A couple months ago, Breaking the Set called out Nestlé corporation for its business practice of bloating the price of water while pursuing the privatization of this common resource against the public good.
Surprisingly, the corporation responded with a bizarre, sci-fi video message in which a woman named ‘Stephanie’ responds to the original report.
By now, you’ve probably heard about Edward Snowden, the 29 year old National Security Agency contractor who defected to Hong Kong after leaking explosive revelations about the extent of the agency’s spying program.
In an exclusive interview with the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, Snowden explains that NSA analysts have the technological ability and blanket legal authority to snoop on anybody. “Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector, anywhere… I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President.”
The story sent shock waves through diplomatic circles and the corporate media. But it’s just the latest story in long wave of recent scandals, including the Associated Press phone records subpoena, the IRS- tea party investigation, the Rupert Murdoch phone hacking and Occupy Wall Street undercover police informant and provocateur revelations.
Snowden further explained the far-reach of NSA capabilities to intercept every mode of our private lives, by saying “with this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your e-mails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your e-mails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.”
His bold confession is not to be understood in a vacuum. There are countless videos of low level US government personnel poking gloved fingers around travelers’ genital areas, causing permanent distress and embarrassment. Racial, religious profiling and clever contrary profiling of white infants and grandmothers is now encountered at train stations, bus stations and highway checkpoints as well. For more than two centuries, this heavy, iron fist did not figure anywhere in the American republic.
Now, police departments across the country issue “administrative subpoenas,” i.e. without a search warrant signed by a judge, to routinely seize troves of customer details from mobile carriers, enabling them to track the whereabouts of millions of subscribers.
High tech surveillance drones are being acquired to spy on Americans while the constitutional scholar and Nobel Peace Prize President uses predator drones to kill thousands abroad, including women and children and American citizens, without bothering to bring any criminal charges in court, let alone convict them of any crime.
Often, the targets’ names are unknown. The killing is based on appearances called signatures: purported intercepted speech, including emails and people the targets are associated with. Its a remote, high tech way to profile targets and it is in this context that Snowden’s revelations should be digested.
The assertion that only bad guys need to worry about PRISM is very naive. Something as innocent as dialing a wrong number could bring you unwarranted scrutiny. Someone with an ax to grind could drop a dime on you and wreck your life.
The intelligence services and the military take a prophylactic approach. This means they increasingly believe that with programs like PRISM, they can identify likely criminals and terrorists before a crime or terrorist act has occurred.
For all its acronyms and technical jargon, the PRISM spy program rests on a simple premise: Secretly record all information about everybody, everywhere at all times, then archive it forever. Since any human being has the potential to become a criminal or terrorist suspect in the future, a dossier on that person will be readily available, including who that person has associated with in the past
The dossier focuses on four areas: financial transactions, phone records, Internet records and travel logs. This diary of bytes makes it possible to ruin anybody under any pretext at will. It creates undreamed of leverage of the state to terrorize the individual and groups of individuals. All manor of abuse is justified under the ‘War on Terror.’
An exhaustive review is beyond the scope of this article, but a few simple but clever changes of habit can go a long way towards protecting yourself from warrantless, illegal, unconstitutional and invasive collection of your genuine private information. To begin, I will focus on the encrypted payments and communication system called Swiftcoin. From a recent press release:
“Users running the Swiftcoin application present a challenge to eavesdroppers. This free application requires no identification or payment to download. Once installed, it enables users to opt out of the common email servers operated by large corporations that are obliged, under gag orders, to provide back door access to invasive, over reaching public and private interests.
Swiftcoin, like numbered Swiss bank accounts, does not identify users by their names. Unlike bank accounts, the user number changes every time he/she presses the send button. The Swiftcoin application may be moved off the user’s computer into a pen drive and opened up again on another computer at will. Swiftcoin users can not be traced by name, by IP address or by device. “
This is called deep encryption because the literally encrypted communication, including its “meta data,” is not identifiable unless the user chooses to make her wallet id public. Every sent message departs from a new “location” or the same location as the user wishes. The same is true for the recipient. Every message or payment is unique and may employ disposable meta data. In addition, the user device itself can be substituted at will. Furthermore, a Swiftcoin wallet can be moved to a pen drive and uploaded to a different device. All of this makes it substantially more difficult to spy on and record a user’s activity, because the correlation between a Swiftcoin id and a particular person is tenuous. Swiftcoin does not rely entirely on encryption which, at the end of the day, can be cracked by cryptographers. The very way that Swiftcoin is designed to be used does not lend itself to tracking any individual over time.
Alas, the Swiftcoin homepage states that it is not available to U.S. citizens. However, the Swiftcoin telegram remains freely available to all regardless of nationality. Every new user may receive ten free Swiftcoins, ( good for 10 000 telegrams; every Swiftcoin ” telegram ” costs 0.001 Swiftcoin ) which is returned to sender upon a return mail from recipient, for a net cost of zero to send and receive a telegram. No money or purchase of Swiftcoin is required to download the program and use the telegram feature.
Abby Martin talks to professor, political critic, and author of over 100 books, about the Boston bombings, US terror inflicted abroad, drones, Obama’s re-branding of Bush administration policies, the National Defense Authorization Act & Holder v. Humanitarian Law, conventional wisdom, the evolution of media propaganda, and education as a form of elite indoctrination.
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RT: As someone who was living in the aftermath of the Boston bombings, the chaos, what did you think of the police and media response to them?
Noam Chomsky: I hate to second guess police tactics, but my impression was that it was kind of overdone. There didn’t have to be that degree of militarization of the area. Maybe there did, maybe not. It is kind of striking that the suspect they were looking for was found by a civilian after they lifted the curfew. They just noticed some blood on the street. But I have nothing to say about police tactics. As far as media was concerned, there was 24 hour coverage on television on all the channels.
RT: Also zeroing in on one tragedy while ignoring others, across the Muslim world, for example…
NC: Two days after the Boston bombing there was a drone strike in Yemen, one of many, but this one we happen to know about because the young man from the village that was hit testified before the Senate a couple of days later and described it. It was right at the same time. And what he said is interesting and relevant. He said that they were trying to kill someone in his village, he said that the man was perfectly well known and they could have apprehended him if they wanted.
A drone strike was a terror weapon, we don’t talk about it that way. It is, just imagine you are walking down the street and you don’t know whether in 5 minutes there is going to be an explosion across the street from some place up in the sky that you can’t see. Somebody will be killed, and whoever is around will be killed, maybe you’ll be injured if you’re there. That is a terror weapon. It terrorizes villages, regions, huge areas. In fact it’s the most massive terror campaign going on by a longshot.
What happened in the village according to the Senate testimony, he said that the jihadists had been trying to turn over the villagers against the Americans and had not succeeded. He said in one drone strike they’ve turned the entire village against the Americans. That is a couple of hundred new people who will be called terrorists if they take revenge. It’s a terrorist operation and a terrorist generating machine. It goes on and on, it’s not just the drone strikes, also the Special Forces and so on. It was right at the time of the Boston marathon and it was one of innumerable cases.
It is more than that. The man who was targeted, for whatever reason they had to target him, that’s just murder. There are principles going back 800 years to Magna Carta holding that people cannot be punished by the state without being sentenced by a trial of peers. That’s only 800 years old. There are various excuses, but I don’t think they apply.
But beyond that there are other cases which come to mind right away, where a person is murdered, who could easily be apprehended, with severe consequences. And the most famous one is Bin Laden. There were eight years of special forces highly trained, navy seals, they invaded Pakistan , broke into his compound, killed a couple people. When they captured him he was defenseless, I think his wife was with him. Under instructions they murdered him and threw his body into the ocean without autopsy. That’s only the beginning.
RT: The apprehension of bin Laden and the assassination and dumping his body into the ocean, of course the narrative completely fell apart. You’ve said that in the aftermath of 9-11 the Taliban said that we will give you Bin Laden if you present us with evidence, which we didn’t do…
NC: Their proposal was a little vague.
RT: But why are people so easy to accept conventional wisdom of government narratives, there is virtually no questioning…
NC: That’s all they hear. They hear a drumbeat of conventional propaganda, in my view. And it takes a research project to find other things.
RT: And of course at the same time of the Boston bombings, Iraq saw almost the deadliest week in 5 years, it was the deadliest month in a long time. Atrocities going on every day, suicide bombings. At the same time our foreign policy is causing these effects in Iraq…
NC: I did mention the Magna Carta, which is 800 years old, but there is also something else which is about 70 years. It’s called the Nurnberg tribunal, which is part of foundation of modern international law. It defines aggression as the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes, and it encompasses all of the evil it follows. The US and British invasion of Iraq was a textbook example of aggression, no questions about it. Which means that we were responsible for all the evil that follows like the bombings. Serious conflict arose, it spread all over the region. In fact the region is being torn to shreds by this conflict. That’s part of the evil that follows.
Every great power that I can think of… Britain was the same, France was the same, unless the country is defeated. Like when Germany was defeated after the WWII, it was compelled to pay attention to the atrocities that it carried out. But others don’t. In fact there was an interesting case this morning, which I was glad to see. There are trials going on in Guatemala for Efrain Rios Montt who is basically responsible for the virtual genocide of the Mayans. The US was involved in it every step of the way. Finally this morning there was an article about it saying that there was something missing from the trials, the US’s role. I was glad to see the article.
RT: Do you think that we will ever see white war criminals from imperial nations stand trial the way that Rios Montt did?
NC: It’s almost impossible. Take a look at the International criminal court (ICC) – black Africans or other people the West doesn’t like. Bush and Blair ought to be up there. There is no recent crime worse than the invasion of Iraq. Obama’s got to be there for the terror war. But that is just inconceivable. In fact there is a legislation in the US which in Europe is called the ‘Netherlands invasion act’, Congressional legislation signed by the president, which authorizes the president to use force to rescue an American brought to the Hague for trial.
RT: Speaking of the drone wars I can’t help but think of John Bellinger, the chief architect of the drone policy, speaking to a think-tank recently saying that Obama has ramped up the drone killings as something to avoid bad press of Gitmo, capturing the suspects alive and trying them at Gitmo. When you hear things like this what is your response to people saying that ‘his hands are tied, he wants to do well’?
NC: That was pointed out some time ago by a Wall Street journal military correspondent. What he pointed out is that Bush’s technique was to capture people and torture them, Obama has improved – you just kill them and anybody else who is around. It’s not that his hands are tied. It’s bad enough to capture them and torture them. But it’s just murder on executive whim, and as I say it’s not just murdering the suspects, it’s a terror weapon, it terrorizes everyone else. It’s not that his hands are tied, it’s what he wants to do.
RT: I would rather be detained then blown up and my family with me…
NC: And that terrorizes everyone else. There are recent polls which show the Arab public opinion. The results are kind of interesting. Arabs don’t particularly like Iran, but they don’t regard it as a threat. Its rank is rather low. They do see threats in Egypt and Iraq and Yemen, the US is a major threat, Yemen is slightly above the US, but basically they regard the US as a major threat. Why is that? Why would Egyptians, Iraqi and Yemeni regard the US as the greatest threat they face? It’s worth knowing.
RT: The controversial Obama policy, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which you are plaintiff on the case, you’ve also said that the humanitarian laws are actually worse, providing material support for terrorism. Do you think that all these policies are quantifying what has been in place for decades?
NC: The NDAA is pretty much quantifying practices that have been employed, it went a little bit beyond , and the court case is narrow, it’s about the part that went beyond – authorization to imprison American citizens indefinitely without trial. That is a radical violation of principles that go back as I said 800 years ago. I don’t frankly see much difference between imprisoning American citizens and imprisoning anyone else. They are all persons.
But we make a distinction. And that distinction was extended by the NDAA. The humanitarian law project broke no ground. There was a concept of material support for terrorism, already sort of a dubious concept, because of how to decide what is terrorism?
Well that’s an executive whim again. There is a terrorist list created by the executive branch without review, without having any right to test it. And if you look at that terrorist list it really tells you something.
So for example Nelson Mandela was on the terrorist list until three or four years ago. The reason was that in 1988 when the Regan administration was strongly supporting the apartheid regime in South Africa, in fact ruling congressional legislation in order to aid it, they declared that the African national Congress was one the most notorious terrorist groups of the world – that’s Mandela, that’s 1988, barely before apartheid collapsed. He was on the terrorist list.
We can take another case: 1982 when Iraq invaded Iran, the US was supporting Iraq and wanted to aid the Iraqi invasion, so Saddam Hussein was taken off the terrorist list…Its executive whim to begin with, we shouldn’t take it seriously. Putting that aside, material assistance meant you give him a gun or something like that. Under the Obama administration it’s you give them advice.
RT: Let’s talk about the linguistics and language of the war on terror. What did Obama’s re-branding of Bush’s policies to do consciousness?
NC: The policy of murdering people instead of capturing them and torturing them can be presented to the public in a way that makes it look clean. It is presented and I think many people see it like that as a kind of surgical strike which goes after the people who are planning to do us harm. And this is a very frightened country, terrified country, has been for a long time. So if anybody is going to do us harm it is fine for us to kill them.
How this is interpreted is quite interesting.
For example there was a case a year or two ago, when a drone attack in Yemen killed a couple little girls. There was a discussion with a well-known liberal columnist Joe Klein, he writes for the Time, he was asked what he thought about this and he said something like – it’s better that four of them are killed than four little girls here.
The logic is mind-boggling. But if we have to kill people elsewhere who might conceivably have aimed to harm us and it happens that a couple little girls get killed too, that’s fine. We are entitled to do that. Well, suppose that any country was doing it to us or to anyone we regard as human. It’s incredible! This is very common.
I remember once right after the invasion of Iraq, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times, Middle East specialist, columnist, was interviewed on the Charlie Rose show, a sort of intellectuals show. Rose asked him ‘what we ought to be doing in Iraq?’ You have to hear the actual words to grasp it, but basically what he said is something like this: ‘American troops have to smash into houses in Iraq and make those people understand that we are not going to allow terrorism. Suck on this, we are not going to allow terrorism in our society! You’d better understand that.
So those terrorized women and children in Baghdad have to be humiliated, degraded and frightened so that Osama Bin Laden won’t attack us.’ It’s mind-boggling. That is the peak of liberal intellectual culture supposedly.
RT: Famous atheists like Richard Dawkins saying that Islam is one of the greatest threats facing humanity, that is a whole another form of propaganda…
NC: Christianity right now is in much greater threat.
RT: The media is obviously instrumental in manufacturing consent for these policies. Your book ‘Media control’ was written a decade before 9-11 and it outlines exactly how sophisticated the media propaganda model is. When you wrote that book did you see how far it would come and where do you see it in 10 years?
NC: I’m afraid that it didn’t take any foresight because it has been going along a long time. Take the US invasion of South Vietnam. Did you ever see that phrase in the media? We invaded South Vietnam, when John F. Kennedy in 1962 authorized bombing of South Vietnam by the US air force, authorized napalm, authorized chemical warfare to destroy crops, started driving peasants into what we called strategic hamlets – it’s basically concentration camps where they were surrounded by barbwire to protect them from the guerrillas who the government knew very well they were supporting. What we would have called that if someone else did it.
But it’s now over 50 years. I doubt that the phrase ‘invasion of South Vietnam’ has ever appeared in the press. I think that a totalitarian state would barely be able or in fact wouldn’t be able to achieve such conformity. And this is at the critical end. I’m not talking about the ones who said there was a noble cause and we were stabbed in the back. Which generally Obama now says.
RT: It’s become so sophisticated, but I don’t know maybe beсause I am younger and I’ve seen it only in the last 10 years in the post 9-11 world. With the internet do you see the reversal of this trend when people are going to be making this form of media propaganda irrelevant? Or do you see a worsening?
NC: The internet gives options, which is good, but the print media gave plenty of options, you could read illicit journals if you wanted to. The internet gives you the opportunity to read them faster, that’s good. But if you think back over the shift from say of the invention of the printing press there was a much greater step then the invention of the internet.
That was a huge change, the internet is another change, a smaller one. It has multiple characteristics. So on the one hand it does give access to a broader range of commentary, information if you know what to look for. You have to know what to look for, however. On the other hand it provides a lot of material, well let’s put it politely, off the wall. And how a person without background, framework, understanding, isolated, alone supposed to decide?
RT: Another form of propaganda is education. You’ve said that the more educated you are the more indoctrinated you are and that propaganda is largely directed towards the educated. How dangerous is it to have an elite ruling class with the illusion of knowledge advancing their own world view on humanity?
NC: It’s old as the hills. Every form of society had some kind of privileged elite, who claimed to be the repositories of the understanding and knowledge and wanted control of what they called the rebel. To make sure that the people don’t have thoughts like ‘we want to be ruled by countrymen like ourselves, not by knights and gentlemen’.
So therefore there are major propaganda systems. It is quite striking that propaganda is most developed and sophisticated in the more free societies. The public relations industry, which is the advertising industry is mostly propaganda, a lot of it is commercial propaganda but also thought control.
That developed in Britain and the US – two of the freest societies. And for a good reason. It was understood roughly a century ago that people have won enough freedom so you just can’t control them by force.
Therefore you have to control beliefs and attitudes, it’s the next best thing. It has always been done, but it took a leap forward about a century ago with the development of these huge industries devoted to, as their leaders put it, to the engineering of content. If you read the founding documents of the PR industry, they say: ‘We have to make sure that the general public are incompetent, they are like children, if you let them run their own affairs they will get into all kind of trouble.
The world has to be run by the intelligent minority, and that’s us, therefore we have to regiment their minds, the way the army regiments its soldiers, for their own good. Because you don’t let a three-year-old run into the street, you can’t let people run their own affairs.’ And that’s a standard idea, it has taken one or another form over the centuries. And in the US it has institutionalized into major industries.
On the newest edition of Media Roots Radio, Abby and Robbie Martin discuss how fear is used as a commodity by the media and political establishment to control society in the context of the Boston Bombings and murder in Woolwich, UK. They also talk about how the increased access to information online will make it harder to discern truths and distinguish reality in the future.
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MEDIA ROOTSDISCLAIMER – The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, Muammar Qaddafi, and do not necessarily reflect the position of Media Roots. The translation was undertaken with the intent of providing global youth with alternative opinions about so-called Western democracy. Youth may take bits and pieces from Qaddafi’s words and use them to form ideas regarding possible future forms of government.
Introduction
The people of the world now confront this persistent problem. Many communities across the world suffer from its associated dangers and profound effects. The world’s communities have not yet succeeded in solving this problem democratically, once and for all. The Green Book offers a conclusive solution to the problem of how to govern.
All political arrangements in today’s world are the result of a power struggle among different instruments of government. The struggle may be armed or peaceful, among or across classes, factions, tribes, parties, or individuals. And it always results in a victory for a particular governing structure – an individual, group, party, or class – and the defeat of the people. In order words, the defeat of true democracy.
The political struggle that results in victory of some candidate by 51 percent of the electorate’s votes leads to a dictatorial governing body cloaked in pseudo-democracy. Keep in mind that over 40 percent of the electorate is then ruled by an instrument of government for which they did not vote, but which is imposed upon them. That, my friends, is dictatorship.
This political struggle might even result in a governing body that represents the minority. Take, for example, when an electorate’s votes are distributed among a group of candidates. One of the candidates obtains a relatively larger number of votes with respect to each of the other candidates. The combined vote of each of these minority candidates constitutes an overwhelming majority. And with one fell swoop, those who cast the minority vote succeed. One considers this a legal and democratic success?! In reality, it’s dictatorship cloaked in false democracy.
This is the reality of the prevailing political arrangements in today’s world; they’re dictatorial regimes and a fabrication of true democracy.
Parliaments
Translator’s note: Qaddafi’s words about parliaments certainly apply to the U.S. Congress.
Parliaments are the backbone of the modern, traditional democracy that prevails in the world today. The parliament is a deceptive representation of the people, a fabricated solution to the issue of democratic representation. Parliaments essentially replace the people, an undemocratic move because democracy means people power not proxy power. The mere presence of a parliament means absence of the people. True democracy is only based upon the active presence of the people themselves, not the presence of their delegates.
The parliamentary system became a legal obstacle between the people and the practice of power, as the general public was isolated from practicing politics while delegates monopolized rule for themselves. All that remained for the people was the false appearance of representative democracy, like when people stand in long lines to place a voting card in a ballot box.
In order to expose the parliamentary system for what it is, we must find out where this form of assembly came from. It is either elected through an electoral framework, a party, a coalition of parties, or it is appointed. All of these methods are undemocratic in light of the fact that the population is divided into electoral districts, which means that one MP takes the place of thousands or even millions of people depending on the size of the population.
This means that the delegate doesn’t have any popular organizational link to the electorate, since he is considered a representative for all the people, just like the rest of the delegates. This is what the prevailing, traditional form of democracy demands. The people are cut off completely from the representative, and vice versa. By merely obtaining the people’s votes, the representative monopolizes their dominion and becomes the proxy for managing their affairs. In this manner we see the traditional form of democracy bestow sanctity and immunity upon parliamentary membership while not affording the people similar privilege. This means that parliaments have become a device through which to plunder the popular authority and to monopolize it for elite use. Today, it is the right of the people to fight this arrangement – through a people’s revolution for the sake of shattering the instrument through which delegates are able to monopolize democracy and negate sovereignty – in order for the will of the people to shine through and cry out their new principle: no more replacing the people with bogus “representatives.”
If a parliament arises from a given party’s electoral victory, it still is a parliament featuring parties and not the people; it represents the party and not the people. The Executive power, which the parliamentary system is supposed to check, is the power of a winning party and not the power of the people. Thus, with regard to the parliament in which each party obtains a number of seats, the owners of these seats are the party representatives and not representatives of the people. And the authority upon which this coalition is based is the authority of the comprised parties and not the peoples’ authority.
The people who suffer under such arrangements are merely prey over which the party vultures wrestle. The competing factions, which struggle over power, exploit the people and make a fool of them in order to wrest votes from them, while the people stand silently in orderly lines, moving along like beads in a rosary, read to toss their votes in the ballot box. This is done much in the same way they toss paper in the recycling bin. This is the prevailing democracy, practiced throughout the world, whether you live under a system of one, two, multiple, or no parties. In this manner, it is clear that this representation is nothing but total scam.
(Side note: The assemblies that result from political appointments or inheritance don’t fall under any appearance of democracy).
The parliamentary electoral process is based upon propaganda in order to attract votes (in true demagoguery fashion); one can buy votes and bribe people for them. The poor are unable to enter this electoral arena in which the rich exclusively and always succeed.
For sure, philosophers, thinkers, and authors called for the theory of parliamentary representation when kings, sultans, and conquerors were herding an unaware people like cattle. The most these people aspired to was to have at least someone represent them in the presence of those rulers who traditionally refused such a measure. So the people fought long and hard to achieve that ambition. It’s baffling to think that today – after many people’s victories, which led to the age of republics – democracy would have only gotten us a little group of delegates to represent so many people. Democracy, in this form, is an obsolete theory and a worn out experiment. Power should be completely in the hands of the people. Indeed, the most insolent dictators of the world have come to power under the auspices of parliaments.
MEDIA ROOTS DISCLAIMER – The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, Muammar Qaddafi, and do not necessarily reflect the position of Media Roots. The translation was undertaken with the intent of providing global youth with alternative opinions about so-called Western democracy. Youth may take bits and pieces from Qaddafi’s words and use them to form ideas regarding possible future forms of government.