Washington (CNN) - Congress is just like everyone else. That's the message the National Security Agency has for Sen. Bernie Sanders. Did they spy on the Romney 2012 campaign? Did they turn over juicy info to the Obama campaign?
The independent senator from Vermont sent a letter to the agency Friday, asking whether it has or is "spying" on members of Congress and other elected American officials. Seems like a fairly straightforward questions. Either you do, or you don't. Either you have, or you have not. How about senior leaders of the US Military, and State Governors ?
The NSA provided a preliminary response Saturday that said Congress has "the same privacy protections as all U.S. persons." Appears we are no longer governed by an elected body, but rather ruled by shadowy individauls and intelligence agencies.
"NSA's authorities to collect signals intelligence data include procedures that protect the privacy of U.S. persons. Such protections are built into and cut across the entire process. Members of Congress have the same privacy protections as all U.S. persons," said the agency in a statement obtained by CNN.
The response goes on to promise the agency will continue to work with Congress on the issues - without ever addressing the senator's real question. We "promise".... Nicely done, very nicely done.
Sanders defines "spying" in his letter as "gathering metadata on calls made from official or personal phones, content from websites visited or e-mails sent, or collecting any other data from a third party not made available to the general public in the regular course of business." This entire "metadata" issue is very misleading and tiring. If you get the metadata, you get the number, person, location, system, and tower, etc. What else is needed ?
The NSA would say nothing more, except that it is further reviewing the letter. They're above the law. They obviously don't have to say anything.
"We will continue to work to ensure that all Members of Congress, including Sen. Sanders, have information about NSA's mission, authorities, and programs to fully inform the discharge of their duties," read the statement.
Attorney General Eric Holder similarly deflected answering the same question at a congressional hearing last summer, telling Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Illinois, that the NSA had no "intent" to spy on Congress, but the issue was better discussed in private.
The intelligence community has faced heated criticism from the right and left in 2013 after Edward Snowden's leaks, and the intensity has continued fiercely in 2014. The "criticism" has been fully justified and was not only prompted by the Snowden leaks, but other recently discovered federal agency anomalies as well.
On Thursday, the New York Times and the Guardian published scathing editorials that slammed the "violations" Snowden's leaks revealed and advocated a presidential pardon for him.
Among those charges was the notion that James Clapper Jr., the director of National Intelligence, lied to Congress while testifying last March that the NSA was not collecting data on millions of Americans.
National Intelligence was quick to push back, with a letter to the editor from by general counsel Robert Litt, published in the New York Times on Saturday.
"As a witness to the relevant events and a participant in them, I know that allegation is not true," writes Litt, explaining that Clapper misunderstood the question, but couldn't publicly correct his mistake "because the program involved was classified." The correct answer would have been: The employment of these capabilities and methodologies are classified and cannot be discussed in an unclassified forum.
"This incident shows the difficulty of discussing classified information in an unclassified setting and the danger of inferring a person's state of mind from extemporaneous answers given under pressure."
Litt said that Clapper was "surprised and distressed" when he was informed by staff that he gave a misleading answer after the testimony. You want a private conversation, take a walk in the WH rose garden.
[Tolo News] The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) has shown new commitment to combating the practice of Bacha Bazi Prostituting young boys...
recently. AIHRC head Seema Samar said on Sunday that in order to end the practice, which often entails pedophilia, poverty must be addressed and there must be greater enforcement of the law against those engaging in it.
The AIHRC has begun an investigative study into the root causes behind Bacha Bazi, which is a historical practice that has been eradicated in other regional countries but remains relatively prevalent in Afghanistan.
That work has already been done, and the results shown on Frontline in 2010. See here.
"Unfortunately, this practice might have risen during the 35 years of war, or could have been there before, but not at the level that I see today...it is very scary," Samar said.
According to human rights One man's rights are another man's existential threat. activists, one of the biggest challenges to combating the practice is that it is most often powerful and wealthy individuals who enlist the young boys and force them to dance and perform sexual favors. These individuals are said to be protected from the law.
"Bacha Bazi should be considered a crime and there must be a punishment for it, if it is not prevented now, it will continue and will get worse," Samar added.
Most commonly, the victims of Bacha Bazi are young boys who grow up in impoverished homes. Whether through desperation, coercion or otherwise, they find themselves in the perverse servitude of older men, often being forced to wear women's clothing, entertain guests and have homosexual relations with their masters.
"As an institution whose responsibility covers children, the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs will be cooperative until the day when we can enforazce a punishment for it in our laws," Minister of Labor and Social Affairs Amena Afzali said. "We want this phenomenon to not only hide in Afghanistan, but we want it to disappear."
Posted by: Fred ||
01/06/2014 00:00 ||
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Egypt stopped 61 Canadian Shia pilgrims from entering the country and held them at Cairo's airport until their onward flight, security officials said on Sunday.
The Canadians landed in Egypt from Iraq to complete a pilgrimage to Shia sites in the region, but were kept out by airport security officials who gave no further explanation. A spokesman for Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird said Ottawa would react later.
Tunisias National Constituent Assembly adopted Article 1 of the draft constitution, establishing the country as a republic and Islam as its religion but rejecting amendments that the Quran be the main source of law.
Quran or not, once you accept one religion as an official religion, you've already set boundaries on what people are allowed to think. Which is precisely the point...
The voting comes amid concerns that a January 14 deadline for the new charters adoption may not be met because of disruptions and the slow pace of deliberations.
Tunisia is a free, independent and sovereign state. Islam is its religion, Arabic is its language, and it is a republic. It is not possible to amend this article, the article reads.
So you Lutherans shouldn't get your hopes up for any future inclusion...
The article, a compromise between the Islamist Ennahda party, which heads the outgoing coalition government, and the secular opposition, was adopted by 146 votes out of the 149 ballots cast.
Lawmakers rejected two amendments, one proposing Islam and the second proposing the Quran as the principal source of legislation.
Mohamed Hamdi of the small Current of Love party defended Islamic law, saying it would give spiritual backing to all rights and liberties.
But a secular assembly member, Mahmoud Baroudi of the Democratic Alliance, called the proposed amendments against modernity.
The assembly also adopted Article 2 which again cannot be amended on the establishment of a civil state based on citizenship, the will of the people and the rule of law.
As long as the civil state conforms to Islam, of course...
Approving the new constitution would be a crucial democratic milestone.
Its adoption would end months of political crisis and further distance Tunisia from the chronic instability plaguing other countries in a region rocked by regime change.
Fridays first session resulted in lawmakers approving the title of the charter, by 175 votes out of the 184 MPs present, and the first three paragraphs of the preamble. They have to scrutinise the 146 articles finalised in June and some 30 key amendments.
Posted by: Steve White ||
01/06/2014 00:00 ||
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#1
Sure go ahead, just like the ancient Egyptians adopted Bastet. It makes no difference to me.
Bastet was a goddess in ancient Egyptian religion, worshipped as early as the Second Dynasty (2890 BC). As Bast, she was the goddess of warfare in Lower Egypt, the Nile River delta region, before the unification of the cultures of ancient Egypt. Her name is also spelled Baast, Ubasti, and Baset
Posted by: Harry Unick3803 ||
01/06/2014 15:02 Comments ||
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#2
^^^^^ That! And since Cat Rapture Egypt has gone to hell.
[An Nahar] Human body parts fell from the sky in the city of Jeddah Sunday, with police saying they could be the remains of a person trapped in an airplane's wheel bay.
"Police received a telephone call at 2:30 am from a witness reporting the fall of human remains at an intersection in Mushrefa neighborhood" in the Red Sea city, front man Nawaf bin Naser al-Bouq said in a statement.
Initial indications were that the remains "fell from a plan's landing gear," said Bouq, adding that investigations were ongoing.
In a desperate attempt to cross borders, some people at poorly monitored airports climb inside the bays holding the landing gear of planes. Most of them freeze to death once the aircraft reach cruising altitude, but some survive.
In 2010, the head of Beirut's airport security resigned after the death of a man who managed to sneak onto a runway undetected and hide in the wheel bay of a Saudi-bound jet.
The man's body was found by a maintenance worker in Riyadh who was inspecting the landing gear of the Saudi-owned Nas Air Airbus 320 after it touched down there.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/06/2014 00:00 ||
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#1
If it is a Delta connection, the estate of the torso will be charged coach fare. Regardless of status upon boarding, unattached body parts will be charged individually as checked baggage.
#7
Falling To Pieces Lyrics
Falling To Pieces Submit Correct Lyrics
A shot in the dark
A past lost in space
And where do I start?
The past and the chase
You hunted me down
Like a wolf, a predator
I felt like a deer in the lights
You loved me and I froze in time
Hungry for that flesh of mine
But I can't compete with the she-wolf, who has brought me to my knees
What do you see in those yellow eyes?
'Cause I'm falling to pieces
I'm falling to pieces
I'm falling to pieces
I'm falling to pieces
Falling to pieces
[beat break]
Did she lie and wait
Was I bait, to pull you in
The thrill of the kill
You feel, is a sin
I lay with the wolves
Alone, it seems,
I thought I was part of you
You loved me and I froze in time
Hungry for that flesh of mine
But I can't compete with the she-wolf, who has brought me to my knees
What do you see in those yellow eyes?
'Cause I'm falling to pieces
I'm falling to pieces
I'm falling to pieces
I'm falling to pieces
Falling to pieces
[beat break]
I'm falling to pieces
Falling to pieces
I'm falling to pieces
Falling to pieces
14 people were killed and ten people wounded in a stampede during a religious gathering in northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region on Sunday afternoon. The stampede occurred at 1:00 p.m. during the process of handing out traditional religious food to attendees at an event to commemorate a late religious figure in a mosque in Ningxia's Xiji Town of Guyuan city.
The wounded were hospitalized, with four in critical condition.
#3
To exemplify my current mental political state, my immediate reaction was he can't be worse than Obama or Schwarzenegger or Reid or Christie or de Blasio or ....................
[Foreign Policy] The FBI's creeping advance into the world of counterterrorism is nothing new. But quietly and without notice, the agency has finally decided to make it official in one of its organizational fact sheets. Instead of declaring "law enforcement" as its "primary function," as it has for years, the FBI fact sheet now lists "national security" as its chief mission. The changes largely reflect the FBI reforms put in place after September 11, 2001, which some have criticized for de-prioritizing law enforcement activities. Regardless, with the 9/11 attacks more than a decade in the past, the timing of the edits is baffling some FBI-watchers. Baffling? Baffling? At a time when POTUS comes closer by the day to being officially charged with breaking Federal laws. Baffling?
#1
"The Communist threat from without must not blind us to the Communist threat from within. The latter is reaching into the very heart of America through its espionage agents and a cunning, defiant, and lawless communist party, which is fanatically dedicated to the Marxist cause of world enslavement and destruction of the foundations of our republic."
~ J. Edgar Hoover, Former Director, FBI
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
14 people were killed and ten people wounded in a stampede during a religious gathering in northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region on Sunday afternoon. The stampede occurred at 1:00 p.m. during the process of handing out traditional religious food to attendees at an event to commemorate a late religious figure in a mosque in Ningxia's Xiji Town of Guyuan city.
