national faults (“From the first we have treated our minorities abominably”), this brave, decent, sentimental man, a sincere thinker but not a deep one, a patriot who loved the idea of freedom — which for him included the proposition that …

So you can imagine the surprise of author William T. Vollmann when he recently sued the government for his FBI file and discovered he had once been designated and spied on as a suspect in both the Unabomber and anthrax cases.

„We are entering a time of state-sponsored intrusion into our privacy that we haven‘t seen since the McCarthy era. And it‘s on a much broader scale,“ Ladar Levison, founder of Lavabit, told the Guardian. The email service was used by Snowden and is now at the center of a potentially historic legal battle over privacy rights in the digital age.

Speaking to the Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, a spokesperson for the Russian defence ministry said the hovercraft was docking in an area owned by the military. „Docking at the beach is normal,’ the spokesman said.

„What people were doing at the beach on the territory of the military (base) is unclear.“

Data-gathering operation is part of a £1bn web project still being assembled by GCHQ

The intelligence is also shared with the US National Security Agency (NSA), it is understood.

Information about the listening station was revealed in leaked documents obtained from the NSA by Edward Snowden, the CIA whistleblower.

by John Glaser

The U.S. military is encircling China with a chain of air bases and military ports. The latest link: a small airstrip on the tiny Pacific island of Saipan. The U.S. Air Force is planning to lease 33 acres of land on the island for the next 50 years to build a “divert airfield” on an old World War II airbase there. But the residents don’t want it. And the Chinese are in no mood to be surrounded by Americans.

„We need to bring down the rhetoric from red line or military intervention to try to find common ground that we can agree on with the Russians and the Chinese, to establish the facts,“ he said. „Was it an astonishing government attack of extraordinary brutality against civilians or was somebody else responsible? And then move on from there.

The top general also said Washington’s military intervention would plunge the United States deep into another war in the Middle East.