NSA spied on Muhammad Ali, MLK & GOP Senator Howard Baker

Police State

Operation Minaret set up in 1960s to "monitor" anti-Vietnam

critics who dared to use free speech in public.

The National Security Agency secretly tapped into the overseas phone calls of prominent critics of the Vietnam War, including Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali and two actively serving US Senators, newly declassified material has revealed.

The NSA has been forced to disclose previously secret passages in its own official four-volume history of its Cold War snooping activities. The newly-released material reveals the breathtaking – and probably illegal – lengths the agency went to in the late 1960s and 70s, in an attempt to try to hold back the rising tide of anti-Vietnam war sentiment.

That included tapping into the phone calls and cable communications of two serving senators – the Idaho Democrat Frank Church and Howard Baker, a Republican from Tennessee who, puzzlingly, was a firm supporter of the war effort in Vietnam reports the UK Guardian.

GOP Senator Howard Baker
The NSA was illegally tapping the
phone calls of US Senators.

The NSA also intercepted the foreign communications of prominent journalists such as Tom Wicker of the New York Times and the popular satirical writer for the Washington Post, Art Buchwald.

In a further paradox, the Washington debate leading to the formation of the Fisa court was spearheaded by the Church Committee – a Congressional panel named after its chair, Senator Frank Church. That was the same Frank Church who a few years before had himself been placed on the NSA watch list.

"I suspect Senator Church never had any idea the NSA was tapping his phone," said Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian specializing in the NSA.

Alongside King, a second leading civil rights figure, Whitney Young of the National Urban League, was also surreptitiously monitored. The heavyweight boxing champion, Muhammad Ali, was put on the watch list in about 1967 after he spoke out about Vietnam – he was jailed having refused to be drafted into the army, was stripped of his title, and banned from fighting – and is thought to have remained a target of surveillance for the next six years.

The agency went to great lengths to keep its activities, known as operation Minaret, from public view. All reports generated for Minaret were printed on plain paper unadorned with the NSA logo or other identifying markings other than the stamp "For Background Use Only".

They were delivered by hand directly to the White House, often going specifically to successive presidents Lyndon Johnson who set the program up in 1967 and Richard Nixon.

The lack of judicial oversight of the snooping programme led even the NSA's own history to conclude that Minaret was "disreputable if not outright illegal".

The new disclosures were prized from the current NSA following an appeal to the Security Classification Appeals Panel by the National Security Archive, an independent research institute based at the George Washington university.

"Clearly the NSA didn't want to release this material but they were forced to do so by the American equivalent of the supreme court of freedom of information law," said Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian specializing in the NSA.

Together with William Burr of the National Security Archive, Aid has co-authored an article in Foreign Policy that explores the significance of the new disclosures. In addition to the seven names of spying targets listed in the NSA history, the two authors confirmed the names of other targets on the watch list from a declassified document at the Gerald Ford presidential library in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

 In total, some 1,650 individuals were tracked by the NSA between 1967 and 1973, though the identities of most of those people remain unknown.


Glenn Beck, Justin Amash on NSA Surveillance

Whistleblower Behind the NSA Surveillance Speaks Out - Edward Snowden

Obama Account of Killing of Bin Laden “One Big Lie”

Seymour Hersh

Pulitzer Prize winner says the press

should "fire 90% of editors"

Seymour Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism – close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of editors in publishing and get back to the fundamental job of journalists which, he says, is to be an outsider.

Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, says that the official account of the raid which killed Osama Bin Laden in 2011 is ‘one big lie’.

Seymour Hersh, 76, said that ‘not one word’ of the Obama administration’s narrative on what happened is true.

In an interview with by The Guardian, Hersh savages the US media for failing to challenge the White House on a whole host of issues, from NSA spying, to drone attacks, to aggression against Syria.

He said the Navy Seal raid that supposedly resulted in the death of the Al-Qaeda terror leader, Hersh said, ‘not one word of it is true’.

According to Hersh – who first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting – the problem is that the US media is allowing the Obama administration to get away with lying.

‘It’s pathetic. They are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama].’

The White House has refused to publicly release images of Bin Laden’s body, fuelling suspicion they are withholding information.

Don't even get him started on the New York Times which, he says, spends "so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would" – or the death of Osama bin Laden. "Nothing's been done about that story, it's one big lie, not one word of it is true," he says of the dramatic US Navy Seals raid in 2011.

Hersh is writing a book about national security and has devoted a chapter to the bin Laden killing. He says a recent report put out by an "independent" Pakistani commission about life in the Abottabad compound in which Bin Laden was holed up would not stand up to scrutiny.

"The Pakistanis put out a report, don't get me going on it. Let's put it this way, it was done with considerable American input. It's a bullshit report," he says hinting of revelations to come in his book.

The Obama administration lies systematically, he claims, yet none of the leviathans of American media, the TV networks or big print titles, challenge him.
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"I'll tell you the solution, get rid of 90% of the editors that now exist and start promoting editors that you can't control," he says. I saw it in the New York Times, I see people who get promoted are the ones on the desk who are more amenable to the publisher and what the senior editors want and the trouble makers don't get promoted. Start promoting better people who look you in the eye and say 'I don't care what you say'.
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Nor does he understand why the Washington Post held back on the Snowden files until it learned the Guardian was about to publish.
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If Hersh was in charge of US Media Inc, his scorched earth policy wouldn't stop with newspapers.
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"I would close down the news bureaus of the networks and let's start all over, tabula rasa. The majors, NBCs, ABCs, they won't like this – just do something different, do something that gets people mad at you, that's what we're supposed to be doing," he says.

Hersh is currently on a break from reporting, working on a book which undoubtedly will make for uncomfortable reading for both Bush and Obama.

"The republic's in trouble, we lie about everything, lying has become the staple." And he implores journalists to do something about it.

Muslims slaughter students while they slept

Nothing to see here, move along

Whenever possible the American media ignores

Islamic terrorism in favor of "news" about

Hollywood celebrities or meaningless filler stories.

Again and again I find myself going to the foreign media to find news stories that really matter. 

The American media covered the butcher's bath in Kenya almost against their will because the entire world was already reporting on it.  At the same time as Kenya some 81 Christians were slaughtered in Pakistan with next to zero American news coverage.

Now we have Islamist gunmen slaughtering non-Muslims at a college in north-eastern Nigeria, killing at least 78 students.   Don't expect to see anything meaningful on your evening news broadcast.

The students were shot dead as they slept in their dormitory at the College of Agriculture in Yobe state.

North-eastern Nigeria is under a state of emergency amid an Islamist insurgency by the Boko Haram group.

Boko Haram is fighting to overthrow Nigeria's government to create an Islamic state, and has launched a number of attacks on schools reports BBC News.

UPDATE - The latest update.  Local reports suggested as many as 78 students were slaughtered, and scores are still missing.

Most of the students, who were sleeping in their dormitory when the attack took place, were aged between 18 and 22.

The gunmen began their ambush on the students of the College of Agriculture, Gujba, at about midnight and the assault continued until the early hours of 29 September.

Initially, the students were killed with swords and knives. However, once the students began to flee, the militants opened fire. Some of the retrieved bodies had been decapitated.

"They started gathering students into groups outside, then they opened fire and killed one group and then moved onto the next group and killed them. It was so terrible," Idris, a surviving student, told Reuters.

Ahmed Gujunba, another resident in the locality said, "They came with guns around 1am [12pm GMT] and went directly to the male hostel and opened fire on them ... The college is in the bush so the other students were running around helplessly as guns went off and some of them were shot down."

(ibtimes.co.uk)

 

Murdered by Islamists
Sept. 29, 2013: In this image taken with a mobile phone, rescue workers and family members gather to identify the shrouded bodies of students killed following an attack by Islamist extremists on an agricultural college in Gujba, Nigeria. (AP)

Classrooms burned

Casualty figures from the latest attack vary, but a local politician told the BBC that around 50 students had been killed.

The politician said two vanloads of bodies had been taken to a hospital in Yobe's state capital, Damaturu.

A witness quoted by Reuters news agency counted 40 bodies at the hospital, mostly those of young men believed to be students.

College provost Molima Idi Mato, speaking to Associated Press, also said the number of dead could be as high as 50, adding that security forces were still recovering the bodies and that about 1,000 students had fled the campus.

A Nigerian military source told AP that soldiers had collected 42 bodies.

The gunmen also set fire to classrooms, a military spokesman in Yobe state, Lazarus Eli, told Agence France-Presse.

The college is in the rural Gujba district.

In May, President Goodluck Jonathan ordered an operation against Boko Haram, and a state of emergency was declared for the north-east on 14 May.

Many of the Islamist militants left their bases in the north-east and violence initially fell, but revenge attacks quickly followed.

In June, Boko Haram carried out two attacks on schools in the region.

At least nine children were killed in a school on the outskirts of Maiduguri, while 13 students and teachers were killed in a school in Damaturu.

In July in the village of Mamudo in Yobe state, Islamist militants attacked a school's dormitories with guns and explosives, killing at least 42 people, mostly students.

Boko Haram regards schools as a symbol of Western culture. The group's name translates as "Western education is forbidden".

Islamists regularly target schools in Yobe, such as this one in Mamudo.

The Religion of Peace Slaughters Again.
Islamic terrorists Boko Haram have launched another wave of attacks in Nigeria, killing 23 people who they deemed to have been breaking Sharia Law.
 

 

Sunday Comics

 

Small Town Throws Pride Parade For Only Gay Resident

 

Liberal to get vasectomy after crying over climate change

'Take My Nuts'

Weeping, hand-wringing sheeple liberal offers up his
manhood in the cause of Global Warming.

The mouth-breathing idiot Sheeple of America are the gift that just keeps giving.

A meteorologist who has covered weather for the Wall Street Journal tweeted that he has decided not to have children in order to leave a lighter carbon footprint, and is considering having a vasectomy.

He also vowed to stop flying after the world’s recent climate-change report made him cry.

Eric Holthaus was reacting to the findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which released a report on Friday that found it was ‘extremely likely’ that humans are causing warming trends seen in the last several decades.

On Friday afternoon the weatherman tweeted: 'No children, happy to go extinct, which in and of itself, carries a certain sadness. #IPCC' reports the UK Daily Mail.

His next tweet said: 'Its a very emotional decision. Mixed feelings. adios babies?'

According to another tweet from Holthaus, the Dutch artist known as Tinkebell, who calls attention to animal rights issues through works that use the remains of dead animals, had herself sterilised last week for a similar reason.

Holthaus, who now writes for Quartz, has decided he will also reduce his carbon footprint by giving up on air travel.

‘I just broke down in tears in boarding area at SFO while on phone with my wife. I've never cried because of a science report before. #IPCC,’ was his first tweet on around 2pm on Friday.

‘I realised just now: This has to be the last flight I ever take. I’m committing right now to stop flying. It’s not worth the climate,’ he tweeted a few minutes later. 

"Happy to go extinct"

'Flying makes me cry.'
Eric Holthaus, a meteorologist who has covered weather for the Wall
Street Journal, cried over the phone to his wife before getting on a plane,
vowing it will be the last time he flies.

 

Visa Goes Anti-Gun - Restricts Transactions

VISA - An arm of the Democrat Party 

Gun grabbing socialist pigs attack gun stores

by preventing them from using credit cards.

The assault on the U.S. Constitution and the Second Amendment continues.

This time big business is getting into the mix and they’re aiming for gun stores right at the source of their revenues – their transaction processing facilities.

According to Larry Hyatt, owner of the largest gun brokerage firm in the United States, Authorize.net, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Visa USA and one of the world’s largest credit card processing gateways, has terminated their relationship with the firm reports the Washington Examiner.

After four years in business with the Visa owned Authorize.net, Larry Hyatt, owner of Hyatt Gun Shop, received an email indicating that the company would no longer provide its services due to “the sale of firearms or any similar product.”

The email reads:

Dear Hyatt Gun Shop Inc, 

Authorize.Net LLC (“Authorize.Net”) has determined that the nature of your business constitutes a violation of Section 2.xiv of the Authorize.Net Acceptable Use Guidelines and Sections 3.3 and 11.3 of the Authorize.Net Service Agreement (the “Agreement”). 

These sections include, but are not limited to, the sale of firearms or any similar product. 

Accordingly, pursuant to Section 4 of the Acceptable Use Guidelines, your ability to access and use the Authorize.NetServices will be terminated on September 30, 2013.

Hyatt’s massive online store will be unable to process credit card transactions, giving the store only a few days to find a new processing company before Authorize.net terminates their business relationship. 

“We’ve never seen anything like this,” Hyatt Marketing Director Justin Anderson told the Washington Examiner.

All of a sudden, after four years of doing business together, Authorize.net declares that Hyatt Gun Shop is in violation of their terms of agreement.

An odd coincidence to be sure, but not if you consider that many top executives at Visa have donated to President Obama’s election campaigns. With President Obama renewing his push for gun control in the wake of the Navy Yard shooting last week, and Americans ardently opposing any legislative action that would further restrict the ownership of firearms, it looks as if anti-gun politicians are now calling in favors with their connections in big business.

For the full article go to Infowars News.

Hyatt Gun Shop

Ted Cruz ahead in GOP presidential poll, but why?

Who the Hell is Ted Cruz?

Many GOP voters are backing Cruz without

knowing the first thing about him.

By Gary;

And away we go for the 2016 Presidential nomination.  I already feel like driving off a cliff to end my suffering early rather than be subjected to this madness for the next three years.

The Public Policy Polling survey found this result for the 2016 nomination:

• 20% Senator Ted Cruz
• 17% Senator Rand Paul
• 14% Governor Chris Christie
• 11% Governor Jeb Bush
• 10% Senator Marco Rubio
• 10% Congressman Paul Ryan
• 4% Governor Bobby Jindal
• 3% each for Rick Santorum and Scott Walker.



There is a fine line between leadership
and shameless self-promotion.

Personally I am stunned that 20% of Republicans would claim they support a man for the White House with only 8 months on the job.  Plus those polled know next to zero about him.

The poll perhaps says a lot more about a hunger for leadership than any meaningful pro-Cruz feelings.

 

About Cruz  -  Don't get me wrong, I love Cruz's display of fire breathing guts.  But who the Hell is he?

To even think of Cruz as President concerns me.  Until January, 2013 Cruz had mostly worked in different positions as a very anonymous appointed government lawyer.  Good, another fucking lawyer in politics.  Well what can you do?

He has no experience on a city council, as mayor, as a state legislator, Governor, Congressman or any meaningful diplomatic post or cabinet level executive experience. 

 

Before running for the Senate in 2012 the world neither knew nor cared that Cruz existed.  As a brand new Senator he has done nothing significant yet except make a long speech.

Being the chief executive of the U.S. is serious business.  Cruz does not bring much to the table.

 

A Real Leader or Power Hungry?

The Founding Fathers knew politics is a wild mix of insane ambition for personal power and the desire to serve the nation.

Most of our Presidents have had considerable experience in assorted offices, such as John Quincy Adams, McKinley and Eisenhower.  Others like Lincoln, Cleveland and Hoover had very minimal experience.  So there is no one path to power.

Some have made the charge that Cruz's mini filibuster was nothing more than a massive publicity stunt for the Cruz in 2016 campaign.  Cruz knew he had little support in the Senate and a debate cut-off was already in place.  There was never a real filibuster.  It was all about TV exposure.

So with the end result never in question, it is legitimate to ask about Cruz's true motives.  Is it real leadership against impossible odds or shameless self-promotion?

I will leave it to the readers to make up their own minds on Cruz.  It is a long way still to 2016.

 

The NSA hacks circle the wagons to defend unconstitutional spying

Orwellian Speak

"Much of the press has called this a surveillance

program, it is not."

Senator Diane Feinstein (D)

It is all an Orwellian control of the language to fool the simple minded.  War is Peace.  Freedom is Slavery.  NSA surveillance does not exist.

Also note that all this unconstitutional spying never alerted us to Major Hasan, the Boston Bombing, the mall attack in Kenya, the attack on our embassy in Libya or the recent slaughter of Pakistani Christians by terrorists.

So who are we really spying on?  If we are not watching terrorists, then a process of elimination says we are spying on the average American and building files on their friends, emails, politics, text messages, weapons and interests.

U.S. officials refused to answer lawmakers’ questions in public on Thursday about the full scope of the National Security Agency’s collection of Americans’ data, including whether it has ever sought to acquire large volumes of cellphone location information or other records.

The neo-fascist hacks won't say in public if they are spying on the American people.  Everything is "classified".  Effectively our leaders are telling the people to fuck off and go away.

NSA Director Keith Alexander dodged questions

NSA Director Keith Alexander dodged questions by a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee about whether the agency has ever tried to augment its broad collection of virtually all Americans’ phone-call records by gathering data that would indicate the callers’ locations. He noted that intelligence officials had given a classified answer to the question reports the Washington Post.

“Is it the goal of the NSA to collect the phone records of all Americans?” Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) asked.

“I believe it is in the nation’s best interests to put all the phone records into a lockbox that we could search when the nation needs to do it, yes,” Alexander said.

Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Udall and other lawmakers have introduced reform legislation that would, among other things, end the phone records collection, while allowing for a more limited program.

On Thursday, Wyden accused U.S. officials of not being more forthcoming about intelligence-collection programs.

“The leadership of your agencies built an intelligence-collection system that repeatedly deceived the American people,” he said. “Time and time again, the American people were told one thing about domestic surveillance in public forums while government agencies did something else in private.”

At the start of the hearing, the Democratic chair of the committee, Diane Feinstein, outlined a separate bill she is introducing with Republican vice-chairman Saxby Chambliss.

Their proposed legislation broadly echoes the small tweaks the intelligence establishment says it will consider, but does not go further.

Republican Senator Chambliss defended the unconstitutional spying and said that "while we are here in large part because of the Snowden leaks", they had caused huge damage to the US and its interests and "would ultimately claim lives", something he said Snowden should be held to account for.

The Feinstein-Chambliss bill would also widen the powers of the NSA, allowing laws that authorise foreign spying to be continued for a period of time after targets enter the United States.  Never mind that the 4th Amendment requires a search warrant.

The Boston Bombing.
All this unconstitutional spying never alerted us to Major Hasan, the Boston Bombing, the mall attack in Kenya, the attack on our embassy in Libya or the recent slaughter of Pakistani Christians by terrorists.

So who are we really spying on?  If we are not watching terrorists, then a process of elimination says we are spying on the average American and building files on their friends, emails, politics, text messages, weapons and interests.

Other senators on the committee criticised media reporting and argued the essence of the surveillance apparatus should be left in place. Republican Senator Dan Coats said journalists were throwing "raw meat out there", suggesting the reporting was misleading the public. He cautioned against overreacting "for fear of the public saying, 'Oh, that headline makes me nervous,'" reports the UK Guardian.

Democrat Jay Rockefeller said that public "misunderstandings" of the unconstitutional spying risked dismantling a system of surveillance that has taken a decade to construct in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. "You don't build a Roman fort and then build another one next door because you've made a mistake," he said.

Democratic Senator Ron Wyden who, as a member of the committee, has for years been privy to classified briefings that he cannot discuss in public. "You talk about the damage that has been done by disclosures, but any government official who thought this would never be disclosed was ignoring history. The truth always manages to come out," he said.

Surviving The Surveillance State

Glenn Beck's "SURVEILLANCE STATE"

 

 

 

"You're shitting me!" 
"You want me to preserve and protect what?"
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Big Brother is bipartisan.  Republican Senator Dan Coats (above) attacked those "evil" journalists for throwing "raw meat out there", suggesting the reporting was misleading the public about the unconstitutional spying by Big Brother. 
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Coats cautioned against overreacting "for fear of the public saying, 'Oh, that headline makes me nervous.'"
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The Constitution and Bill of Rights has no meaning to the Statists from both parties.  People exist to serve the State.  Never question your Masters.

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“Nothing exists except an endless present in which
the Party is always right.”
― George Orwell, 1984