We are, each of us, purposefully chained by a leash in the Land of the Free™. But it is only those who stray from the cookie-cutter conformity who feel the leash’s harsh pull. Herman Wallace spent a lifetime tugging on that leash. We owe it to him and so many others to not only make the leash more visible but to also break the chains once and for all.
She became an international icon after surviving being shot by the Taliban for promoting education for girls. But Birmingham poet Benjamin Zephaniah fears others may be using Malala Yousafzai for political reasons
As the baton travels around that notional ‘family’ of two billion people, starting in Delhi, it would be great to have a country-by-country account of Britain’s conquests, wars and plundering, past and present.
We could even have the historian Mark Curtis, author of Unpeople and Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam, on-hand to help chart the ten million deaths that Britain is complicit in since 1945 alone.
Countries’ economies are driven by an obsession, continuous growth in the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The absurdity of this becomes clear with a little bit of thought. Never-ending growth that relies on extracting resources from a finite planet is, of course, a mathematical impossibility, but well before we reach that point, this obsession will render our planet uninhabitable.
Among IT security professionals, it has been long understood that the public disclosure of vulnerabilities is the only consistent way to improve security. That’s why researchers publish information about vulnerabilities in computer software and operating systems, cryptographic algorithms, and consumer products like implantable medical devices, cars, and CCTV cameras.
“It is a war crime to launch “an indiscriminate attack affecting the civilian population in the knowledge that such an attack will cause an excessive loss of life or injury to civilians.” -Geneva Conventions, Article 85
The casino has swallowed the system. The sums the players are betting are not only far larger than the value of the rest of their portfolios, but six times larger than the combined assets of every human institution and family on Earth, and almost 17 times bigger than the worth of humankind’s yearly output. Even if the whole planet were offered as collateral, it could not cover Wall Street’s bets.
What is becoming clearer, as stated by various senior military officers as the recent DSEi arms fair, is a commitment to armed drone technology beyond Afghanistan.
“Within 5 to 10 minutes after the Israeli helicopter approached the ship, I ran into Cevdet Kiliclar’s dead body on the deck, before any Israeli commando had boarded the vessel,” O’Keefe said, referring to one of the Turkish activists. “He must have been shot from the air. After seeing Kiliclar’s dead body, I went upstairs to the top of the deck and saw several people lying on the ground, wounded or dead.”
Though former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has been indicted for leaking secrets about the U.S. government’s intrusive surveillance tactics, he was honored by a group of former U.S. intelligence officials as a courageous whistleblower during a Moscow ceremony, reports ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern who was there.
The invasion of Iraq was undertaken with warnings from the intelligence services in the United States and Britain, both the attacking countries, intelligence services warned that this was going to increase terrorism. It did by a huge factor. According to government statistics by about a factor of seven in the first year. Does that help security? Well they had other reasons to invade Iraq, not security and this goes way back.
Israel and Saudi Arabia are rogue states writ large. They’re two of the world’s worst. They deplore democratic values. They spurn rule of law principles.
They commit horrendous human and civil rights abuses. They’re responsible for daily crimes against humanity.
They partner with Washington’s imperial wars. They’re an odd couple. They’re strange bedfellows. Perhaps they’re joining forces. Formal relations aren’t maintained. Back channel secret ones substitute.
