Drifting Towards War?

                                            

 

 By Reginald Johnson

 

        As violence spreads in Ukraine, the danger grows of an eventual confrontation between the U.S. and Russia.

     Forces loyal to the pro-western regime that came to power in Kiev in a February coup have been waging a brutal military campaign against pro-Russian separatists in the east, who do not recognize the new authorities.

  Dozens of fighters on both sides, as well as civilians, have been killed. There have been some horrific incidents with pro-government neo-Nazi fighters setting fire to buildings where separatists have fled, and burning people alive. Rebel fighters also been accused of accused of atrocities.

    The separatists, many of whom are ethnic Russians, have taken over whole cities in eastern Ukraine and say they won’t take part in a national election set for this Sunday.

   There’s concern on the part of some observers that the on-going fighting could turn into a full-fledged civil war, prompting Russia --- which borders Ukraine --- to intervene. At some point NATO and the U.S. could get involved, too.

   Given that NATO countries like the U.S. are nuclear-armed, and Russia is nuclear-armed, this is a frightening scenario.

   Unfortunately, it’s not a possibility that is totally remote, says the widely respected expert on Russia, Prof. Stephen Cohen.

          “It is not inconceivable that we may be creeping, crawling, drifting towards war with Russia,” Cohen said on the Counterpoint radio show on WPKN hosted by Scott Harris.

    Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian Studies and Politics at New York University and Princeton said that in the chaos in Ukraine, “anything can happen….I think it’s the worst crisis since the Cuban missile crisis.”

          The Cuban Missile Crisis, for those not alive at the time or who don’t know, saw the U.S. and Russia (then the Soviet Union) almost start a nuclear war over American demands that Russian missiles be removed from Cuba. Fortumately, catastrophe was averted when Premier Nikita Krushchev of
Russia and President John F. Kennedy worked out a deal, whereby Russian missiles would be taken out of Cuba in return for American missiles being removed from Italy and Turkey, together with a pledge that the U.S. would not invade Cuba.

          Cohen said that to defuse the present crisis, there is an urgent need for dialogue between the Kiev regime and the east Ukrainian separatists. He said the group in east Ukraine is demanding a greater level of autonomy, possibly a form of independence in a federalized system. “This is negotiable,” said Cohen.

    At the urging of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, “roundtable” talks involving officials from Kiev, and political and business leaders in east Ukraine got started last week, but little was accomplished. More talks are planned. Separatist leaders did not attend, partly because they distrust the authorities in Kiev, and partly because the Kiev leaders said they would not talk with people “with blood on their hands,” which would exclude a number of separatists.

          It should be noted that these meetings were not suggested by the United States. The Obama administration said they didn’t object to the talks, but there was no public endorsement for the negotiations by either President Obama or Secretary of State John Kerry.

          In general, Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin has offered a number of steps to try to ease the crisis, while the United States has done nothing. Putin announced he was pulling his troops back from the Ukrainian border, although the west says he is lying; he asked the separatists not to hold independence referendums recently; and he’s now given support for the national election and will respect the results; and he advocated for a dialogue between the Kiev government and the eastern protesters.

     The only contributions coming from the U.S. have been a string of belligerent statements by Obama and Kerry, blaming Russia for arming and encouraging the rebel groups, and saying Russia would be hit with more economic sanctions for its alleged bad behavior.

 There’s been little apparent effort by the administration to make sure that verified neo-Nazis are not being used in the civil strife.  The fascist thugs, who spearheaded the fighting in the February coup, have now been incorporated into the National Guard, and have been reportedly carrying out atrocities in east Ukraine.

          It would be nice if President Obama would change course, tone down the rhetoric and start taking the steps to bring about a constructive dialogue between the factions in Ukraine, and settle the crisis.

          But I don’t think that is likely to happen, because the Ukraine crisis serves the United States. This is part of a long-range plan, developed probably by hawks in the Pentagon and neo-cons in the White House --- and you have to conclude now that Obama is one of them --- to undermine Russia, and ultimately force regime change.

          The noted author and war critic John Pilger wrote recently in The Guardian (“In Ukraine, the U.S. is dragging us to war with Russia”) if the civil strife continues and there’s more attacks on ethnic Russians, Putin may be provoked into coming to their aid. Then, Pilger writes, Putin’s  “pre-ordained ‘pariah’ role will justify a NATO-run guerilla war that is likely to spill into Russia itself.”

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/13/ukraine-us-war-russia-john-pilger/

  A war that Russia has to fight next door, similar to the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, would be tremendously draining. That cost, together with the sanctions, could seriously undermine Russia in the long term, and might force regime/leadership change. The annoying Mr. Putin, who has aided two enemies of the U.S., Syria and Iran, would be out of the way. This may be the neo-cons’ dream scenario.

  But this dream plan is fraught with unbelievable risks. If Russia is backed into a corner fighting the Ukrainian regime aided by NATO weaponry, they might consider striking back with nuclear weapons. Someone’s dream scenario becomes a nightmare.

   Obviously, this is all speculation. I don’t know if such a neo-con plan is afoot. But I do know neo-cons and hawks seem to be holding sway in the White House, and Russia is certainly deemed to be a problem nation, given their alliances. So some sort of geopolitical power scheming is going on.

  We have no business in Ukraine. This is in Russia’s backyard, and their actions to date are understandable, if not always legal. They feel threatened by the eastward advance of NATO, and with Ukraine becoming a western ally (and possibly a NATO member later), Russia feels encircled.

  American policy to date in Ukraine is irrational and risks, possibly, a world war.

  People need to get involved in opposing this policy. They need to call and write their congress people and push them to take a stand against this. Congress so far has been asleep at the switch on Ukraine, with too many members unthinkingly going along with the administration. There should be hearings and a debate on Ukraine.

  As Prof. Cohen said, “I don’t remember in my lifetime there ever being a situation in America where war was on the horizon and there was no debate inside the beltway, the mainstream press, or in Congress.

          No debate at all! That’s not democracy. That’s a failure of democracy. Whether I’m right or wrong, everybody should agree we should have a debate about this.” 

    Get involved.

 

    

 

 

         

     

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

  

 

  

 

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

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Media on Ukraine: What Happened to Journalism?

By Reginald Johnson

                             

            As the United States continues to ramp up the manufactured “Ukraine Crisis” to gain geopolitical advantage over Russia, mainstream press outlets have once again abandoned their role as impartial purveyors of vital news.

             Major media operations like The New York Times, The Washington Post and MSNBC, have become virtual propaganda machines for the Obama administration as it seeks to paint Russia as the villain in the Ukraine situation. Every outrageous statement or claim by Secretary of State John Kerry or President Barack Obama about Ukraine is dutifully reported by these media, with little attempt to give a countervailing view or put the claims in context. Crititical reporting has basically gone out the window.

   The one-sided reporting has gone on pretty much unabated since a putsch took place in February in which militants, led by neo-Nazis, ousted the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, from power. The American government, whose representatives had openly encouraged protests leading up to coup, quickly recognized the new regime. The new leaders pledged to seek closer ties to the West and join the European Union.

   Coverage of both the rebellion and the establishment of a new government has been decidedly positive. Press reports have largely glossed over the presence of fascists in the uprising and in the new regime. There was wide acceptance in the mainstream press of the claim by the rebels that government snipers had shot and killed Ukrainian citizens participating in the protests, and no investigation of reports that right-wing militants had in fact, done the shooting.

    When Russia moved into Crimea in Ukraine to protect its Black Sea fleet at Sevastopol, Russia was denounced by both the Kiev government, the Obama administration and the press for breaking international law and being “expansionist.” It was true that Russia was breaking international law, and that’s wrong. But media reports on this issue rarely brought up, or brought up only sparingly, Russia’s legitimate security interests in taking back Crimea, which had been part of the old Soviet Union until 1954.

   In the 1990s, American leaders promised former Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev that after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, NATO would not expand its borders to the east. But under the Clinton and Bush administrations, former Soviet bloc countries such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and the Baltic states were asked to join the western alliance, and they did. Now NATO’s borders are much farther east.

    With a potential enemy alliance inching closer to their borders and an anti-Russian government now in control in Ukraine, what were Russian leaders like Vladimir Putin supposed to think? Status quo is fine? No potential military threats?  This is absurd.

   Yet the drumbeat goes on by the administration and key members of the media that Russia is a villain, not to be trusted, and bent on expansion. America has led the way to impose economic sanctions on Russia for their actions in Crimea, and now for allegedly fomenting unrest in eastern Ukraine, where the Russian-oriented population seeks to break away from Kiev. The U.S. has accused the Russian Federation of secretly sending in military agents to train the east Ukrainian militants, who have taken over government buildings in various cities..

  In an echo of their shoddy reporting prior to the Iraq War, the Times recently ran a front-page piece making the case that Russian military personnel had unlawfully gone into Ukraine to train east Ukrainian rebels. The story came with photographs purportedly showing Russian soldiers training militia. In one case, the story showed a photograph of a group of men previously taken in Russia, and then photos of some of the same men doing training in Ukraine.

   But the story quickly fell apart when the free lance photographer who took the picture of the trainers stepped forward and said the group photo was shot in Ukraine, not Russia. He also said he not given permission for use of his photos, which he had posted on Instagram.

  The Times issued a limited retraction of the story some days later, with a short piece buried inside the paper.

  The Times has had other questionable stories, most recently a lengthy 1500-word Sunday article which mused about Putin’s possible substantial fortune and how it could be hit by sanctions, too. The piece on April 27 enititled “Sanctions Revive Search for Secret Putin Fortune,” offers no hard facts or evidence, just speculation.

   It’s amazing the Times would devote so much space to a piece that’s just speculation, but this fits in with the paper’s consistent portrayal of Putin as the “bad guy” in the Ukraine situation.

  Other press outlets like The Washington Post also have been on the bandwagon running Russia-bashing stories, and adopting the position of the administration and of the Kiev regime on events in Ukraine, without any questioning.

    Robert Parry, the editor of Consortiumnews.com, detailed in an article recently how Washington Post reporter Lally Weymouth, in an interview with Ukrainian internal affairs minister Arsen Avakov on the regime’s efforts to deal with the protesters in east Ukraine, referred to “Russians” in occupied buildings, and at another point called the protesters “terrorists.”

   There has been no proof presented by the U.S. government that there are Russians taking part in the occupations, but here you have a journalist, so-called, adopting the language of the administration which continues to claim that Russians are guiding the protests and Russia is masterminding the secessionist movement.

  In using the word “terrorist,” Weymouth picked up the language of the Kiev regime, which said they have to conduct “anti-terrorist” campaigns against the militants in eastern Ukraine.

   Parry writes:  “For their part, those eastern protesters have said they are resisting the imposition of power from Kiev, which has included the appointment of  billionaire “oligarchs” as regional administrators, and are rejecting a harsh austerity plan from the International Monetary Fund that will make their hard lives even harder.

 “Yet, Official Washington has largely banished those realities to the great memory hole. Many in the U.S. government and the mainstream press corps seem to be licking their lips over the prospect of unleashing hell on the eastern Ukrainians.”  http://consortiumnews.com/2014/04/22/prepping-for-a-ukrainian-massacre/

 Other outlets, usually called liberal, seem to be buying into the administration view of “Russia bad, U.S. good” on Ukraine. Rachel Maddow of MSNBC in a recent segment on the sanctions wondered whether the “escalating tactics” short of war by the U.S. against Russia, were working. Then she interviewed former ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, who referred to Russia “escalating tensions” in Ukraine, and said the sanctions were aimed at stopping “further aggression” by Russia.

    The whole tenor of the interview was that both Maddow and McFaul were in agreement that Russia was at fault in Ukraine, and needed to be punished. Maddow didn’t raise any contrary views, or note that the U.S. had a role in fomenting the February coup, which led to the tensions in the first place.

  To top off the poor reporting and analysis of the events in Ukraine, major media --- following the administration --- have criticized any media (such as RT or alternative media) that has brought up Russian perspectives on Ukraine, for spouting Russian propaganda.

   Parry has done an excellent job in recent weeks spotlighting the media bias on Ukraine.

  In his piece, “Ukraine, Through the U.S. Looking Glass,” he wrote,  “In my four-plus decades in journalism, I have never seen a more thoroughly biased and misleading performance by the major U.S. news media. Even during the days of Ronald Reagan – when much of the government’s modern propaganda structure was created – there was more independence in major news outlets. There were media stampedes off the reality cliff during George H.W. Bush’s Persian Gulf War and George W. Bush’s Iraq War, both of which were marked by demonstrably false claims that were readily swallowed by the big U.S. news outlets.

 “But there is something utterly Orwellian in the current coverage of the Ukraine crisis, including accusing others of “propaganda” when their accounts – though surely not perfect – are much more honest and more accurate than what the U.S. press corps has been producing.” http://consortiumnews.com/2014/04/16/ukraine-through-the-us-looking-glass/

  As for me, I can’t say for sure what’s going on with some of the media. It may be in some cases top people in certain organizations agree with the “Neo-con” foreign policy of the Obama and Bush administrations and the utterly backwards and arrogant notion of “American exceptionalism.”  If so, reporters and editors below feel obliged to fall in line with the slanted coverage, or else. Probably a few reporters are neo-cons themselves, and write accordingly. In other cases, reporters feel a need, again for the sake of their careers, to play along with the administration they’re covering, otherwise they’ll lose access.

  A really good report on Ukraine would start with this central question: why is the United States so obsessed with something going on in a country that is 8,000 miles away from our borders?

   What are our motives in aiding an unelected, far-right wing regime in Ukraine and constantly demonizing Russia and its leader Mr. Putin? It’s certainly not about preserving the sanctity of international law, since we break it all the time. Stopping expansionism? How many bases do we have around the world?

   Aren’t we trying to undermine Russia, and possibly someday force regime change? And in effecting regime change, aren’t we paving the way for private corporations to gain access to the vast mineral, oil and gas wealth of Eurasia, while at the same time removing a powerful patron of Iran and Syria --- enemies of both the U.S. and Israel?

   That’s the way I see it.

  But I don’t know for sure, I’m just asking.

 I hope some people in the mainstream media, those who haven’t totally sold-out, will finally stand up and start asking similar questions.

 It's critical that they do, because the Ukraine situation --- with two nuclear-armed nations at odds with each other --- is fraught with incredible danger.

 

  

   For more in-depth news stories on Ukraine, you can go to a number of good, non-mainstream websites. Among them are: www.btlonline.org; www.consortiumnews.com; and www.commondreams.org.

  

  

    

                       

           

Dismantling the Corporate State

                                             

By Reginald Johnson 

                  

              

                America has slid into a form of  “corporate totalitarianism”  where basic rights and freedoms outlined in our Constitution have been wiped away.

            The only thing that will restore our rights will be a mass movement, similar to the labor movement and civil rights movements of years past,  where people defy the government and engage in acts of civil disobedience.

            That’s the view of one of America’s leading intellectuals, Chris Hedges, the author of numerous books on America’s social condition and a former reporter for The New York Times.  Speaking at a recent conference on civil liberties at Central Connecticut State University, Hedges said the establishment of a mass surveillance system, repressive new laws and corporate power have made democracy in the United States  “a fiction.” There is only one way to turn it around. 

            “Reform will only come through building mass movements and alternative centers of power that can overthrow --- let me repeat that word for Homeland Security --- overthrow the corporate state,” he said.           

 Hedges was the keynote speaker at the conference sponsored by the Connecticut Coalition to Stop Indefinite Detention. The gathering also featured workshops and panel discussions on issues related to prisoners, discrimination against Muslims, deportations, drones, unlawful detentions and other civil liberties subjects.

A 20-year foreign correspondent who reported in East Germany and Czechoslovakia under communist rule, as well as in El Salvador and Guatemala during the civil wars in the 1980s, Hedges said the United States is taking on many of the characteristics of the dictatorial regimes he once covered.

    Under the guise of fighting terrorism, a vast surveillance apparatus has been set up through the National Security Agency and the FBI, which allows the government to learn everything about you --- who you are communicating with, what your views are, what your activities are, where you travel, and if you’ve had any personal issues or problems in the past. As whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed, the NSA sweeps up phone calling “metadata” of all Americans as well as their emails.

   The FBI, through legislation passed after 911, can secretly gain your personal information by issuing warrantless National Security Letters to anyone --- your employer, your bank, your doctor, your friends or a library, Hedges said.  They also have the technical capabilities through cell phones and GPS systems to track your geographical movements.

Moreover, “they will store this information for perpetuity in government computers,” Hedges said.

Additionally, under the Section 1021 provision of the National Defense Authorization Act, the government now has the power to arrest an American citizen simply on the basis that they might be linked to terrorists, place them in jail, and hold them indefinitely, without due process. And, as has happened under Barack Obama, the President can order the assassination of American citizens, if it is determined such individuals are terrorists.

Chris Hedges speaks on the surveillance state

Hedges said that those who try to expose illegal behavior by the government are  “hunted down” and pay a heavy price. He pointed to Chelsea Manning, an Army officer who released military files to divulge war crimes by U.S. soldiers, and then was tried on espionage charges; and Snowden, who released classified files to reveal the unconstitutional NSA spying program, and then had to flee the country to avoid prosecution.

     “This is always the way totalitarian secret police forces work --- the SS, the KGB, the East German Stasi,” said Hedges. “Dissent is criminalized, truth is hidden.”

   As the laws were passed and court decisions handed down which enabled the surveillance state, Constitutional provisions such as the 4^th Amendment and its guarantee of privacy, have been shredded, Hedges said.

    Hedges said many people in the legal profession should have spoken up during this period of constitutional erosion, but did not.  “Where are the judges, the deans of law schools, the nation’s 1 million lawyers?” he asked.  “Why do they refuse to defend the Constitution? They have become valued partners, along with a bankrupt press, in a campaign to eradicate our most basic civil liberties.”

   While the  ‘war on terrorism’ and ‘national security’ are always cited as the reasons for the passage of the laws and judicial decisions curbing civil liberties, Hedges sees another reason behind the repression: corporate influence.  In these times of economic distress and widening inequality,  the elites in the corporate world fear potential unrest and seek control, Hedges said.  A mass surveillance system serves their interests.

            “Totalitarianism no longer comes through communism or fascism, it comes now from corporations,” Hedges said. “And these corporations fear those who think, write and speak out and those who form relationships freely. Individual freedom impedes their power and their profit.”

        Hedges, the author of a dozen books, including  “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt,” “Empire of Illusion,” and “Death of the Liberal Class,” dismissed the idea that reform of our government and repealing anti-democratic laws will somehow come from elected officials like Obama or members of Congress.

  About the recent proposal by Obama to restrict NSA’s metadata collection, in the wake of Snowden’s revelations, Hedges said at first it seems good, “until you look at the details.”

  Then he said,  “I ask you, how many times does Barack Obama have to lie to you before you get it?”

     He said Obama had broken a number of pledges concerning civil liberties and constitutional matters, including the promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison; a pledge to revisit the Patriot Act; the promise to shut down our “black sites”; or the promise to reverse unconstitutional executive decisions by his predecessor, former President George Bush.

   “We got none of this. We got more untruths,” Hedges said.

 To restore our liberties, Hedges said,  the American people cannot look to government officials. “It means refusing to trust in their cosmetic reforms. Reforms will never come from those complicit in crimes.”

 In the end, it will be the people who will have to bring about change. “We can only save ourselves. We are the people we have been waiting for,” he said.

  “We must find, like Snowden, the physical and moral courage to tear down the structures that enslave us,” he said.

 

    

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Talking Tough on Russia

By Reginald Johnson

                      

               U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., insists he hasn’t done a flip-flop on his approach to foreign policy, with the hard-line stance he’s taken towards Russia in the current Ukraine crisis.

      Murphy won praise from progressives while he was in the House of Representatives for his opposition to the Iraq War and for his stand last year against military action in Syria following his election to the Senate.

      But now Murphy has endorsed a package of tough sanctions the Obama administration has set down to punish Russia, following that nation’s annexation of Crimea, a section of the Ukraine along the Black Sea where the Russian navy has its fleet. The Russians moved troops into Crimea following a coup d’etat in Ukraine, in which a pro-Russian leadership group was ousted by a pro-Western faction.

   The Connecticut lawmaker has traveled to Ukraine with conservative and hawkish Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, to investigate conditions in that nation and express support for the new government.

   “My position is not inconsistent. I am not an isolationist,” Murphy told about 60 people at a “Town Hall Meeting” in New Haven this week.

   Murphy said while he is “skeptical” of the U.S. ever getting involved militarily in Ukraine, he believes that penalties on Russia are essential, to send a message to Russian leader Vladimir Putin that territorial encroachment would not be tolerated.

   “You cannot allow a precedent to be set,” Murphy said, saying that if the west didn’t respond forcefully now, there will be more encroachments and more attempts “to reset borders” in the future.

   “This may not be the end. Kiev may be the target,” he said.

  Murphy got a respectful hearing at the meeting, which took place in the East Rock School. His remarks criticizing Russia drew applause several times from people in the audience, some of whom were Ukrainian-Americans. One man said there was a good bit of propaganda coming from the Russian side these days about the situation in Ukraine, similar to the propaganda put out in the old Soviet Union. He also questioned the validity of the referendum vote in Crimea recently, in which residents there voted overwhelmingly to join with Russia.

   But a number of other speakers criticized U.S. policy and challenged the senator on his stances. Stanley Heller of West Haven pointed out that a group of people in the new government were neo-fascists, from either the Svoboda Party or Right Sector. He said that he had seen a picture of Murphy standing with one of the more controversial figures.

   Murphy said a photo had been taken of him in a group shot “with about 50 people” and he was not fully aware at the time who was on the stage.

  Later, the senator said, he and others talked to the individual and expressed their deep concern about any fascistic or anti-semitic remarks, and indicated they were unacceptable.

   Richard Hill of New Haven  said that various factors are not being taken into account in understanding how Russia is concerned about developments in Ukraine. Hill spoke of the United States’ meddling in the politics of Ukraine, leading up to the coup.

   “Would we want that kind of meddling (by the Russians) going on in Canada or Mexico?” he asked.

  Hill also criticized the American press for failing to point out that Russia is concerned from a security standpoint with the expansion of NATO’s borders. Breaking a pledge made by American officials to former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991 ---- that NATO would not expand following the dissolution of the Soviet Union ---  NATO has gone ahead and expanded.  The Cold War organization formed in 1949 to defend western Europe from any possible Soviet aggression, has brought in new members from the old Soviet bloc, and NATO’s borders have moved further east towards Russia.

   Should Ukraine join, it would mean NATO would be lined up all along the Russian border.

    

    Others questioned whether America’s motives in Ukraine were really about building democracy as proclaimed, but instead about economic or other interests. Megan Iorio said the U.S. record of supporting dictatorships in Latin America, and failing to support democratic protests in places like Bahrain,  cast doubt on American pledges of wanting to build democracy in Ukraine.

  Some in the audience rebutted the claims about any anti-semitism going on now in Ukraine, or any discrimination against Jews being promoted by members of the new government. One woman said the “chief rabbi in Ukraine” said that Jewish life in Ukraine is “flourishing.”

   Murphy said he welcomed input from constitutents on Ukraine and other issues, and wants to hear different points of view. He said if people thought the senator would benefit from reading some article, they can send in the reference through his website.

   

Those Lying Russians

                                                    

By Reginald Johnson

Hey, did you hear? RT TV is biased!

It parrots the government line! Its Ukraine coverage is shameful!

Thank god we have a free, open and objective press here. Our reporters never kowtow to the government!

Remember the lead-up to the Iraq War, the press was tough and skeptical about Bush administration claims! None of the reporters swallowed hook, line and sinker claims about Iraqi WMDs! Thank goodness for that, because, because....

OK, a pause on the sarcasm. I want to say this. Russia Today--- which has been in the news this week due to two employees complaining about bias at the network ---  is in fact, slanted. It is funded by the Russian government; the stories often go easy on Vladimir Putin and government officials. But the network also produces some good stories which are well researched and present a perspective that’s tough to find here. You have to separate the wheat from the chaff.

  I am tired of the self-righteous preachings of people in the U.S. media, about how RT is nothing but a propaganda machine, while the American press is some kind of paragon of virtue, bravely revealing all the vital news of the day, without fear or favor. What blather.

  Corporations that own newspapers and TV here often censor stories when corporate interests are threatened. Stories that should see the light of day do not. In other cases, the government --- yes, the government --- puts pressure on press outlets to kill stories, or hold stories, and the government usually gets its way. And finally, reporters often engage in self-censorship, when they avoid doing certain stories that might cast a negative light on public or private officials, because they don’t want to lose future access to sources and endanger their careers.

  Please, American media, enough of the sanctimony. And by the way, maybe it’s time to do a real story about what’s going on in the Ukraine. The coverage stinks. It seems a bit slanted to the side of the, uh, U.S. government. 

 

Fighting Back Against NSA Spying

                                            

By Reginald Johnson

        After a successful national protest earlier this month against the sweeping surveillance over Americans’ phone calls and email activity by the National Security Agency, it’s critical to keep up the pressure on Congress to rein in the spying programs.

    According to the website “The Day We Fight Back,” which promoted the Feb. 11 event of the same name, some 555,000 emails were sent to members of Congress urging them to rein in the NSA through reform legislation;  89,000 phone calls to Congress were made; some 301,000 people signed a petition demanding privacy as a human right; the website the daywefightback.org  was shared 420,000 times on Facebook; and more than 37 million people worldwide saw the “The Day We Fight Back” banner on the website the day of the protest.

  “Together we demonstrated that activists, organizations and companies can work in unison to fight mass surveillance and laid a foundation for escalation over the months to come,” said a statement on the website following the protest.

   The statement added that the fight still has a long ways to go. “To push back against surveillance, we need to keep acting to educate and urge our representatives to take action,” it said.

   The Feb. 11 protest was organized by a coalition of civil liberties organizations, digital rights groups, companies and activists who are determined to force the government to curtail the dragnet surveillance that was exposed last year by whisteblower Edward Snowden. The former contractor for the NSA released a trove of classified documents which showed that the NSA was tracking the phone records, email communications,  social network activity and web activity of hundreds of millions of Americans and foreigners.

  Billions of records of phone calling “metadata” --- showing who made a call, to whom, how long the call was, and the location of those taking part ---- are being swept up by the government.

  According to The Washington Post, one of the papers which published the revelations made by Snowden, the NSA is also harvesting both the metadata and content of emails, web activity, social networks and chats, as part of what the agency calls “upstream collection.”

   The government claims that the NSA surveillance is both constitutional and a necessary tool in fighting terrorism.

  But civil liberties advocates claim that the NSA spying program is a clear violation of the Constitution’s guarantees of the right to privacy, freedom of expression and freedom of association.

   The American Civil Liberties Union, which is part of the coalition fighting the NSA surveillance, says that the agency’s “aggregation of metadata constitutes an invasion of privacy and an unreasonable search” and is unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment. Also, the phone tracking program violates the First Amendment “because it vacuums up sensitive information on associational and expressive activity.”

  The ACLU is suing the government to end the spying program and have all the collected data deleted.

  According to Josh Levy, of the internet rights group Free Press, the NSA surveillance programs “attack our basic rights to connect and communicate in private, and strike at the foundations of democracy itself. Only a broad movement of activists, organizations and companies can convince Washington to restore these rights.”

    During the “Day We Fight Back” protest, people either calling or emailing their representatives in Congress were urged to tell them to support the USA Freedom Act, which would end the bulk collection of phone data by the government and make the deliberations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) --- which authorizes NSA surveillance programs --- more transparent.

   Another bill is going through Congress, offered by U.S. Dianne Feinstein, D-Ca., relating to the NSA. However, the bill, though offering some cosmetic reforms in the FISA process, would largely keep in place the existing NSA surveillance programs.

   Several members of the Connecticut congressional delegation were called by this reporter in the “Day We Fight Back” protest. A staff member for U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-4, said the congressman was still weighing whether to support the USA Freedom Act. A spokesman for U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy also said the senator hadn’t taken a position on the bill yet.

  The position of U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., was clear, however. Blumenthal is a co-sponsor of the USA Freedom Act, a staffer said.

   Activists see an urgency in rolling back the legal authority for the spying programs, as more and more revelations keep coming out about how extensive the government surveillance is, both in the United States and abroad.

  Recently The Guardian newspaper in the UK reported that the British spy agency GCHQ, with aid from the NSA, had intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of Internet users not suspected of wrongdoing.