A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its "widest-reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet.

The latest revelations will add to the intense public and congressional debate around the extent of NSA surveillance programs. They come as senior intelligence officials testify to the Senate judiciary committee on Wednesday, releasing classified documents in response to the Guardian's earlier stories on bulk collection of phone records and Fisasurveillance court oversight.

The files shed light on one of Snowden's most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by the Guardian on June 10.

What is America going to look like when the middle class is dead? Once upon a time, the United States has the largest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the world. When I was growing up, it seemed like almost everyone was "middle class" and it was very rare to hear of someone that was out of work. Of course life wasn't perfect, but most families owned a home, most families had more than one vehicle, and most families could afford nice vacations and save for retirement at the same time. Sadly, things have dramatically changed in America since that time. There just aren't as many "middle class jobs" as there used to be. In fact, just six years ago there were about six million more full-time jobs in our economy than there are right now. Those jobs are being replaced by part-time jobs and temp jobs. The number one employer in America today is Wal-Mart and the number two employer in America today is a temp agency (Kelly Services). But you can't support a family on those kinds of jobs. We live at a time when incomes are going down but the cost of living just keeps going up. As a result, the middle class in America is being absolutely shredded and the ranks of the poor are steadily growing. The following are 44 facts about the death of the middle class that every American should know:

Just think. A nuclear device carried aloft by an Iranian rocket somewhere near the Gulf of Mexico and a blinding flash in the skies.

Within 12 to 18 months, experts predict, 90 percent of Americans would be dead.

That's the catastrophic threat from the resulting electromagnetic pulse signal, or EMP, that an upcoming conference will address.

The live-streamed event, hosted by Florida-based The United West, is scheduled for Friday, beginning at 11 a.m. Eastern Time.

The group says it is "dedicated to defending and advancing Western Civilization against the kinetic and cultural onslaught of Shariah Islam."

After three decades in exile as an author and editor in Cuba, Assata Shakur's longtime FBI predator stigmatized her as the first woman on its Most Wanted Terrorists list in May 2013. They upped the bounty on her head to $2 million! Shakur never was and is not now a terrorist. But the FBI appears desperate to intensify its police-state activities and discredit political dissidents, especially Black revolutionaries.

The frame-up. Shakur was shot twice and arrested in a traffic stop in 1973 on the New Jersey Turnpike for a "faulty tail light." It led to a shootout that killed a state trooper along with the car's driver, a close friend. Sundiata Acoli, the third companion in the car was wounded and captured. He remains in prison today.

The trial was a mockery. Her jury was all white. Even after state trooper James Harper testified that he never saw Shakur with a gun and that she was shot while holding up her arms, she and Acoli, both unarmed, were convicted in 1977 of murdering trooper Werner Foerster - and their comrade Zayd Shakur! Assata served time in a men's prison where she was subjected to vaginal and anal strip searches and under continuous threat as a "cop killer." She was able to finally escape with outside help in 1979, and in 1984 fled to Cuba, which gave her political asylum. Radical Women organized a Feminist Brigade to Cuba in 1997 which met with and heard Shakur speak.

The Bradley Manning case is such a transparent attempt at intimidation to prevent others from exposing war crimes perpetrated by the US government that it could make even a lethargic baboon scream bloody murder.

There is no moral validity to the US military's claim or the courts judgment that Manning is guilty of 'espionage' and 'theft'. There is ample room for the specific laws that Manning broke to be interpreted by the judge in terms of the public interest. The public interest can also be cited as requiring laws that work against the public interest, such as those broken by Manning, to be repealed.

Manning was in possession of information that showed that the US government and military had committed crimes against humanity, war crimes, and even genocide against the Iraqi and Afghan people.

Manning's information included footage of a US military helicopter gunning down a father taking his children to school, evidence of a death squad operating in Afghanistan, and files showing that amongst the innocents being held at Guantánamo bay prison, who are regularly tortured, are dementia patients, taxi drivers and prisoners of the Taliban.

Proving that idiocy truly has no bounds, Spain issued a "royal decree" taxing sunlight gatherers. The state threatens fines as much as 30 million euros for those who illegally gather sunlight without paying a tax.

The tax is just enough to make sure that homeowners cannot gather and store solar energy cheaper than state-sponsored providers.

Via Mish-modified Google Translate from Energias Renovables, please consider Photovoltaic Sector, Stunned

The Secretary of State for Energy, Alberto Nadal, signed a draft royal decree in which consumption taxes are levied on those who want to start solar power systems on their rooftops. The tax, labeled a "backup toll" is high enough to ensure that it will be cheaper to keep buying energy from current providers.

An Army judge on Tuesday acquitted Pfc. Bradley Manning of aiding the enemy by disclosing a trove of secret U.S. government documents but found him guilty of espionage, a mixed verdict that dealt a rebuke to military prosecutors who sought to prove that the largest leak in U.S. history had assisted al-Qaeda.

The judge, Col. Denise Lind, found Manning guilty of most of the more than 20 crimes he was charged with, including several violations of the Espionage Act. He could face a maximum of 136 years in prison.

The case, tried in a small courtroom at Fort Meade, Md., an installation that includes the National Security Agency, unfolded amid a heated national conversation about the right balance between government secrecy and civil liberties - a debate fueled by recent revelations about the scope of U.S. surveillance programs.

In charging Manning with aiding the enemy, government prosecutors argued that the former intelligence analyst's decision to release diplomatic cables and battlefield reports amounted to the highest form of treason.

Lind did not buy that argument. But her verdict, which marked the first major espionage conviction during the Obama administration, is certain to set markers in the ongoing debate over government secrecy and whistleblower protections.

Manning's attorney, David Coombs, said he was pleased by the verdict, but he signaled that the decisive moment will come during the sentencing phase of the court-martial, which opens Wednesday and could last several weeks.

"We won the battle, now we need to go win the war," Coombs said after leaving court. "Today is a good day, but Bradley is by no means out of the fire."

It's not easy being a flag-waving American nationalist. In addition to having to deal with the usual disillusion, anger, and scorn from around the world incited by Washington's endless bombings and endless wars, the nationalist is assaulted by whistle blowers like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, who have disclosed a steady stream of human-rights and civil-liberties scandals, atrocities, embarrassing lies, and embarrassing truths. Believers in "American exceptionalism" and "noble intentions" have been hard pressed to keep the rhetorical flag waving by the dawn's early light and the twilight's last gleaming.

That may explain the Washington Post story (July 20) headlined "U.S. asylum-seekers unhappy in Russia", about Edward Snowden and his plan to perhaps seek asylum in Moscow. The article recounted the allegedly miserable times experienced in the Soviet Union by American expatriates and defectors like Lee Harvey Oswald, the two NSA employees of 1960 - William Martin and Bernon Mitchell - and several others. The Post's propaganda equation apparently is: Dissatisfaction with life in Russia by an American equals a point in favor of the United States: "misplaced hopes of a glorious life in the worker's paradise" ... Oswald "was given work in an electronics factory in dreary Minsk, where the bright future eluded him" ... reads the Post's Cold War-clichéd rendition. Not much for anyone to get terribly excited about, but a defensive American nationalist is hard pressed these days to find much better.

If you had a question about how to protect yourself from a criminal known to break into houses in your neighborhood, would you ask him how to protect your home and then take his suggestions, or would you be suspicious he might be answering them in a way that would make your home even easier to encroach?

If you had a question about the honesty and integrity of a person in an authority position, would you ask that person to investigate himself and then accept his findings? (I mean, if you were a normal person, not if your name is Barack or Eric.)

If a company came out with a new medication that promised to cure your ills overnight, would you ask the company that produced it whether it was safe and trust them to be honest, or would you feel that their answer might be colored by their urge to make a buck?

So why on earth would anyone possibly believe that the likes of Monsanto, Dow, and DuPont would be spreading anything but sales-driven propaganda on their new website GMOAnswers?

Are they serious or is this some kind of big public relations joke being played out on a national platform? Are we being punked?

What kind of person would look up their answers on a website SPONSORED by the very people who are putting out the toxic garbage they'd like us to believe is food?

Part I

"The engineering of a series of provocations to justify military intervention is feasible and could be accomplished with the resources available." ~ Report of May 1963 to Joint Chiefs of Staff [1]

Bush's Terror War and the Fixing of Intelligence

On September 11, 2001, within hours of the murderous 9/11 attacks, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney had committed America to what they later called the "War on Terror." It should more properly, I believe, be called the "Terror War," one in which terror has been directed repeatedly against civilians by all participants, both states and non-state actors. A terror war is one in which the major role is played by weapons of indiscriminate destruction, whether they are IEDs planted by the roadside or bombs delivered aerially by a high-tech drone. [2]

Bush's war should also be seen as part of a larger, indeed global, process in which terror has been used against civilians in interrelated campaigns by all major powers, including China in Xinjiang and Russia in Chechnya, as well as the United States. [3] Terror war in its global context should perhaps be seen as the latest stage of the age-long secular spread of transurban civilization into areas of mostly rural resistance - areas where conventional forms of warfare, for either geographic or cultural reasons, prove inconclusive.