Read "Do Americans Love Big Brother?" by Chet Nagle, a former CIA agent. Can't you just see the new wanted posters everywhere of Edward Snowden as the new Emmanuel Goldstein. He even has the beard for it.

Everyone is wondering (at least I am) who is Ben Rhodes, a 30-something who ascended from literally nowhere to be what seems a main driving force behind Obama's foreign policy. He is credited with convincing the president to embrace the Arab Spring, convincing the president to bomb Libya, and, now, convincing the president to start yet another war, this time against Syria.

Who is he? How did a 24-year old aspiring fiction-writer in 2002 suddenly become one of the drafters of not only the 9/11 Commission report but also the Iraq Study Group Report? Then move on to Obama's presidential campaign as a speechwriter and then to Deputy National Security Advisor, from which he announced the beginning of a US war on Syria while the president met with supporters in the East Room of the White House? Those familiar with Washington know that such miraculous ascents rarely happen on their own and are equally rarely the result of pure, raw talent.

There might be some clues to his brother David's also improbable rise -- from a lowly production assistant at Fox News at the end of the 1990s to covering presidential elections for Fox News (including the one where his brother was writing Obama's speeches) to the lofty position of president of CBS news by 2011!

The excellent Russ Baker was wondering about all this way back in March, when he noticed a typical New York Times gloss-over article on Rhodes.

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I often hear or read conservatives (and some "libertarians") saying that they want to bring the Republican Party back to its roots. Why would anyone want to do that? As Tom DiLorenzo shows today in his excellent article, the roots of the Republican Party are evil roots. The GOP should be destroyed root and branch.

Philip Giraldi is a former counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who served as a foreign policy adviser to Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign. He has some very perceptive things to say about Syria, Russia, and John McCain.

Thomas Drake has a very informative article in The Guardian.

Listen to (and read) this insightful interview with Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg on the coup against the Constitution, the National Security State, Edward Snowden, and the American Empire. He sure sounds a lot like Ron Paul in the manner he addresses these issues.

I am told that a climate of fear already is taking hold among government employees with security clearances. To quote an e-mail:

"That 'climate of fear, caution, distrust, suspicion and persecution' already exists. I have a lot of friends and acquaintances who are what I call ‘clearance concubines’ - in other words, they depend upon their gov’t clearances to ‘earn’ their bread. To a man they are fearful to state or post publicly any criticisms of the recent revelations concerning the Leviathan to whom they are beholden, and it’s pretty funny to watch. On forums and social media, where they have in the past posted numerous political or issue-related comments, they are now strangely silent. Most are professing Christians and ‘conservative’ pro-gun & anti-socialism, even anti-state, but to come down on the side that their natural political bent would place them would jeopardize those clearances, knowing that their colleagues at the NSA will see and record anything they might say. So they cower in their corners."

Nevertheless, there are going to be more revelations, like this one titled "Thousands Of Firms Trade Confidential Data With The US Government In Exchange For Classified Intelligence."

The recovered diary of National Socialist official Alfred Rosenberg may prove invaluable in helping scholars solve various mysteries surrounding the Third Reich and the conduct of the Germans in World War II. Rosenberg was a Thule Society occultist and early member of Thule's offspring, the German Workers Party (known later as the National Socialist German Workers Party). He was introduced to Adolf Hitler by fellow occultist Dietrich Eckart. Rosenberg rose in ranks to become the Party’s chief ideologist as author of Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Myth of the Twentieth Century), the second most important book next to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Alfred Rosenberg was also known for his fierce opposition to "degenerate" modern art. Following the 1941 invasion of the USSR, Rosenberg was appointed head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete) and was instrumental in the Holocaust. He was tried at Nuremberg for war crimes and hanged in 1946.

The Germans, who suffered for decades under the totalitarian domination of the all-powerful Stasi surveillance state, recognize precisely what is going on in the United States. Read "Germans accuse U.S. of Stasi tactics before Obama visit." Even Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak sees a parallel between cloud computing and the NSA PRISM program and what happened in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War.

Read “NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants,” by Declan McCullagh.

(Thanks To Ryan Underwood)

Fox News Sunday sought out Cheney and interviewed him, as reported by CNN. I've rewritten some of that article according to what passed through my mind as I read. My replacements are bracketed [...].

Former Vice President Dick Cheney defended [the Iraq War] programs Sunday, but not the Obama administration that now supervises them.

Discussing [the Iraq War], Cheney told Fox News Sunday that the U.S. [invasion and bombings] have "saved lives and protected us from other attacks."

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"Education . . . is no longer the answer to rising inequality," declares Democratic Party hack/propagandist Paul Krugman.  THE ANSWER, he says, is even heavier taxation of work, savings, investment, production, and entrepreneurship, and more lavish subsidies for welfare parasites.  Taxing the productive to subsidize the unproductive, in other words.

This of course is the identical theme of every single column that Krugman has ever written.  It is a perfect example of a syllogism that Milton Friedman often remarked upon.  The syllogism is this:  1) Socialism has been a disaster wherever it has been implemented; 2) the entire world knows this; 3) therefore, we need more socialism.

In his latest broken-record column Krugman does have a point, but he is in a fog over the reason for the point.  Yes, Paul, the teachers' unions who are the backbone of your beloved Democratic party have indeed destroyed "public" education which is, by the way, the prototypical socialist enterprise of the type you have been advocating all your adult life.  The socialistic government schooling monopoly has destroyed the lives of millions of children, especially black children who are trapped in violent and useless "inner city" government schools.  The "answer," Paul, is not throwing more money down that rat hole, or your asinine scheme to punish the productive and subsidize the unproductive.  The first step is for parents to secede from the government brainwashing academies and send their children to private schools or better yet, home schooling.  But of course you would never embrace that since it might mean less political power for the hardcore left in American politics, personified by the greedy and thuggish teachers' unions.

"Governments, like married couples, are entitled to their secrets" has written Richard Cohen a few years back. Which secrets? Lines have to be drawn. A government shouldn't cover up crimes under the mantle of secrecy. It shouldn't conceal wrongful seizures and exercises of power. This government and the preceding one under Bush have concealed the fact that they were collecting information wrongfully, namely, information on private communications. The term "national security" cannot reasonably be invoked as an excuse for doing this because it's too vague, and almost anything can be construed as affecting "national security". The quest for catching terrorists cannot be offered as a reason because there are bounds on searches and invasions of privacy that have long standing and that specifically apply to government and policing activities. These governments have gone way beyond these bounds and then compounded their trespasses by attempting to keep them secret.

The government has kept secret or tried to keep secret its collecting and storing information on everyone's secret and private communications. Thanks to Edward Snowden and his predecessors, this wrongful secret has been revealed publicly. There is no crime in revealing the wrongdoing of the government by revealing a secret program of massive invasions of privacy.

Read the rest of this entry »

So, John McCain wants a no-fly zone over Syria. Okay, give him a plane. He flew a plane over Vietnam, didn't he? It might take him a little time to learn how to fly the new jets, but he should be able to pick it up quickly. Let McCain get shot down over Syria like he did in Vietnam. Nothing that happens in Syria is worth one drop of blood from one American.

This comment about Ed Snowden may seem harmless, except in the context of knowing that this is how most catatonic Americans think about the Snowden affair. Try not to wince at the woeful cliches rolled out by the amateur wordsmith.

He is a coward, wisp, punk, traitor, gut spiller, unpatriotic, fool, stupid, backstabber, yellow belly, S.O.B., P.O.S. Snowden deserves the highest penalty allowed. Manning and Snowden have given our nation a bad name. One never bites the hand that feeds you.

I am hearing the same sentiment from the men in the street. In fact, your average Joe Boob worships the US military machine, applauds the domestic-militarized police state, begs to give up his freedom for guaranteed "security," and expresses admiration for the surveillance scheme that is sold as a protection from foreign boogeymen.

According to a Time Magazine poll, Joe Boob suffers from a case of cognitive dissonance in terms of Snowden's fate. Now if you can stand it, watch the Old Crow Pelosi recite stale government law - while stumblin', bumblin', and looking down at her notes - and put us all into snooze mode with her parroted jabber.

Who is more paranoid?

Someone like Rand Paul accused by the Washington Post of being paranoid about the surveillance state, or someone like John McCain who fears that unless the U.S. invades Syria, the national security is compromised?

Somehow the neocon intellectuals and media, who claim at every opportunity that American (= Israeli) interests are threatened by the goings-on in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Afghanistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Libya and require American interventions, see absolutely no threat to Americans from massively undermining the privacy of every American, placing unaccountable power in the hands of a few, keeping Congress in the dark, breaking laws that are already invalid and unnecessary, and creating the machinery that any police state or totalitarian would love to get their hands on.

Leonard Pitts writes about the tyranny of the Surveillance State in the Miami Herald:

If ever tyranny overtakes this land of the sometimes free and home of the intermittently brave, it probably won’t, contrary to the fever dreams of gun rights extremists, involve jack-booted government thugs rappelling down from black helicopters. Rather, it will involve changes to words on paper many have forgotten or never knew, changes that chip away until they strip away, precious American freedoms.

...People think tyranny will be imposed at the point of a gun. Paranoids look up in search of black helicopters. Meanwhile, the architecture of totalitarianism is put into place all around them, surveillance apparatus so intrusive as to stagger the imagination of Orwell himself.

What Pitts doesn't mention is that not so long ago we were considered to be "paranoids" for thinking there was a surveillance apparatus state.

The progressivist Gawker is shocked, shocked. Intelligence officials lie (and kill and steal) for a living, yet many senators prefer to hit the road rather than attend a briefing that cannot be trusted. And frankly, who cares? It's just a vaudeville show.

Some people are resurrecting that antique phrase, "no-win war," as part of a critique. But if a war--like those on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and so many others--is a war of aggression, a crime against humanity as defined at Nuremberg, why in the world would we wish for victory? Let the victims win, as in Vietnam, though win may be an inappropriate word for a people who lost 6-7 million to foreign invaders, as military historian Martin Van Creveld estimates. I'm still waiting for that wall in Washington.

(Thanks to EconomicPolicyJournal.com)

Remember how we were told that Arab Spring was a real "awakening" in places like Egypt, where the governments would no longer simply be lapdogs of the US and local enforcers of US foreign policy?

Remember how we weren't supposed to notice all the training and assistance given these new more independent voices by our own State Department and its various proxies? And those of us who couldn't help noticing were called kooks?

Are we still not supposed to notice how these new "independent" governments who were no longer US lackeys have magically all lined up behind US foreign policy in the Middle East?

Like this?

"Egypt's Islamist president says he is cutting off diplomatic relations with Syria and has ordered that Damascus Embassy in Cairo to be closed.

"Mohammed Morsi told thousands of supporters in a rally held on Saturday that his government is also withdrawing the Egyptian charge d'affaires from Damascus.

"Morsi also called on Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group to leave Syria, where the Iranian-backed Shiite group has been fighting alongside troops loyal to embattled President Bashar Assad against the mostly Sunni rebels."

And, on the very day President Obama's deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes (an early supporter of the Egyptian "Arab Spring") announces the administration's decision to flood Syria with new weapons for the Islamist insurgents, this?

"A senior official in Egypt’s presidency said Thursday that Egyptians are free to join the fight in Syria and will not be prosecuted upon return amid increasingly public calls by leading clerics for Sunni Muslims to back the rebels there with firepower."

Just when they need new bodies to shoot all those new guns!

It's funny how these things always seem to work out.

Twitter @DanielLMcAdams

Daily Mail: "Revealed: Yahoo FOUGHT against NSA's warrantless spying program but lost and was forced by secret court to join PRISM."

Maybe, though who can doubt she would approve a Republican war. But her remark, "Let Allah sort it out," is at the very least ignorant. "Allah" is Arabic for God. Christian Arabs pray to Allah, too. Unfortunately, she may also mean to echo the genocidal, "Kill them all, and let God sort them out."

Now admits, though in murky fashion, that the FBI was in touch with the alleged lead Boston bomber.

Oops! What is Washington to do? For months -- longer -- the geniuses at the State Dept., the Administration, and their NGOs have told us that the presidential election in Iran would be neither free nor fair.

Now that Washington's favorite candidate, the "reformist" Hassan Rouhani, has won the election outright how are they going to back-track on their assessment?

It might be fun to watch. Probably, though, they will just pretend they didn't say all the stuff they said before things turned out their way. Probably no one will notice.

Iran-watchers Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett predicted that "Iran's Presidential Election Will Surprise America's So-called Iran 'Experts'" and it looks like they were right.

Twitter @DanielLMcAdams

Given that no one non-evil is ever appointed to the Black-Robed Gang, and that even a rare decent decision is motivated by one pressure group as versus another, I should have known better than to praise the gene decision, which I had not then read. Thanks to Richard Roland for correcting me:

The United States Supreme Court made a serious and harmful blunder in its decision in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc.

Their first holding was that a gene or portion of a gene extracted as a strand of DNA from a genome is not an invention, but something found in nature, and thus not patentable. So far, so good. Unfortunately, they erred in reaching their second holding, that a strand of cDNA, which is derived by a different process, and contains only a single gene, is patentable. This means that genes do, despite the headlines, remain patentable.

In its defense of its first holding, the Court appears to understand the key concept that the essence of a gene is information – a sequence of codes that can be decoded one at a time into a corresponding sequence of amino acids, which then folds into a functional protein that is not just information, but works by virtue of its physical shape and exposed chemical properties. The Court seemed to rely on that understanding in rejecting the argument made by Myriad (and accepted by at least one lower court judge) that because the particular physical molecular embodiment of an isolated gene differs from its embodiment in a chromosome, the isolated gene is something that does not exist in nature.

Read the rest of this entry »

And they're not employees of the Fed. (Thanks to Zee Zee)

Endorsed by the Republican House.

Don't miss the latest from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Will the new Iranian president Hassan Rouhani opt not only for more freedom--though Iran is far freer than the Western media portray--but also act so as to prevent the nuclear incineration of his country by the US and Israel? The anti-civilian sanctions, and therefore war crimes, continue to be imposed on Iran, most recently made worse by the US Senate. Next: they vote to make Obama's horse a consul.

(Thanks to Mark Carroll)

He was feared as the best player and long-ball hitter the GOP had.

Tax collectors training with AR-15s? (Thanks to Mark Carroll)

US spy agencies swap data with thousands of state-connected companies. (Thanks to Robert Blumen)

Americans' confidence in Congross has declined to 10%, but they love the Pentagram (76%). Thanks to Ralph Raico.

The warmongering imperialists at the War Street Journal, like their comrades at the Claremont Institute and National Review, are always ready to dredge up a quote from either Alexander Hamilton or his political descendant, Abraham Lincoln, to "justify" the lawless abandonment of the U.S. Constitution and the unlimited growth of the warfare state.

The latest example of this is how a recent unsigned editorial in the WSJ announced that "Some commentators assert an abstract sense that government has gone too far" by spying on several billion phone calls per day, emails, tweets, etc.  The Journal then invokes the words of the mighty Hamilton that "the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty."  If history proves anything, it proves that this is the exact opposite of the truth.  War has always been the health of the state, and the state is always and everywhere the enemy of liberty.  (See Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan).  And commentators don't just "assert" an "abstract" principle here; their criticisms are based on the REALITY of NSA spying and the demolition of the Fourth Amendment.

The neocons use Hamilton as their "justification" for a totalitarian police state because Hamilton was the foremost sworn enemy of limited, constitutional government during his time.  At the constitutional convention he advocated a "permanent president" who would appoint all governors who would be mere puppets of an American king.  When the convention failed to adopt his nationalist plan and adopted federalism instead, he stormed out and denounced the Constitution as a "frail and worthless fabric."  He spent the rest of his life subverting and undermining it by inventing the theory of "implied powers" of the Constitution and expansive interpretations of the Commerce and General Welfare Clauses.  His fundamental constitutional philosophy was that the document could be used by clever lawyer/politicians like himself to rubber stamp anything and everything the federal leviathan state ever wanted to do.  This is why his nemesis, Jefferson, considered him to be a corrupt and dangerous man.  We have lived under the "Hamiltonian Constitution" ever since 1865 when the principle was established (at gunpoint) that the federal government would forevermore be the sole arbiter of the constitutionality of its own powers through its own "Supreme" Court.  The fox has been guarding the constitutional henhouse for very long time; it's time to call in Animal Control by resurrecting the rights of peaceful secession and nullification. (See my book, Hamilton's Curse, for more details about Hamilton and the curse of Hamiltonianism).

. . . when people who represent it behave like out-of-control college kids on spring break," asks columnist Cal Thomas.  Thomas refers here to the military bureaucrats who "defend" U.S. State Department bureaucrats abroad who have, once again, been caught engaging in what he calls serial "sexual assaults" and an "endemic" solicitation of prostitutes while on the job.

News for Cal:  These ARE "our core values."  They are the "core values" of the military and have been for a very long time.  The U.S. military is an American institution; therefore, these are indeed "our" core American values.  (Haven't you watched MTV recently, Cal?  Or the new ABC miniseries, "Mistresses"?  Or just about any movie coming out of Hollywood?).

Question for Cal:  Since when is "projecting our core values" at gunpoint  and the constant threat of waging total aggressive war on countries that have done nothing to us a legitimate, constitutional role for government?  Feel free to project YOUR values in Syria, Lebanon, Israel, or wherever, Cal, but I wish you would leave the rest of us out of it.

Information for Cal:  In addition to gross sexual perversion and illegality, a hallmark of the U.S. military for generations, among the other American Core Values that "we" project at gunpoint are:  crony capitalism that benefits the top one percent at the expense of everyone else; unlimited government run by limitless liars; mind-boggling public debt; a bankrupt welfare state that destroys families and the work ethic; the fascist attitude of worshipping all things military; grossly irresponsible money printing to pay for government handouts; a "war on drugs" that has generated and explosion of crime for generations; and the brainwashing of all school children by government schools in the supposed "exceptionalism" of this regime.

Despite Our Rulers’ total surveillance of us, their own degeneracy and filth flourishes as if no one, not even a higher Judge, is watching:  “A former top officer” at the TSA who’s “worked [sic] for the federal agency since August 2002” “was arrested on child pornography charges after items were seized from his locker at Manchester-Boston Regional Airport” in New Hampshire.

Cops claim that they discovered evidence on Miquel Quinones’ “personal laptop computer and three thumb drives stored in his airport locker.” Seems an odd place to hide your sin. So perhaps the cops are lying yet again, but who cares? When their target is a fellow myrmidon for the satanic state, I sit back and enjoy the spectacle.

Allegedly among the stash was “a video and more than 1,000 images of child pornography…” Ah, so that’s why Quinones kept the stuff at the office, so to speak: he’d simply downloaded the porno-scanners’ photos into his laptop.

You’d think they’d commend the guy for working overtime rather than vilify him as a pedophile. Yo, TSA: kinda tough to tell the difference, isn’t it?

The politically-active Americans who believe in the State and in using its coercive powers are anti-Christian. They are not active followers of Jesus Christ. They are not Christian Anarchists. The millions upon millions of Americans who believe likewise and support the State likewise are not active followers of Jesus Christ no matter what they profess. Someone who goes to a church of Christian denomination one day and on that same day or the next day supports the current American invasion of Iraq or Libya or Syria is not really following Jesus, or not consistently and not to the degree he or she should. Is America really a Christian nation? If it is, it's not the version that I get from reading the Gospels and from the messages of Jesus.

The catalyst for this remark now and today, which I have long believed, is a quote in Justin Raimondo's article today. He quotes a progressive named Joshua Marshall. Marshall's religion is of no concern here. What matters is the thought and the fact that many people attending Christian churches would endorse this thought, which is what Laurence Vance has been documenting now for years. Marshall said or wrote “On the other hand, if you basically identify with the country and the state, then indiscriminate leaks like this are purely destructive. They’re attacks on something you fundamentally believe in, identify with, think is working on your behalf.”

The issue here is wrapped up in the word "basically". What do you basically identify with? If it's the country and the state, then it cannot be God. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot place God in one compartment and state in another.

Here is the terrifyingly chilling Oscar-winning motion picture, The Lives of Others, about the totalitarian surveillance state of communist East Germany under the Stasi's brutal and all-pervasive intrusive domination. (Please view it with English captions on.) In 1899, the great libertarian William Graham Sumner published a classic (and very controversial) essay called "The Conquest of the United States by Spain." Americans had just beaten the Spanish in open warfare but in the process had cast aside their core principles of individual liberty, non-interventionism, and constitutional restraint and adopted the hubristic values of their opponent, imperial Spain. Sumner dared put forth that we had ceased being a republic and had become an empire. I think what we have been experiencing since the creation of the National Security State in 1947 can best be described as “The Conquest of the United States by East Germany.” We abandoned our first principles beginning during the Cold War, and more significantly and dramatically, since September 11, 2001. The excellent posts today on LRC concerning the situation surrounding Edward Snowden and the NSA by Eric Margolis, Thomas Drake, Justin Raimondo, and Glenn Greenwald confirm this assessment.

Lew: Here is my favorite part of Dr. Paul's great new video:

Whether it's the Gallup or Pew poll of Americans on surveillance, there is not a rock hard super-majority that is against the surveillance state. Americans haven't experienced the possible downsides of a state that can go back years to hear and read their most private communications. They are blissfully unaware of the workings of police states and the role played by the state's possession of files on everyone. They do not understand that when the blackness of the human heart is combined with the control of such vast information sources, the most horrible oppression results. They cannot imagine the horrible workings of suspicion, greed, envy, snitches, and hatred, or the workings of the reformers, the religious, the utopians, the social planners, the intellectuals, the power-hungry and the idealists when they gain such power. They do not understand that when the machinery of oppression and dominance is rolled into place, and this includes access to private information on anyone and everyone, that all it takes is a pull of the switch -- a crisis, real or manufactured -- for Congress to pass a law that turns on the police state. They do not understand that once it is turned on, the nation must go through the wringer to get it turned off, and that could take generations.

Dismantle the machinery of oppression now! It is much easier to do it now, than later, and it is already very hard to do this even now.

A great statement for peace and justice (of course).

UPDATE Don't miss this new Ron video on more planned US atrocities against Syria.

Franklin Lamb has been on Capitol Hill digging out information on Syria and what comes next. Everything I wrote earlier is true, although I do not stray from East Amherst. Reading his very good article leads me to some further observations. All quotes are from Lamb's article.

1. I wrote earlier that U.S. entry would lead to more people killed. Washington knows this. It has budgeted for 50,000. "Hand wringing over the loss of 125 lives due to chemical weapons, whoever did use them, pales in comparison to the more 50,000 additional lives that will be lost in the coming months, a figure that  Pentagon planners and the White House have 'budgeted' as the price of toppling the Assad government." America's leaders are cold-blooded murderers, in the same league as Hitler, Stalin and Mao.

Read the rest of this entry »

Operation Mockingbird (or its 2013 equivalent) is alive and well. Last night I spent several hours on the Yahoo news site posting the message below at hundreds of articles by lemming-like regime hacks attacking Edward Snowden and defending the NSA. This curiously appeared to have been a coordinated effort of sorts, with Yahoo as the centralizing vehicle bringing this array of negativity and black propaganda together. Several contributions from entities, such as The Atlantic Wire, were repeatedly referenced and displayed. The National Security State pleads it no longer pays these scurrilous scribes or have them on retainer as agitprop flacks as it did for decades in the past. Yeah, just like how the Fed never buys statist economists to burble on about its munificence and virtues. Here was the message I posted:  Read the rest of this entry »

Hours after President Obama's young Deputy National Security Advisor, the fiction-writer Ben Rhodes, announced that the "red line" in Syria had been crossed and that his boss was about to start arming the Syrian rebels, the usual suspects have again crawled out of their shells to gleefully finger the dog-eared pages of their favorite weapons catalogues...

Witness Foreign Policy's John Hudson, who updates his March 2013 full color glossy guide to "The weapons that could change the game in Syria" to inform us of the president's decision.

Who did he turn to in his March article for all the breathless details on the glowing death machines? None other than Jeffrey White, of the notorious Washington Institute for Near East Policy -- otherwise known as "AIPAC's Think-Tank." WINEP and its sister organizations, AIPAC and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies have heartily encouraged the shift. Now that they have their way it is time to trot out the war porn, bring the uniformed "experts" back on to the television screen to talk weapons and tactics in a blistering staccato of acronym and jargon that delights the warmonger's ears.

It's 2003 all over again!

Twitter @DanielLMcAdams

Investigative reporter Greg Palast on The Drone Ranger: Obama's Dirty Wars.

NSA expert James Bamford on Building America’s secret surveillance state." He is the author of The Shadow Factory: The NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America; Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency; The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency, America's Most Secret Intelligence Organization; and A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies.

“One South Florida man accused in a series of bank robbery attempts is hoping the recent revelation that the federal government is secretly keeping millions of U.S. phone records could help his defense” by proving that he was nowhere near the scene.

Since his carrier can’t locate the relevant data, his attorney wants the NSA to cough it up. “The president of the United States has recognized this program has been ongoing since 2006 … to gather the phone numbers [and related information] of everybody including my client in 2010," [the defendant’s counsel, Marshall Dore] Louis said.

Indeed. “’If the government is spying on our phone calls, it can't then claim in the same breath that it won't provide those calls when it helps the defense. What's good for the goose, is good for the gander,’ said David Oscar Markus, a defense lawyer who blogs about the federal justice system in South Florida and first wrote about the unusual request.”

And you're absolutely right, Mr. Markus --  or should be. But in a police-state, the ganders pluck the geese and plunder their nests. They even slaughter some, usually but not always those who hiss and honk in dissent. Nor do those foul fowl abide by the rules they foist on the lesser birds. You can read more about this parasitic species in Animal Farm. (Thanks to Bill Martin for the link.)