Is Snowden a Spy or a Hero?

By Alan Caruba

Interesting to see how Edward Snowden, former employee of a National Security Agency contractor, has dropped off the front pages; how quickly he has become “old news”.

The leaders of the European Union are shocked to learn that the U.S. spies on them. Since their own spy agencies routinely share information with the intelligence agencies of our government, it did not come as a big a surprise to them.

The real surprise is how much spying our government does on American citizens.

Even in the days when the Continental Congress sent representatives to France to negotiate deals to acquire arms and secure its support for our Revolution the British spied on them, opening their mail, and such. George Washington won the Revolution in large part to an excellent network of his own spies. Spying is as old as mankind.



Though he embarrassed the President and the National Security Agency, Edward Snowden is not likely to be granted asylum in Russia. The odds are that Snowden has been a witting or unwitting agent of what used to be called the KGB and now goes by the name of the Federal Security Services, FSB. It is responsible for internal security and counter-intelligence.

It should come as no surprise, however, that two Communist nations, Venezuela and Nicaragua, have offered Snowden asylum.

The old KGB was closely involved with another American who went to Russia. He was Lee Harvey Oswald who history records as returning to the U.S. and later assassinating President Kennedy. The highest ranking Soviet bloc intelligence official to defect to the West, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, has written “Disinformation”, revealing the long history of deception perfected under Lenin, Stalin, and others among the parade of KGB agents that served as its prime minister in the wake of Stalin’s death.

In 2007, Pecepa’s book, “Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination” in which he revealed that Oswald had been recruited for ideological reasons when he was a U.S. Marine stationed in Japan. “When he insisted on defecting to the Soviet paradise, the KGB kept him there for three years and then persuaded him to return to the United States temporarily, in order to assassinate President Kennedy, who had badly humiliated Oswald’s idol, Khrushchev. before the whole world.” Khrushchev changed his mind, but Oswald was determined to go ahead.

Everything old is new again!

A Daniel Greenfield commentary posted on New Media Journal.com notes that “Foreign intelligence agencies look for people with security clearances who go through a lot of money in short periods of time, who simmer with grudges and grievances, who are rootless and dissatisfied. These descriptions adequately cover Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning, two men who should never have been given any kind of clearance whatsoever on personality alone.”

FSB Logo

It is pure speculation, but there is reason to believe that Snowden was recruited “for ideological reasons” and given the assignment to secure access to the NSA secrets. His escape to Hong Kong and then onto Russia smacks of some real planning. I don’t know who is funding WikiLeaks, but it would not surprise me to learn that it was the FSB. What an easy way to dupe people like Bradley Manning into providing information the FSB might otherwise not be able to secure. If anyone deserves the firing squad, it is Manning.

On July 1st Snowden said “In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised—and it should be.”

Former Soviet KGB officials are now the Russian Federation government, starting with Putin and including every other member of his executive team. The process of disinformation continues; reaching back to the days of the czars.

As Pacepa notes, “In a 2008 Rasmussen poll, only 53% of Americans preferred capitalism to socialism, with another 27% unsure, and 20% strongly opting for socialism.”

 

That was also the year a totally unknown Illinois Senator leaped from virtual anonomy to capture the presidency. Despite strong connections with radical leftists, his charm and the “slobbering love affair” that ensued from the news media put him in the Oval Office and have kept him there. Along with the White House, the FSB agents stationed here routinely leak or spin stories to these dupes.

Pacepa points out that Obama has engineered the extraordinary takeover of “the U.S. banking sector, home mortgages, school loans, automakers, and most of the healthcare industry.” If the President has not long been and continues to be a FSB agent of influence, then he is surely the greatest of what Lenin used to call his “useful idiots.”

Under the Communist premiers from Lenin to Putin, disinformation has had two goals; to undermine faith in the Judeo-Christian religions, especially the spread of anti-Semitism, and to advance communism/socialism worldwide.

Old journalists like myself will tell you that there is no such thing as a coincidence. This is particularly true on the world stage. There are always unseen hands seeking to set events in motion or to control and correct the outcome of unforeseen events. I have always been wary of conspiracy theories, but that does not mean that conspiracies do not exist.

As for Snowden, Douglas J. Hagmann, a private investigator with strong ties inside the U.S. government among people who are deeply concerned of actions taken by the Obama administration, recently wrote: “Edward Snowden made a conscious decision to expose a massive, draconian system of spying on American citizens that he believed is violating the rights of every American. He could not reconcile his responsibilities under the executive order in which he was working with his knowledge as an American citizen himself.”

I recommend you read Pacepa’s book with its astonishing revelations based on decades within the inner circles of the Rumanian and Russian secret services. At the end of his book, he says, “Let us reject the Marxist redistribution of wealth which has transformed so many once-noble countries into lands looking like giant trailer camps hit by a hurricane…” warning against “the disinformation, the glasnost, that has been used so destructively over the years to squash freedom and bankrupt countries.”

Maybe Snowden is a hero? There are such people, you know. Or a dupe? That’s possible, too.  One thing is sure, more and more Americans are coming to fear the current administration..

© Alan Caruba, 2013

Cartoon Round Up

What If George Zimmerman is Found Not Guilty?

Jamie Fox at the BET Awards

By Alan Caruba

White people have largely made their peace with the changes that were initiated with the Civil Rights Act that Lyndon B. Johnson signed in 1964 in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. The Jim Crow era that included segregated schools and other indignities is long gone, but it took a hundred years past the Civil War to reach that point.

Race has always been a factor in American life dating back to the importation of the first slaves to the colony of Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. One of America’s leading historians, Thomas Fleming recently had a new book published, “A Disease in the Public Mind: Why We Fought the Civil War”, that recounts the problems the Founding Father’s encountered as they sought to fashion the Constitution in 1787. The issue of slavery was an obstacle and, as the Founders feared, it led to the Civil War.

In the years immediately preceding the war, the calls for the abolition of slavery increased at the same time white southerners had spent decades gripped with growing fears of being killed by the slaves who vastly outnumbered them. There were approximately 4,000,000 slaves, mostly in the south, and some 500,000 free blacks, generally in the north. They were a substantial part of the population, but it is little known that only six percent of the southern white population, approximately 316,632, owned slaves. It is even less known that some free blacks owned slaves as well.

Fleming asked “Why did they (the southerners) sacrifice over 300,000 of their sons to preserve an institution in which they apparently had no personal stake?” The answer, generally stated, was that, by 1861 the northern states passionately hated the southern states and vice versa. That was the disease in the public mind.

I cite this bit of history because I keep hearing the question “If Zimmerman is acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin, will there be race riots?” Like the southerners of old, whites, Hispanics and others today are concerned about black violence.

Taking 1964 as a starting point, there were seven race riots that year, three of them in my home state, with others in Philadelphia, Rochester, New York, and Chicago. The famed Watts riot occurred in 1965. Riots continued in 1966, 1967, and most actively in 125 cities in 1968 following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They tapered off in the 1970s and 80s. There were five riots in the 1990s and, as the new millennium began there were riots in Cincinnati (2001), Toledo (2005), Los Angeles (2006), and in Oakland (2009).

In the week preceding July 4^th, there were reports of black on white violence in Greensboro, Portland, Chicago and other cities around the nation

In 2011 I reviewed a book by Colin Flaherty, “’White Girl Bleed A Lot’—The Return of Race Riots to America.” Flaherty stated that “Race riots are back along with widespread racial crime and violence.” He documented these episodes, noting in particular that “local media and public officials are silent…this denies the obvious: America is the most race conscious society in the world. Few know about it (the violence). Fewer still are talking about it.”

In October the sixth edition of his book will be published by WND Books. When I asked him whether the fear of racial riots after the verdict in the Zimmerman trial is rendered were justified, Flaherty replied that “I have not noticed anyone saying if Zimmerman is acquitted there will NOT be a riot. It seems to be a given, especially since I documented at least a dozen examples of black mob violence following the Trayvon Martin episode.”

“So I cannot predict the future, but I know that cops all over the country will be ready for violence. There is so much black mob violence happening now without any specific precipitating event, it does not seem like a stretch to make sure the cops are ready for more.”

A visit to Flaherty’s website confirms his observations regarding violent attacks. Even the media is beginning to give them more coverage, but blacks are frequently referred to as “urban youths” and other euphemisms.

In a post on his site, “Trayvon, Jeantel and Critical Race Theory”, Flaherty examines the theory, initiated by Derrick Bell. “Critical Race Theory says racism is everywhere,” within the black community, says Flaherty, “And it is permanent. As for any gains made in the courts or in public or private life”, the theory holds that “they are an illusion. And serve White Supremacists who lead a life of White Privilege.”

Given that voters have twice elected a black President, the theory seems absurd, but it is useful to keep in mind that President Obama sat through twenty years of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s racist sermons, the most famous, following 9/11, in which he said “God damn America.”

Following the shooting of Trayvon Martin, Obama said, he “would have looked like my son.” The trial is not going well for the prosecution at this writing and whites are wondering whether the President will say something to warn blacks against any rioting when the verdict comes in.

 © Alan Caruba, 2013

The Egyptians Want Freedom Too

By Alan Caruba

The news from Egypt on the day before Americans celebrate the Fourth of July is that the military has stepped in to remove its Prime Minister, Mohammed Morsi, and have replaced him with the Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court. The Egyptian constitution has been suspended as well. We can only hope this results in a government that Egyptians can accept as a legitimate democracy. The one they’ve had has been a disaster.

Even though Americans had a long period of time to develop self-governance in the thirteen colonies prior to the Revolution that required them to come up with a unified system, the original effort, the Articles of Confederation, failed and had to be replaced by the U.S. Constitution. Americans have celebrated 237 years of its success with an interruption for the Civil War, 1861 to 1865, a terrible slaughter for both sides.

Egyptians, whose history goes back to 6,000 BC and whose dynasties date from around 3150 BC when King Menes unified the nation have not had any experience with self-rule. Brett Stephens, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, recently noted that a series of “pharaohs, caliphs, pashas, and strongmen for 6,000 years” was the only experience Egyptians have had with government.

More recent governments from Nasser to Mubarak ranged from hostile to friendly and all had a military strongman leading them. Nasser was an Islamist who took on Israel and lost twice. His successor, Anwar el Sadat concluded a peace treaty with Israel in the 1970s and was assassinated by the Muslim Brotherhood for doing so.  Mubarak took over and stayed in power until he was forced by public protests to resign as president on February 11, 2011.

What followed were elections that elected Mohammed Morsi, a leader in the Muslim Brotherhood, as president on June 24, 2012. His margin of victory was just 51% in a sharply divided nation. As testimony to the utterly fascist nature of the Brotherhood, it only took a year for the vast majority of Egyptians to once again fill Tahrir Square in Cairo and squares in other cities to demand he resign. That should be taken as a sign of progress.

I think historians will look back and conclude that the Internet has been a major contributing factor to the overthrow of dictators in the Middle East. It has allowed people in the region’s nations to learn what was actually going on without being dependent on local media. There has also been a growing secularism in the region, from modern Turkey that was founded with a strict separation of mosque and state in 1920 to present times. The elections of Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an Islamist, have led to increased protests there as well.

Egypt had enjoyed relative peace between Muslims and the Coptic Church that dates back to the earliest days of Christianity, bit under Morsi that era of peace ended. Islam is not famous for tolerance. Within Islam, the conflicts between Shiites and Sunnis, date back to its earliest years following the death of Mohammed in 632 A.D. Islam demands jihad—holy war—until the entire world submits to its domination, making it one of the most unpopular religions wherever it existed. The protests in Islamic nations in the Middle East demonstrate a growing secular resistance to it.

The resistance to the authoritarian rule by Islamists in Egypt has other factors that are not widely known in the West. Writing in the Middle East Forum, David P. Goldman, an author, economists, and noted demographer, pointed to Egypt’s unfixable economy that will, he said, turn it into a failed state. I had a professor of history who once said that no nation is more than two weeks away from revolution if it fails to feed its people. Egypt, under PM Morsi, has some serious problems that include the collapse of its tourist industry, long gas lines, and rising food prices.

“Egypt remains an essentially pre-modern society with a 45% literacy rate and a dysfunctional higher education system unable to produce a competent labor pool to meet the demands of a globalized economy,” says Goldman. “Over the past decade, Cairo’s annual imports soared from $10 billion to $60 billion, mainly due to rising food prices.” Although more than 70% of Egyptians are involved in farming, the country imports half of its food consumption.” Its current wheat stockpiles, estimated at 68 days, will rapidly dwindle.

Islamist governments are unable to function in the modern era of globalization. They represent conflicts that constantly threaten the stability of the Middle East. There is a horrendous civil war between Sunni supremacists in Syria, and on-going bombings in Iraq from the same forces. The nations in the region are on a constant military alert and it should be noted that the U.S. withdrawal from the region in Iraq and forthcoming in Afghanistan will only exacerbate tensions.

The United States has real interests in stability or the lack of it, but the Obama administration has demonstrated a complete failure to adapt to the realities occurring in Egypt, Libya, and other nations in turmoil. President Obama has demonstrated a strong tilt toward the Muslim Brotherhood and that has led to growing hostility to America.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

The Flag is Passing By

 

The Flag Goes By

 

Hats off

Along the street there comes

A blare of bugles, a ruffle of drums,

A flash of color beneath the sky:

    Hats off!

The flag is passing by!
 

Blue and crimson and white it shines,

Over the steel-tipped, ordered lines.

     Hats off!

The colors before us fly;

But more than the flag is passing by.
 

Sea-fights and land-fights, grim and great,

Fought to make and to save the State:

Weary marches and sinking ships;

Cheers of victory on dying lips;
 

Days of plenty and years of peace;

March of a strong land’s swift increase;

Equal justice, right and law,

Stately honor and reverend awe;
 

Sign of a nation, great and strong

To ward her people from foreign wrong:

Pride and glory and honor,--all

Live in the colors to stand or fall.
           

   Hat’s off!

Along the street there comes

A blare of bugles, a ruffle of drums;

And loyal hearts are beating high:

    Hats off!

The Flag is passing by!
 

 -- Henry Holcomb Bennett

B. December 5, 1863 – D. April 30, 1924

American author, journalist and poet

A Not So Happy Fourth of July

By Alan Caruba

Normally Americans celebrate the Fourth of July as the happy anniversary of the birth of the nation with the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. In 2013, our happiness is muted by fears of eroding freedoms; corrupt and incompetent governance.

The men who signed the document had struggled to reach some accommodation with England for many years until the arrogance and continuing taxation of the colonies left them no alternative than to “dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another.”

When that effort failed they fought our Revolution over the course of eight years until the king and parliament concluded they could not retain the American colonies. Rarely mentioned in the history books was the large portion of colonists, known as Tories, who did not want to sever the connection. It is worth noting that the Revolution began when British troops moved to seize American arms in Concord, Massachusetts, and were met by militias there and in Lexington.

We celebrate the holiday in 2013 in a nation sharply divided between those who wish to retain and maintain the traditional and political values of America—conservatives—and the liberals who want to adopt the failed socialist systems of Europe and elsewhere. Even the former Soviet Union collapsed under the dead weight of communism. Even China, though politically communist, has adopted the capitalist system.

The transformation of today’s America from one whose values are enshrined in the Constitution and, in particular, the Bill of Rights, did not occur overnight. It began largely in the last century as “progressive” ideas were embraced. The educational system was transformed by progressives such as John Dewey. The rise of the union movement transformed the relationship between employer and employees; unions have since fallen on hard times, but still solidly support liberal candidates for office.

For the duration of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, from the end of World War Two in 1945 until its end in 1991, progressives mocked the notion that the U.S. government was filled with Soviet agents-of-influence and spies. Historians have since documented this.

Liberals see the values of the 1950s and earlier as “old-fashioned” and “out of date.” They welcome the attack on traditional marriage—in place for thousands of years by all faiths—that has resulted in the legalization of same-sex marriage in many states. They defend abortion even though it has killed an entire generation of Americans in the womb. These changes did not and do reflect the will of the people, but rather the result of Supreme Court decisions, of law suits that ignore the will of the people.

A nation built on welcoming immigrants who happily left Europe and other former homelands to seek real opportunity here is now led by politicians unwilling to acknowledge that the 1986 effort at immigration reform failed to secure the southern border, incentivized illegal immigration, and has resulted in an estimated eleven million “undocumented” aliens competing for jobs and benefits that rightfully should belong to native-born and naturalized Americans.

As Americans celebrate the Fourth of July in 2013, many are unaware that Obamacare is the law of the land. It is the nationalization of what was regarded as the finest health care system in the world and it is filled with hidden taxes, fines, the insertion of the government between patients and their physicians, and it will wreak havoc on the nation’s economy, increasing unemployment, impacting small businesses and large. Nationalization is socialism!

The protests against Obamacare gave rise to the Tea Party movement and a recent Rasmussen poll found that “26% of Obama supporters view the Tea Party as the nation’s top terror threat.” A slim majority, 51%, of likely voters, however, still regard radical Muslims to be the biggest threat.

Even more ominous is news that the U.S. agency, FEMA, has signed an agreement with the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry to provide “security at mass events.” The notion of Russian troops on U.S. soil to control Americans is an abomination. We fought a Revolution when the British did this following the Boston Tea Party.

The Founding Fathers wanted limited government and the Constitution is designed to create checks and balances so that no one element, the executive, Congress, or the judiciary, can act without the ability of Americans to reverse decisions with which they disagree. Americans demanded and got the repeal of Prohibition and they can do the same for Obamacare.

On this Fourth of July we have been witness to the failed policies of the President elected in 2008 and again in 2012. His conduct is more that of a monarch or dictator, indifferent and resentful of the judiciary and of Congress. He is surrounded by appointees who oversee elements of the government that increasingly give evidence of seeing Americans as “the enemy.”

On this Fourth of July, scandals abound and remain to be investigated, from “Fast and Furious” a gun-running scheme from within the Department of Justice to the attack on September 11, 2012 on our ambassador to Libya who died in Benghazi along with three other brave Americans. The cover-up continues.

We are learning that the Internal Revenue Service was corrupted by his administration to become an agency targeting conservative organizations in ways that denied them the opportunity to raise financial support. We have learned that the agencies intended to protect us have virtually unlimited capacity to monitor and retain all our electronic communications. The National Defense Authorization Act allows the government the right to arrest and detain any American without a trial. It must be repealed!

Recently the President gave a speech in which he said that “climate change” was the greatest threat to the nation and announced new policies to limit the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere. This is so utterly absurd that it defies the evidence of an Earth that continues to cool over the period of the last seventeen years. It ignores the fact that CO2 plays no role in climate change and has actually increased during the time the Earth has been cooling. This is one more diversion from the very real threats to the Constitution and our freedoms.

We have a Congress now that routinely passes bills exceeding a thousand to two thousand pages, often without reading them. The corruption this implies is a threat to the future of the nation.

The government the Founding Fathers feared would happen is the government we now have.

It is not a happy Fourth of July.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

The Conservative Founding Fathers Who Saved America

By Alan Caruba

On the Fourth of July it is traditional and proper that we pay tribute to the nation’s Founding Fathers. The names of Washington, Jefferson, Adams and Madison are well known to Americans, but far less of the names of the conservative founders who, in many ways, saved and created the nation through their efforts and sacrifices.

They include Robert Morris, Gouveneur Morris, John and Edward Routledge, James Wilson, Philip Schuyler, and John Dickerson. Their achievements have been mentioned in passing by many historians, but it took David Lefer to do them the full justice they deserve in his new book, “The Founding Conservatives: How a Group of Unsung Heroes Saved the American Revolution.”

For conservatives today, it is testimony to the tenacity, fortitude, and sacrifice these men demonstrated during the long years of the Revolution and it is also the story of the way the colonies, later states, often failed to meet their obligations to fund the soldiers who fought for freedom from England, often suffering horribly at Valley Forge and elsewhere. When the fighting ceased, they just as often found themselves without pay or pension.

From the Declaration of Independence in 1776, to the peace treaty in 1783, to the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, and the inclusion of the Bill of Rights in 1791, Lever notes that “The Revolution was a time of war without end; of real estate crashes, rampant speculation, and mounting public debt; of popular outrage at bankers and merchants who grew rich while the rest of the nation struggled; of bitter disputes over taxation; and of such animosity between left and right that it left Congress paralyzed for months on end.”

In short, times not unlike our own today.

In the years following World War II, historians of that time “made a conscious decision to downplay any hint of strife among the Founding Fathers”, but the reality can be found in Lefer’s book and it is far from what a generation or two of Americans were taught. America’s economy was based largely on agriculture, but it was the conservative Founders who were the first advocates of a banking system, corporations, and large-scale industry. It was the conservatives who set in motion the rise of America.

Today it is fashionable among liberals to depict the Founding Fathers as slave-owners and many were in an era where their labor was needed, but many of the conservatives chose to free their slaves after the nation was established.

Of the men mentioned above, all could be considered the “elite”, wealthy men who nonetheless risked their wealth and their lives in the cause of establishing a new nation and, indeed, many lost everything as they risked the investments in a wide range of land speculation and other enterprises.

At the heart of their endeavors was the 17^th and 18^th century concept of virtue which was very different from how we interpret it today. “It implied manliness as well as selflessness, an ability to fight for the state, and a willingness to place its interests about one’s own.” None perhaps exemplified this better than George Washington whose tenacity kept together the ill-clothed and fed army that ultimately defeated the most powerful empire of its time.

The Founding Fathers were extremely distrustful of the concentration of power as was seen in the concept of monarchy and today Americans are distrustful of a government whose powers of surveillance and thus control are seen in the revelations about the role of the National Security Agency, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Department of Homeland Security. Most particularly, Americans fear a presidency that ignores the Constitution and Congress, preferring to rule by executive orders.

By April 19, 1775, “the stench of gunpowder and dead men filled the air between Boston and Concord” and soon enough the Second Continental Congress “which met for the first time three weeks later, found itself in charge of a war it had not authorized and did not know how to run.” Their job was made easier by an arrogant George III who refused any efforts at compromise.

“By the end of the Revolution, writes Lefer “Americans were toppling old patterns of deference as relentlessly as gilded statues of King George. A new world of greater social mobility and political participation was rapidly coming into being. And while hostility to the rich continued to exist, the changes taking place in American society were far more democratic than radical. It wasn’t that the lower classes wanted to limit wealth. It was that they too now demanded the right to earn it.”

It was the belief among the conservative Founders that large-scale capitalism would be the engine that drove America to greatness. They were right.

Of those who met in private and in secrecy to draft a Constitution to replace the Articles of Confederation, “thirty-nine were lawyers and judges. Two were college presidents, and three were or had been professors. Almost half had served in the Continental Army or the militia…American conservatives were well represented at the convention.”

The threats to the new republic were not so different then as they are today and the future of the United States of America was no more in question then as now.

© Alan Caruba, 2013