Terrorism plot thwarted; no NSA involved

The National Security Agency and it’s backers in the White House and Congress would have us believe that the only way to break terror plots is massive, intrusive spying on every connection we make through the technology on which modern life depends.

And in the popular mind, a “terrorist” is someone of darker skin who prays in the direction of Mecca.

Well here’s a story that puts things in a different light.

Here;s Brendan J. Lyons of the Albany, New York, Times-Union, writing in a story headlined “Terrorism radiation plot uncovered in Albany”:

An industrial mechanic with General Electric Co., who is also allegedly a member of the Ku Klux Klan, designed a deadly mobile radiation device that he intended to sell to Jewish groups or a southern branch of the Ku Klux Klan, according to a federal complaint unsealed Wednesday in Albany.

The device was intended to be a truck-mounted radiation particle weapon that could be remotely controlled and capable of silently aiming a lethal beam of radioactivity at its human targets. The concept was that victims would eventually die from radiation sickness.

Glendon Scott Crawford, 49, of Galway, is accused in a federal complaint of developing “a radiation emitting device that could be placed in the back of a van to covertly emit ionizing radiation strong enough to bring about radiation sickness or death against Crawford’s enemies,” states the complaint attributed to an FBI agent.

Read the rest.

But it wasn’t the National Security Agency’s massive surveillance of American citizens that brought the plot down, report Jonathan Dienst, Pete Williams, and Erin McClam of NBC News:

Federal authorities said they became aware of the plot and later began working undercover, after Crawford walked into a synagogue and asked for help with technology that could kill enemies of Israel while they slept.

The synagogue declined, and both the synagogue and another Jewish organization approached by Crawford told the FBI, the complaint said.

Read the rest.

What really blows us away is the radical change in the outlook of the Klan, an organization once as fervently anti-Jewish as the American Nazi Party. While once Klansmen would’ve targeted Jews, now they see them as allies.

Strange times, no?

Charts of the day: Divisions over spookery

Two charts from a new survey by the Pew Center for the People & the Press on the impact of the National Security Agency’s massive domestic spying operations.

First a look at how folks look at the leaks and the leaker:

Next, How they feel about possible snooping on their own lives:

Headlines of the day: Spooks, woe, stabbing

From Spiegel:

Obama’s Soft Totalitarianism: Europe Must Protect Itself from America

From ANSAmed:

Free trade talks kick off between U.S. and European Union

Obama says a free-trade deal could create 30 million jobs

From Common Dreams:

Obama Cans Regulator Who Crossed Wall Street

Ouster is a gain for big bankers advocating lax oversight

From the New York Times, worries from Down East:

Faltering Economy in China Dims Job Prospects for Graduates

From the London Telegraph:

German economy to slow this summer, warns Bundesbank

The German economy will slow this summer after a spring recovery, the Bundesbank predicted in a report, citing weaker industrial orders and export data

From France24, another sign of hard times:

French far-right shames Socialists in by-election

From The Consumerist:

Feds Bust Group Of 7-Eleven Stores For Allegedly Exploiting Immigrants, Stealing Their Pay

From the Christian Science Monitor, on the death of Old Media:

India to send world’s last telegram. Stop.

Once a staple of authoritative communication across the Indian subcontinent, the telegram has lost too much ground to smartphones. One devotee is threatening a Gandhi-style fast.

Finally, from Radio France Internationale, proof that imitators aren’t always flattering:

Serge Gainsbourg impersonator in court for stabbing Johnny Hallyday imitator

Quote of the day: Drugs and real causes

Columbia University psychologist Carl Hart, author of High Price: A Neuroscientist’s Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society, grew up in a tough Miami neighborhood and went on to become Columbia’s first tenured black science professor.

Hart argues that laws, public policy, and much scientific discourse on drugs is misdirected, based on myth rather than science, and used to disguise the real causes of the conditions attributed to illegal drug use.

As physician Suzanne Koven wrote in her Boston Globe review of Hart’s book:

Hart’s personal story supports his broader argument. If drugs alone caused poverty, crime, and family dysfunction, Hart would have been unlikely to grow up to be a happily married father and tenured Ivy League faculty member.

Here’s his response to Alternet’s Kristen Gwynne’s question, “What is actually responsible for problems often linked to drugs?”

Poverty. And there are policies that have played a role, too. Policies like placing a large percentage of our law enforcement resources in those communities, so that when people get charged with some petty crime, they have a blemish on their record that further decreases their ability to join mainstream, get a job that’s meaningful, and that sort of thing.

The policy decisions that we make play a far bigger role than the drugs themselves. When I turned 14, for example, there was a federal government program that, in order to keep kids like me out of the streets, gave us jobs. Under these federal government programs, we had money for the summer, for clothing—it was great. When we cut these types of programs and kids have nowhere to go what do you expect to happen? It doesn’t take rocket scientists to figure this out.

Now, I have an 18-year-old who, this summer, won’t have anything to do. I’m trying to find him some sort of work. Having a federal government program for underprivileged children, that was great. That let kids know that the society might care about you. We teach them work skills, we teach them something about responsibility, we make sure they have money in their pockets. Now, you take away all of this, and you miss the chance to teach them about responsibility. You miss the opportunity to help them put food on the table, to put clothes on their backs.

Read the rest.

Headlines of the Day: Culture wars to spookery

The biggest news of the day, from EUoserver:

EU-US trade talks to start after France wins culture clause

From the London Telegraph, a word of alarm about the rising titan:

Fitch says China credit bubble unprecedented in modern world history

China’s shadow banking system is out of control and under mounting stress as borrowers struggle to roll over short-term debts, Fitch Ratings has warned

From the Oakand Tribune:

Is Bay Area housing bubble back?

From The Independent:

‘The worst case of scientific censorship since the Catholic Church banned the works of Galileo’: Scientists call for drugs to be legalised to allow proper study of their properties

From International Business Times:

Cannabis Comes To Wall Street: The Next Big Industry?

From Deutsche Welle, some Obama flattering by German imitation:

Der Spiegel: Germany to expand Internet surveillance

From The Age:

Australia gets ‘deluge’ of US secret data, prompting a new data facility

Facility hints at Australia’s involvement in data collection.

And then there’s this, from c/net:

NSA spying flap extends to contents of U.S. phone calls

National Security Agency discloses in secret Capitol Hill briefing that thousands of analysts can listen to domestic phone calls. That authorization appears to extend to e-mail and text messages too.

From Bloomberg News:

Hong Kong People Oppose Returning Snowden to U.S., Poll Shows

One sign of Hong Kong sympathy can be seen in this Saturday report on a demonstration of support there for the controversial leaker of NSA secrets.

Headlines of the day: Hither to [no] yawn

From the BBC:

IMF: US budget cuts ‘ill-designed’

From Radio France Internationale, a rebuff to the favorite argument of xenophobes:

Immigrants contribute more than they cost, OECD reports finds

From Ekathemerini, evidence that student loans are a global problem:

Greeks owe 4.3 mln pounds for student loans in the UK

From EUobserver, on one country striking an independent note:

Iceland’s EU bid is over, commission told

From Business Insider, a debtor imprisonment here in the U.S.:

Man Handed A 3-Year Prison Sentence For Refusing To Pay For Dinner

From ProPublica, on a story that leaves us shocked. . .shocked we say:

Bank of America Lied to Homeowners and Rewarded Foreclosures, Former Employees Say

From Vienna’s Der Standard, translation by Watching America. But we love the sound of the German word for “thought police,” Gedankenpolizei:

Barry and the Thought Police

No U.S. president has hounded whistleblowers with as much religious zeal as Obama.

Headlines of the day II: All about the Benjamins

From EUbusiness:

Biggest European groups are big in tax havens: NGO

From Reuters:

EU justice chief seeks answers on U.S. data spying

From El País:

Europe faces up to impotence over US’s mass spying program

From EnetEnglish:

Greece downgraded to emerging market status

From Grist:

BP stops cleanup in three Gulf states — and starts funding a new beachfront hotel

From Improbable Research, reporting on the UN-approved list of recommended edible insects for our Brave New Diet:

Anyone for fried lice?

And from The Independent, good news for Berkeley bioengineers and their corporate sponsors:

Exclusive: The agricultural revolution – UK pushes Europe to embrace GM crops

Environment Secretary will urge EU to relax restrictions on crop licensing

A backhanded paen to the bankster brigade from the New York Times:

Banks Seen as Aid in Fraud Against Older Consumers

And finally, from Sociological Images, another reminder of who the real winners are:

The Top 1% of US Income-earners Receive 15% of Tax Breaks and Credits

Obama’s patron and the fate of the free press

University of Chicago Law School Professor Geoffrey Stone played a critical role in the creation of the legalistic covert neoliberal politician that is Barack Obama, for it was Stone who brought Obama to his campus as a constitutional law professor. Obama brought him onto his advisory team during his 2008 campaign.

In this Democracy Now! debate with former New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief Cris Hedges, Stone makes a critically important point about Obama: Whatever he does is accomplished with a Con Law prof’s finesse, with all the requisite whereas-es and wherefores. Thus, what he does is — moral, immoral, or otherwise — certain to pass the scrutiny of legislatures and a Supreme Court which hews to the neoliberal line, a doctrine that arose from a cadre of scholars from — where else? — the University of Chicago.

Obama has bested Bush in his zeal to kill messengers, initiating more whistleblower prosecutions than all previous administrations combined, and Hedges makes the critical point that without whistleblowers, the press has no way of reporting on government’s darkest sides.

Relevant here, a quote from Jeff Bachhman, lecturer in Human Rights at the School of International Service at American University, writing for The Hill’s Congress Blog:

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has charged six whistle-blowers, a term apparently not in The New York Times’s or The Washington Post’s editorial vocabulary, under the Espionage Act. These six individuals have revealed government waste, fraud, and abuse, acts of aggression, torture and war crimes. Yet, it is those who have revealed the criminal activity that have suffered prosecution by the Obama administration while those who actually committed the crimes have gone unpunished.

>snip<

The Obama administration has sent a clear message. Government officials and journalists who wish to work together to create news stories through the leak of classified information that portray the president and his administration in a positive light should have no fear. And to the journalists and whistle-blowers thinking about publishing that other kind of classified information, be prepared to have your emails read, your phones tapped without your knowledge and your life and career turned upside down.

Read the rest.

And now for the debate:

The program notes:

Edward Snowden’s decision to leak a trove of secret documents outlining the NSA’s surveillance program has elicited a range of reactions. Among his detractors, he’s been called “a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison,” (Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker), who’s committed “an act of treason,” (Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate intelligence committee). To supporters, Snowden is a hero for showing that “our very humanity [is] being compromised by the blind implementation of machines in the name of making us safe,” (author Douglas Rushkoff), one whom President Obama should “thank and offer him a job as a White House technology advisor,” (American Conservative editor Scott McConnell). We host a debate with two guests: Chris Hedges, a senior fellow at the Nation Institute and former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times; and Geoffrey Stone, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. Stone served as an informal advisor to President Obama in 2008, years after hiring him to teach constitutional law.

More confirmation: The bugs in Marilyn’s house

Three years ago we wrote about the two sets of covert microphone installations in Marilyn Monroe’s house — one installed by freelance wireman Bernard Bates Spindel on behalf of Jimmy Hoffa and the other by J. Edgar Hoover’s boys, and both eager to dig up the dirt on the Kennedys, Jack and Bobby.

Another player in the game was Freddie Otash, a corrupt ex-LAPD vice cop who made a tidy living digging up dirt for Hollywood gossip magazines and for the increasingly paranoid Howard Hughes.

Now comes a new twist, reported by the Irish Independent:

Otash, who inspired the character of private investigator Jake Gittes (played by Jack Nicholson) in the 1974 film Chinatown, was a notorious Hollywood gumshoe during the 1950s and 1960s, who snooped on – and on behalf of – a slew of the era’s stars, including Lana Turner, Errol Flynn, Frank Sinatra and Bette Davis. In his notes, Otash claims to know the location of Judy Garland’s secret supply of pills; to have caught James Dean shoplifting at a Hollywood store; and to have heard Marilyn Monroe having sex with John F Kennedy.

>snip<

Otash, known as “Mr O”, died aged 70 in 1992, having just completed a book called Marilyn, Kennedy and Me. The manuscript, never published, was also found among his files, which had been kept by his daughter. In it, he recalls bugging Monroe’s house, allegedly to snoop on Kennedy and other Democrats for the Republican tycoon Howard Hughes. Otash claims to have taped an argument between Monroe, Bobby Kennedy and Kennedy’s brother-in-law, the actor Peter Lawford, on the day she died.

The detective later said Lawford had asked him to remove anything that incriminated the Kennedy brothers – both rumoured to have had romantic relations with Monroe – from the dead star’s home.

Read the rest.

So did Otash bug Monroe’s home? Neither of our two sources, Marion Phillips, the second in command and operations boss of LAPD’s mob squad and a former phone company security expert who’d formerly worked for the CIA, said Otash had installed bugs. The two sets of wiring were clearly identifiable, one the FBI’s and the other Spindel’s.

There was no evidence of a third set of bugs, which leads us to suspect Otash may have serviced Spindel’s installation or otherwise shared in it’s fruits. But there was no sign he’d ever planted microphones of his own.

Pot smoking, class war, and a real war in Mexico

In a follow-up to yesterday’s post about class differences in America, here’s an interesting chart from the ACLU report The War on Marijuana in Black and White [PDF] on the disparity in arrests in the country’s 25 most populous counties:

There’s good news for folks living in our own home turf, California’s Alameda County — home to both Berkeley and Oakland. Seems as though the racial disparity in pot busts is among the lowest around and the overall number of arrests is the lowest save for Middlesex, Mass.

And here’s another take on the drug wars, from Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks:

On an even more sobering note, here’s a report from The Real News Network on an even more devastating impact of the war on drugs, the 70,000 deaths in Mexico over the past six years as a result of the literal drug wars waged by the country’s drug cartels.

Paul Jay gets the facts from John Ackerman, professor at the Institute for Legal Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and editor in chief of The Mexican Law Review:

A transcript of the interview is posted here.

Class in America: Defined by two stories

We came across two stories today that precisely epitomize the state of class relations in the United States.

The first comes from Majid Mohamed of The Independent, and deftly defines the relationship of the rich to the law, and to the world inhabited by lesser mortals, namely thee and we.

The subject of Mohamed’s tale is the Big Sur wedding of Sean Parker — the 33-year-old multi-billionaire who founded Napster and added to his pile as Facebook’s first  president and Spotify investor.

Seems he’s having to cough up $2.5 million for holding an illegal wedding Saturday in a nature preserve:

The 33-year-old, who was portrayed by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network, married singer-song writer Alexandra Lenas in a $10 million ceremony on Saturday in Big Sur.

Officials were notified that he had reportedly built a small village – including a gated cottage, fake ruins, bridges, ponds, waterfalls and a huge dancefloor – without permission in a closed campground owned by Ventana Inn & Spa. By the time the California Coastal Commission inspected the area, they found many of the structures already built but allowed the wedding to go ahead.

>snip<

Although the wedding was compared by many to Game of Thrones, Parker insisted it was not a themed wedding. He did though, hire Ngila Dickson, the Oscar-winning costume designer of The Lord of the Rings to design outfits for their 300 guests.

Read the rest.

The state Coastal Commission approved the fine, and will oversee deconstruction of Parker’s fake frippery — which, they insist — won’t leave any lasting damage.

So he shells out ten million for the festivities, and gets away with a fine that — to him — amounts to chump change.

Another America, another story

Let’s get right into the lead of this Ian Urbina New York Times story:

Black Americans were nearly four times as likely as whites to be arrested on charges of marijuana possession in 2010, even though the two groups used the drug at similar rates, according to new federal data.

This disparity had grown steadily from a decade before, and in some states, including Iowa, Minnesota and Illinois, blacks were around eight times as likely to be arrested.

During the same period, public attitudes toward marijuana softened and a number of states decriminalized its use. But about half of all drug arrests in 2011 were on marijuana-related charges, roughly the same portion as in 2010.

Read the rest.

So let’s get this straight. If you’re a billionaire, you can flaunt the law and buy your way out of it. But if you’re black, if you indulge in a crime that causes harm only because it is a crime, you’re far more likely to go to prison than if you’re white.

And the disparity is growing.

Oh, yeah. Lest we forget, our President is guy who smoked more weed than half the hippies in Haight-Ashbury’s heyday, and now presides over a major federal crackdown on clinics that provide the stuff to folks like ourselves who are  battling cancer.

We refer to this guy:

Quote of the day: Assange on the Manning trial

The trial of soldier and alleged Wiki-leaker Bradley Manning began yesterday. Here’s telling part of a statement on the prosecution from Wikileaks co-founder and political refugee Julian Assange:

The alleged act in respect of which Bradley Manning is charged is an act of great conscience – the single most important disclosure of subjugated history, ever. There is not a political system anywhere on the earth that has not seen light as a result. In court, in February, Bradley Manning said that he wanted to expose injustice, and to provoke worldwide debate and reform. Bradley Manning is accused of being a whistleblower, a good man, who cared for others and who followed higher orders.

But this is not the language the prosecution uses. The most serious charge against Bradley Manning is that he “aided the enemy” – a capital offence that should require the greatest gravity, but here the US government laughs at the world, to breathe life into a phantom. The government argues that Bradley Manning communicated with a media organisation, WikiLeaks, who communicated to the public. It also argues that al-Qaeda (who else) is a member of the public. Hence, it argues that Bradley Manning communicated “indirectly” with al-Qaeda, a formally declared US “enemy”, and therefore that Bradley Manning communicated with “the enemy”.

But what about “aiding” in that most serious charge, “aiding the enemy”? Don’t forget that this is a show trial. The court has banned any evidence of intent. The court has banned any evidence of the outcome, the lack of harm, the lack of any victim. It has ruled that the government doesn’t need to show that any “aiding” occurred and the prosecution doesn’t claim it did. The judge has stated that it is enough for the prosecution to show that al-Qaeda, like the rest of the world, reads WikiLeaks.

In the end it is not Bradley Manning who is on trial. The trial of Bradley Manning ended long ago. The defendant now, and for the next 12 weeks, is the United States and the collapse of its institutions. The runaway military, the deferent courts, the hand-maiden press, and the rotten institutions of government. They sit in the docks. We are called to serve as jurists, during this, their lowest hour. We must not turn away.

Free Bradley Manning.

Read the rest.

Headlines of the day II: Wonder drug edition

From CNN:

Marijuana: The next diabetes drug?

From Collective Evolution:

New Study Shows Cannabinoids Improve Efficiency Of Mitochondria And Remove Damaged Brain Cells

From MSN:

Choosing pot over pills may be the way to go for Crohn’s sufferers

From Medical Daily:

Marijuana’s Active Ingredient May Weaken HIV

In a new study, researchers suggest THC-like compounds may have a weakening effect on HIV infection.

From the scientific journal Oncology’s Cancer Network:

Cannabis Linked to Decreased Bladder Cancer Risk

And there’s an important negative finding, too, as noted in this headline from The Oncology Report:

Marijuana habit not linked to lung cancer

And then there’s this from Business Insider, disproving that old canard about the effects of “The Munchies” and providing a surefire incentive for the headline to follow:

Pot Smokers Are Skinnier

From Waking Times, clear evidence that Big Medicine is eager to move:

Who Is Trying To Patent Marijuana?

Finally, from Deutsche Welle, a headline about an idea whose time has obviously come:

OAS calls for drugs rethink, proposes legalization

Canadian corruption: Troubles north of the border

A sobering report from The Real News Network featuring Leo Panitch, Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy and Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at York University in Toronto:

Headline of the day II: Drone war on taggers

And in Germany, too.

From Spiegel:

Battling Graffiti: German Rail Turns to Drones in War on Vandals

Headlines of the day: Greekpocalypse Now

Greeks of a conspiratorial mindset might be forgiven for thinking the economic crisis masks a deeper agenda on the part of folks with money to lessen the numbers of those inconvenient poor.

Consider, for example, the following. . .

From Greek Reporter, 11 May:

Greek HIV Test Centers Shut Down

From Ekathemerini [Athens], 28 May:

Experts warn of ‘worrying’ increase in HIV infections in Greece

From Phantis:

Malaria and HIV Spike as Greece Cuts Healthcare Spending

From Greek Reporter:

Dramatic Rise in Suicides in Greece

From Deutsche Welle:

Little hope for Greece’s jobless youth

From Greek Reporter:

UNICEF: 600,000 Children Below Poverty Line in Greece

From Ekathemerini:

Crisis increases domestic violence, dampens sex drive among Greek men

Surveillance state video: World – Naked Citizens

From the British documentarians at Journeyman Pictures [YoutTube channel here], a stunning look at the extent of the powers and abilities of the modern surveillance state:

From Journeyman Pictures

Increasing numbers of ‘terror suspects’ are being arrested on the basis of online and CCTV surveillance data. Authorities claim they act in the public interest, but does this intense surveillance keep us safer?

“I woke up to pounding on my door”, says Andrej Holm, a sociologist from the Humboldt University. In what felt like a scene from a movie, he was taken from his Berlin home by armed men after a systematic monitoring of his academic research deemed him the probable leader of a militant group. After 30 days in solitary confinement, he was released without charges. Across Western Europe and the USA, surveillance of civilians has become a major business. With one camera for every 14 people in London and drones being used by police to track individuals, the threat of living in a Big Brother state is becoming a reality. At an annual conference of hackers, keynote speaker Jacob Appelbaum asserts, “to be free of suspicion is the most important right to be truly free”. But with most people having a limited understanding of this world of cyber surveillance and how to protect ourselves, are our basic freedoms already being lost?

The Boston bombings struck close to home

If you haven’t yet heard, a pair of bombs at the Boylston Street finish line for the Boston Marathon have resulted in massive casualties.

The news sent us to the phone, because among those present on Boylston Street today were our regnant elder daughter, Jackie, her spouse, and his mother, who had run the race.

Jackie observed that had her mother-in-law finished a few minutes later, they would’ve been at or near where the blasts occurred  rather than having passed the sites  a few minutes before.

UPDATE: She was interviewed about her expieriences by NBC News’s Matt Lauer. See it here.

Headlines of the day: More patterns that connect

First, atop a tale of an ex-bureaucrat’s lament in the London Telegraph:

Financial crisis caused by too many bankers taking cocaine, says former drugs tsar

David Nutt, the former Government drugs tsar sacked after claiming that horse riding was as safe as taking ecstasy, has said that the banking crisis was caused by too many workers taking cocaine

From World Socialist Web Site:

Sharp decline in employer-sponsored health coverage in US

From Ekathemerini:

Study finds spike in heart attacks since start of Greek debt crisis

From The Guardian:

Portugal’s fed-up youth pack and go as their nation slides into reverse

Job prospects are grim, health and education are in crisis and, with more austerity to come, emigration is increasingly the only solution

From MercoPress:

Madrid’s city council to vote naming a street after Margaret Thatcher

Headlines of the day: Looking for patterns?

From Newswise:

Cigarette Relighting Tied to Tough Economy

From the Washington Post:

Cancer clinics are turning away thousands of Medicare patients. Blame the sequester.

From Reuters:

U.S. considers less prison time for ex-Enron CEO Skilling

From The Guardian:

Mary Schapiro: the latest official through the regulatory revolving door

Former SEC chairman Schapiro, 57, to switch to the private sector in a move likely to anger critics of ‘regulatory capture’