Read How America Was Lost: From 9/11 to the Police/Welfare State Online
Authors: Paul Craig Roberts
This is the same Obama who promised to close the Guantanamo Torture Prison, but did not; the same Obama who promised to tell us the purpose for Washington’s decade-long war in Afghanistan, but did not; the same Obama who promised to end the wars, but started new ones; the same Obama who said he stood for the US Constitution, but shredded it; the same Obama who refused to hold the Bush regime accountable for its crimes against law and humanity; the same Obama who unleashed drones against civilian populations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen; the same Obama who claimed and exercised power to murder US citizens without due process and who continues the Bush regime’s unconstitutional practice of violating habeas corpus and detaining US citizens indefinitely; the same Obama who promised transparency but runs the most secretive government in US history.
The tyrant’s speech of spectacular hypocrisy elicited from the invited audience applause on 36 occasions. Like so many others, Germans proved themselves willing to be used for Washington’s propaganda purposes. Here was Obama, who consistently lies, speaking of “eternal truth.”
Here was Obama, who enabled Wall Street to rob the American and European peoples and who destroyed Americans’ civil liberties and the lives of vast numbers of Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis, Libyans, Pakistanis, Syrians, and others, speaking of “the yearnings of justice.” An Obama who equates demands for justice with “terrorism.”
Here was Obama, who has constructed an international spy network and a domestic police state, speaking of “the yearnings for freedom.”
Here was Obama, president of a country that has initiated wars or military action against six countries since 2001 and has three more Muslim countries—Syria, Lebanon, and Iran—in its crosshairs and perhaps several more in Africa, speaking of “the yearnings of peace that burns in the human heart,” but clearly not in his own.
Obama has taken hypocrisy to new heights. He has destroyed US civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. In place of a government accountable to law, he has turned law into a weapon in the hands of the government. He has suborned a free press and prosecutes whistleblowers who reveal his government’s crimes. He makes no objection when American police brutalize peacefully protesting citizens. His government intercepts and stores in National Security Agency computers every communication of every American and also the private communications of Europeans and Canadians, including the communications of the members of the governments, the better to blackmail those with secrets. Obama sends in drones or assassins to murder people in countries with which the US is not at war, and his victims on most occasions turn out to be women, children, farmers, and village elders. Obama kept Bradley Manning in solitary confinement for nearly a year assaulting his human dignity in an effort to break him and obtain a false confession. In defiance of the US Constitution, Obama denied Manning a trial for three years. On Obama’s instructions, London denies Julian Assange free passage to his political asylum in Ecuador, turning him into a modern-day Cardinal Mindszenty. This is the Obama who asked at the orchestrated event at the Brandenburg Gate: “Will we live free or in chains? Under governments that uphold our universal rights, or regimes that suppress them? In open societies that respect the sanctity of the individual and our free will, or in closed societies that suffocate the soul?”
When the Berlin Wall came down, the Stasi Spy State that suffocates the soul moved to Washington.
A NEW BEGINNING WITHOUT WASHINGTON’S SANCTIMONIOUS MASK
June 25, 2013
It is hard to understand the fuss that Washington and its media whores are making over Edward Snowden. We have known for a long time that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been spying for years without warrants on the communications of Americans and people throughout the world. Photographs of the massive NSA building in Utah built for the purpose of storing the intercepted communications of the world have been published many times.
It is not clear to an ordinary person what Snowden has revealed that William Binney and other whistleblowers have not already revealed. Perhaps the difference is that Snowden has provided documents that prove it, thereby negating Washington’s ability to deny the facts with its usual lies.
Whatever the reason for Washington’s blather, it certainly is not doing the US government any good. Far more interesting than Snowden’s revelations is the decision by governments of other countries to protect a truth-teller from the Stasi in Washington.
Hong Kong kept Snowden’s whereabouts secret so that an American black-op strike or a drone could not be sent to murder him. Hong Kong told Washington that its extradition papers for Snowden were not in order and permitted Snowden to leave for Moscow.
The Chinese government did not interfere with Snowden’s departure.
The Russian government says it has no objection to Snowden having a connecting flight in Moscow en route to Ecuador.
Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino responded to Washington’s threats with a statement that the Ecuadorian government puts human rights above Washington’s interests. Foreign Minister Patino said that Snowden served humanity by revealing that the Washington Stasi was violating the rights of “every citizen in the world.” Snowden merely betrayed “ some elites that are in power in a certain country,” whereas Washington betrayed the entire world.
With Hong Kong, China, Russia, Ecuador, and Cuba refusing to obey the Stasi’s orders, Washington is flailing around making a total fool of itself and its media prostitutes.
Secretary of State John Kerry has been issuing warnings hand over fist. He has threatened Russia, China, Ecuador, and every country that aids and abets Snowden’s escape from the Washington Stasi. Those who don’t do Washington’s bidding, Kerry declared, will suffer adverse impacts on their relationship with the US.
What a stupid thing for Kerry to say. Here is a guy who once was for peace but who has been turned into an asset for the NSA. Try to realize the extraordinary arrogance and hubris in Kerry’s threat that China, Russia, and other countries will suffer bad relations with the US. Kerry is saying that America doesn’t have to care whether “the indispensable people” have bad relations with other countries, but those countries have to be concerned if they have bad relations with the “indispensable country.” What an arrogant posture for the US government to present to the world.
Here we have a US Secretary of State lost in delusion along with the rest of Washington. A country that is bankrupt, a country that has allowed its corporations to destroy its economy by moving the best jobs offshore, a country whose currency is in the hands of the printing press, a country that after eleven years of combat has been unable to defeat a few thousand lightly armed Taliban is now threatening Russia and China. God save us from the utter fools who comprise our government.
The world is enjoying Washington’s humiliation at the hands of Hong Kong. A mere city state gave Washington the bird. In its official statement, Hong Kong shifted the focus from Snowden to his message and asked the US government to explain its illegal hacking of Hong Kong’s information systems.
China’s state newspaper,
The People’s Daily
, wrote: “The United States has gone from a model of human rights to an eavesdropper on personal privacy, the manipulator of the centralized power over the international internet, and the mad invader of other countries’ networks. . . The world will remember Edward Snowden. It was his fearlessness that tore off Washington’s sanctimonious mask.”
China’s
Global Times
, a subsidiary of
The People’s Daily
, accused Washington of attacking “a young idealist who has exposed the sinister scandals of the US government.” Instead of apologizing “Washington is showing off its muscle by attempting to control the whole situation.”
China’s official Xinhua news agency reported that Snowden’s revelations had placed “Washington in a really awkward situation. They demonstrate that the United States, which has long been trying to play innocent as a victim of cyber attacks, has turned out to be the biggest villain in our age.”
The Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made it clear that Russia’s sympathy is with Snowden, not with the American Stasi state. Human rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin said that it was unrealistic to expect the Russian government to violate law to seize a transit passenger who had not entered Russia and was not on Russian soil. RT’s Gayane Chichakyan reported that Washington is doing everything it can to shift attention away from Snowden’s revelations that “show that the US has lied and has been doing the same as they accuse China of doing.”
Ecuador says the traitor is Washington, not Snowden.
The stuck pig squeals from the NSA director—“Edward Snowden has caused irreversible damage to US”—are matched by the obliging squeals from members of the House and Senate, themselves victims of the NSA spying, as was the Director of the CIA who was forced to resign because of a love affair. The NSA is in position to blackmail everyone in the House and Senate, in the White House itself, in all the corporations, the universities, the media, every organization at home and abroad, who has anything to hide. You can tell who is being blackmailed by the intensity of the squeals, such as those of Dianne Feinstein (D, CA) and Mike Rogers (R, MI). With any luck, a patriot will leak what the NSA has on Feinstein and Rogers, neither of whom could possibly scrape any lower before the NSA.
The subservience of the White House and Congress to the NSA makes a person wonder who is running the government.
Let’s quit calling the NSA the National Security Agency. Clearly, the NSA is a threat to the security of every person in the entire world. Let’s call the NSA what it really is–the National Stasi Agency, the largest Gestapo in human history. You can take for granted that every media whore, every government prostitute, every ignorant flag-waver who declares Snowden to be a traitor is either brainwashed or blackmailed. They are the protectors of NSA tyranny. They are our enemies.
The world has been growing increasingly sick of Washington for a long time. The bullying, the constant stream of lies, the gratuitous wars and destruction have destroyed the image hyped by Washington of the US as the “indispensable people” who are a “light unto the world.” The world sees the US as a plague upon the world.
Following Snowden’s revelations, Germany’s most important magazine,
Der Spiegel
, had the headline: “Obama’s Soft Totalitarianism: Europe Must Protect Itself From America.” The first sentence of the article asks: “Is Barack Obama a friend? Revelations about his government’s vast spying program call that into doubt. The European Union must protect the Continent from America’s reach for omnipotence.”
Der Spiegel
continues: “We are being watched. All the time and everywhere. And it is the Americans who are doing the watching. On Tuesday, the head of the largest and most all-encompassing surveillance system ever invented is coming for a visit. If Barack Obama is our friend then we really don’t need to be terribly worried about our enemies.”
There is little doubt that German Interior Minister Hans Peter Friedrich has lost his secrets to NSA spies. Friedrich rushed to NSA’s defense, declaring: “that’s not how you treat friends.” As
Der Spiegel
made clear, the minister was not referring “to the fact that our trans-Atlantic friends were spying on us. Rather, he meant the criticism of that spying. Friedrich’s reaction is only paradoxical on the surface and can be explained by looking at geopolitical realities. The US is, for the time being, the only global power– and as such it is the only truly sovereign state in existence. All others are dependent—either as enemies or allies. And because most prefer to be allies, politicians—Germany’s included—prefer to grin and bear it.”
It is extraordinary that the most important publication in Germany has acknowledged that the German government is Washington’s puppet state.
Der Spiegel
says:
German citizens should be able to expect that their government will protect them from spying by foreign governments. But the German interior minister says instead: ‘We are grateful for the excellent cooperation with US secret services.’ Friedrich didn’t even try to cover up his own incompetence on the surveillance issue. ‘Everything we know about it, we have learned from the media,’ he said. The head of the country’s domestic intelligence agency, Hans-Georg Maassen, was not any more enlightened. ‘I didn’t know anything about it,’ he said. And Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger was also apparently in the dark. ‘These reports are extremely unsettling,’ she said. With all due respect: These are the people who are supposed to be protecting our rights? If it wasn’t so frightening, it would be absurd.
For those naive Americans who say, “I’m not doing anything wrong, I don’t care if they spy,”
Der Spiegel
writes that a
“monitored human being is not a free one.”
We have reached the point where we “free Americans” have to learn from our German puppets that we are not free.
You can read it for yourself at
Der Spiegel
.
Present day Germany is a new country, flushed of its past by war and defeat. Russia is also a new country that has emerged from the ashes of an unrealistic ideology. Hope always resides with those countries that have most experienced evil in government. If Germany were to throw off its American overlord and depart NATO, American power in Europe would collapse. If Germany and Russia were to unite in defense of truth and human rights, Europe and the world would have a new beginning.
A new beginning is desperately needed. Chris Floyd explains precisely what is going on, which is something you will never hear from the presstitutes. Read it while you still can, at
Globalresearch.ca
.
There would be hope if Americans could throw off their brainwashing, follow the
lead of Debora Sweet
and others, and stand up for Edward Snowden and against the Stasi State.