There has been an orgy of remembrances about Richard Nixon’s resignation as president because the 40th anniversary was on the 9th. I am not a big fan of these retrospectives but I found the following video clip intriguing. It is from a TV series called Nixon’s the One that has not yet been broadcast in the US. It is supposed to be an accurate verbatim portrayal of events based on transcripts and notes of those present.
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In an extremely important and positive development triggered by Edward Snowden, Yahoo announces that like Google they will begin to encrypt email. It was clear that the only way that government spying could be thwarted is if the big companies started including sophisticated encryption methods into their software and made it easy to use, because ordinary people would be too intimidated by what is required to do so on their own. We cannot depend upon Congress to rein the NSA in.
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There seem to be more and more leakers willing to spill the dirt on what their governments are doing and it looks like The Intercept is their vehicle of choice for revealing information, which must be causing the major media outlets considerable chagrin at not getting the scoops. Of course, they have only themselves to blame because they have shown themselves to be not good custodians of the public trust, being more eager to ingratiate themselves with governments than informing the public.
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An op-ed in the Washington Post makes a good case as to why the use by the US government of drone strikes is so problematic
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When the Bush-Cheney regime went on an orgy of torture, they denied that what they were doing deserved that label and the US media became extremely coy about calling it that, although the practices such as waterboarding had been unambiguously condemned as torture when done by Japanese on American prisoners of war and the perpetrators had been executed. The New York Times was one of the worst culprits during that period, routinely using the phrase ‘enhanced interrogation’ that the Bush administration wanted them to use instead of calling it torture.
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In a post on July 25, I mentioned early reports of a possible massacre by Israeli troops in the town of Khuza’a near the Israeli border, with social media providing gruesome stories. In a new report, Human Rights Watch confirms it, saying that between July 23 and 25, Israeli troops deliberately targeted civilians, killing them as they walked with their hands up or carrying white flags or were running away.
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Yesterday’s The Intercept story by Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux about the numbers of people caught up in the various government’s watch lists was based on confidential documents from the National Counterterrorism Center that was leaked to them. What was interesting is that these were not part of the trove of documents released by Edward Snowden and the date of the documents is August 2013 showing that they were created after Snowden left the NSA.
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The Daily Show exposes the hypocrisy of the US government in that, while calling for an end to hostilities in Gaza, it is also rushing more weapons and ammunition to enable Israel to replenish the weapons stocks it has used up in the massive bombardment of Gaza so that it can keep bombing at the same high rate if the current ceasefire should break down. The assault has already resulted in the deaths of more than 1,800 Gazans of whom nearly 400 are children.
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Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux of The Intercept have a detailed analysis based on confidential documents that they have received that about 40% of the 680,000 people on the US government’s Terrorist Screening Database have no recognized terrorist group affiliation. The TSDB is the ‘watch list’ that the government uses and one can land up on it merely if some government agency somewhere decided that you are suspicious.
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