The Guardian, ProPublica and the New York Times yesterday simultaneously published articles on the latest revelation to come out of the Edward Snowden documents and they are doozies. The articles reveal that the government has been very successful in trying to break the encryption codes that are used to protect all our data, like our medical records and bank accounts and everything else. And it reveals that US tech companies (both hardware and software) have colluded with the government to provide backdoor access to the government in order to gain that access. The result is a system where little or nothing in our lives is safe from the prying eyes of the government. [Read more…]

President Obama seems to be trying to wriggle out of his ‘red line’ comment, perhaps realizing that if the Syria attack goes badly awry, then people will use that statement to suggest that it was he who was solely responsible for getting the US into the mess even if Congress authorized him to act, since it was that statement that people are repeatedly using to suggest that US ‘credibility’ is on the line. [Read more…]

In this report by Philip Weiss, he says that members of congress are getting an earful from their constituents who oppose any US war against Syria. The Washington Post has a breakdown of the current views of members. [Read more…]

The Brazilian newspaper O Globo, one of the outlets for the NSA documents, reports that the NSA intercepted the communications between the leaders of Mexico and Brazil and their associates. Naturally enough, this latest revelation courtesy of Edward Snowden has sparked outrage in those countries. You can be assured that the leaders of countries all over the world are realizing that ‘fighting terrorism’ seems to be merely a side issue for the NSA, and that their real purpose is political and economic espionage against other countries, irrespective of whether they are allies or not or whether those countries are involved in terrorism or not. It is just the same as domestic spying in the US, where combating terrorism is a cover for anti-democratic surveillance of everyone. [Read more…]

I hate to say it but it looks like war with Syria is now inevitable.

Philip Weiss reports that the Israel lobby, which was keeping a low profile on its views about Syria, has come out into the open with a full-throated lobbying effort in Congress to authorize a war with Syria. Obama’s statement that he seeks a broader goal than merely ‘punishing’ Syria and that he seeks to destabilize the government must have helped in its decision. [Read more…]

It became increasingly clear during the last election that the Republican party strategy in several states was to try and suppress the minority vote by adopting various local rules that made it harder to register and vote and also removing minority voters from the rolls on dubious grounds, fearing that that vote would go overwhelmingly for the Democratic party. That strategy failed to sway the eventual outcome (at least at the presidential level) but now with the US Supreme Court striking down the provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that required certain parts of the country to get pre-clearance from the US Justice Department before changing voting rules, some elements of the party seem to think that this gives them much greater freedom to adopt measures that can suppress the minority vote more effectively. [Read more…]

Max Blumenthal writes that John Kerry now uses rhetoric that combines all the warlike imagery of the past.

In a Labor Day conference call with 127 House Democrats, Secretary of State John Kerry invoked an apocalyptic scenario, summoning visions of American power and credibility incinerated in a terrible Middle East-wide conflagration laced with nerve gas and enriched uranium. [Read more…]

Thanks to a link provided by commenter Marcus Ranum, I want to bring to readers’ attention this gripping account by Adam Curtis of the of the twists and turns of post-World War II Syrian history, and how it interweaves with the histories of Iraq and Egypt. I am reposting it here because it deserves a much wider readership. [Read more…]

As the congressional debate on whether to authorize military action against Syria gets under way, we will hear endlessly from the war hawks who have predictably started salivating at the prospect of more killing by the US military about the need to uphold US ‘credibility’ and that in the highly unlikely event that Congress votes down the resolution and the administration abides by their decision, US credibility will be seriously damaged. As numerous commentators and commenters to this blog have pointed out, ‘credibility’ has now become narrowly identified with the willingness of the US to carry out a threat, whether or not that threat was wise or even reasonable. [Read more…]