It's no joke - beginning April Fool's Day in Wisconsin, even citizens convicted of misdemeanor crimes will have a DNA sample forcibly taken from them as the state dramatically expands its collection database.

As reported by The Free Thought Project, the new law will dramatically expand the number of samples being analyzed by state criminal labs in the capital of Madison. Prior to the change in law, the number of DNA profiles created came only from about 10,000-12,000 felony convictions each year. According to local news affiliate Fox 6, of that figure, some 550 positive hits were made on cases previously unsolved.

As confirmed in an earlier report April 9, 2015, the Security Bureau of Ukraine, on April 7th, had seized and disappeared two Odessa bloggers, who were trying to get an independent investigation, and ultimate prosecution, of the individuals who participated in the 2 May 2014 massacre of regime opponents, and who burned, shot, and clubbed to death perhaps over 200 in the Odessa Trade Unions Building — the event that precipitated the breakaway of Donbass from the rest of the former Ukraine, the country's civil war. (See Ukraine "Disappears" Opponents of the Kiev Regime. Abductions of Independent Journalists By Eric Zuesse, April 09, 2015)

And I also reported that April 7th saw the official announcement that,

"The security service of Ukraine ... has discontinued operation of a number of Internet sites that were used to perpetrate information campaigns of aggression on the part of the Russian Federation aimed at violent change or overthrow of the constitutional order and territorial integrity and inviolability of Ukraine."

The follow-up to that story is the news on April 9th, which was reported in the courageous independent Kiev newspaper, Vesti, that "SBU has blocked more than 10,000 websites." It says that, "Law enforcers seized the servers," and that one SBU official told the newspaper, "'We have made the decision of the court and confiscated equipment.' He promised to return the servers in two months."

Another news report on April 9th in Vesti tells of seizures of that day's edition of newspapers by far-right toughs at news stands throughout the city, and the story even shows a video of Right Sector toughs raiding and emptying a Vesti delivery van headed out for distribution. The report also said:

"On Thursday, April 9, machines [coin-operated distribution boxes] that were transporting part of the circulation of the Kiev edition of the newspaper 'Vesti' were attacked. The attacks occurred around the metro stations 'Heroes of Dnepr' and 'Vasylkivska.' In both cases, the scenario was the same: the circulation machine was blocked by two cars that emerged containing unidentified men wearing symbols of the 'Right Sector' who illegally seized the circulation. In the case near the metro station 'Vasylkivska,' a driver was beaten, and the attackers threatened to burn his car."

American sponsorship, simultaneously, of Neo-Nazis waging ethnic cleansing in Ukraine and of Arab dictators bombing an impoverished Yemen is stark testimony to the true nature of US power. Unmasked from unctuous vanity and virtuous pretensions, the ugly face of Washington is fascism and dictatorship.

Ukraine and Yemen, to some, may seem disconnected theatres. Not at all. The American-backed lawlessness and barbarity running amok in both countries are an integral function of how US power really operates in the world; not as a recent aberrant phenomenon, but rather going back to the fundamentals of how the American ruling class functions under capitalism.

Let's survey America's partners in practice: first in Yemen, then in Ukraine, and finally integrate the systematic connections.

As the death toll among civilians mounts in Yemen, aid agencies are warning of a humanitarian catastrophe in the Arab Peninsula country. Rundown hospitals can't cope with the droves of injured, many of them children suffering severe burns.

Yet this week Washington announces it is stepping up its weapons supplies to the coalition of Arab states led by Saudi Arabia that has been bombing Yemen for nearly two weeks.

US Army Colonel Steve Warren announced that the weapons are "a combination of pre-existing orders to our partners [sic] and some new requirements."

A cursory look at the geo-political developments taking place in the Middle East would draw our attention to one very critical aspect of Middle Eastern politics: Israel's transforming strategic environment and its geo-political posture therein. It would not be wrong to say that one of the greatest beneficiaries of the US' geo-political maneuverings in the Middle East during last two decades or so has been the state of Israel. In fact, Israel's strategic position vis-à-vis other regional powers has fundamentally changed over the last two decades or so, making it one of the most 'formidable forces' in the region. However, the credit for this "change" does not merely go to Israel's own defence related preparations, but also to the declining power of its strategic competitors, thanks to the recurrent US direct and indirect interventions!

For instance, the conventional military threats to Israel has been significantly reduced. The phased destruction of the Iraqi army, first in the 1991 Gulf War and then during the 2003 Iraq War, has eliminated Iraq as a significant conventional threat. It is easy to forget that until this process began, Iraq possessed a very large conventional order of battle and contributed expeditionary forces to the Arab war coalitions attacking Israel in 1948, 1967 and 1973. Until 1991 Israeli defense planners needed to constantly update their estimates of the size of the potential Iraqi expeditionary force could be sent to join an "Eastern Front" attack on Israel and of the speed with which these forces might traverse Syrian territory and the Jordanian desert to reach the front lines. In June 2014, by contrast, the ease and speed with which a few thousand-strong insurgents of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) caused the newly reconstructed units of the Iraqi military to melt in the face of an attack illustrates how difficult it would be for Iraq to once again constitute a threat to Israel's security.

Similarly, for the past two years, a very different development in Syria has seriously diminished if not eliminated that country's capacity to pose a significant conventional military threat. The ongoing civil war has weakened Syria's armed forces and has rendered many of its fighting units inoperable. Indeed, among Israel's close neighbors, only Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Jordan still possess significant conventional military forces. But Egypt has adhered to its peace treaty with Israel for the past 35 years, and Jordan has shown similar commitment for the past two decades.

NATO plans to deploy military forces in Romania are inadequate and confrontational, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Alexander Lukashevich said Wednesday.

"In fact, it is a sequential transformation of the country into another supportive foothold for the United States and NATO close to the Russian border. We have repeatedly commented on such steps by NATO member states, noting their confrontational manner and stressing their inadequacy and redundancy, both militarily and financially," Lukashevich said.

According to Lukashevich, the Romanian government is sacrificing the safety of the region by agreeing to deploy the bloc's military forces.

"One is tempted to conclude that the current Romanian authorities, in order to raise their 'profile' in the eyes of the overseas strategists... are willing to sacrifice maintenance of stability in the Black Sea region for tactical reasons," Lukashevich said.

Almost 10 years before the September 11 attacks, the US government had been tracking nearly every call made from America to a number of foreign countries - an effort that eventually laid the groundwork for the National Security Agency's own surveillance.

According to a report by USA Today, which cited multiple unnamed officials, the program gathered information on billions of international phone calls made by Americans. It was jumpstarted in 1992 by President George H.W. Bush and carried out by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in order to monitor drug trafficking rings and uncover new ones.


The program - known as USTO because it monitored calls from the US to foreign nations - first began targeting Colombian drug cartels and, thus, only set its sights on a few countries. It eventually expanded to up to 116 countries, however, and took aim at international phone calls made to Canada, Mexico, Italy, Afghanistan, Iran and others, as well as "most of Central and South America."

Huge story: The DEA harvested billions of US phone records for nearly a decade before 9/11, becoming NSA's blueprint. http://t.co/XhlqT5gzq8

— Trevor Timm (@trevortimm) April 7, 2015

Notably, the DEA program was described as a "blueprint" for the surveillance programs launched by the NSA during the presidency of George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11. It was approved by four presidential administrations before Attorney General Eric Holder put an end to the program in 2013 - more than 20 years after it first began - after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed the NSA's own domestic spying efforts.

In December 2011, the United States sold $30 billion worth of weapons to the monarchy of Saudi Arabia. Included in the sale were 84 F-15 fighter jets, which are now "at the core" of the Saudi war in Yemen.

This fact, and numerous others about the Kingdom have received scant attention from proponents of the Saudi attack on Yemen.

Here's a look at five things about Saudi Arabia that US officials and the establishment media are neglecting to talk about as Saudi bombs continue to drop on the people of Yemen with the support of the United States:

1. Sharia Law runs the country.
2. Saudi Arabia is an authoritarian dictatorship: There are no national elections, no parties, and no rights.
3. People are publicly beheaded in the Kingdom.
4. Human rights for Saudi women are among the worst in the world.
5. The monarchy is a cash machine for terrorists.

"Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi'ite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbor, and the Druzes who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan, and certainly in the Hauran and in northern Jordan. (...) This state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run, and that aim is already within our reach today."
Oded Yinon, "A strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties", Kivunum, translated by Israel Shahak, February 1982.

During the five-day trip he made to the United States, Israeli defense minister Moshe Ya'alon told Steve Inskeep, one of the hosts of Morning Edition on National Public Radio that "MidEast borders 'absolutely' will change" [1].

Ya'alon follows to the letter the balkanization process of the "Yinon Plan", named after a former Israeli Foreign Ministry official [2]: "the borders have already changed" since Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is no longer in a position to unify his country and that he "only controls 25% of Syria", which creates a problem that Israel "will have to pay." How sad!

Once in a while a book appears that forces us to rethink the previous cognitive patterns. To use the celebrated phrase from Thomas S. Kuhn's influential, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), it introduces the paradigm shift. Kuhn's explored scientific revolutions and the shifts produced by, say, Newtonian or quantum physics. The realm of social ideas is not immune to similar breakthroughs. In the twentieth century, Orwell's analysis of a doublespeak and the mutual corruption of politics and language has clearly changed the way we look at modern politics.

Recently, Harry C. Frankfurt's little pamphlet, with its beguilingly simple title, On Bullshit (Princeton University Press, 2005) has pushed Orwell's insights into a higher degree of conceptualization. While written in Orwellian vein and addressing the abuse and manipulation of language, Frankfurt's analysis offers a new way of looking at the old problem. The book open with the following, by now well-known observation: "One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows it. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves."

Without proper understanding of its functions and purposes, we are left, frankly, unarmed to confront and understand bullshit, despite our confidence to recognize it. For Frankfurt, BS is a greater enemy of truth then a lie because a liar does care about truth and thus tries to pass falsehood for truth, while BS artists do not really care about the truthfulness of their statements - they just make assertions to impress, while disguising their real agenda. There are obvious mechanisms to challenge lies: just produce facts. But how does one challenges bullshit and understands its secret agenda? There is no cognitive frame, no intellectual traps into which the bullshitter can be caught.

Every now and then, it's worth taking a stroll down memory lane. In 2008, TomDispatch regular Karen J. Greenberg, now the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law, took just such a stroll -- and found herself in a torture museum in Prague. The piece she wrote on "torture lite" in medieval Europe and medieval twenty-first century America is, in my opinion, a little TD classic. It's also a grim reminder that Americans didn't need a Senate torture report (along with the CIA's efforts to make sure it would never appear) to grasp just what a nightmarish path this country's leaders took us down in the wake of 9/11. In the same way, we don't need to wait for the Senate drone report of 2019 to know that those high-tech weapons systems Washington has deployed across the backlands of the planet are law-breakers, sovereignty-destroyers, terror-makers, and chaos creators. Nor should we need future Senate investigations to grasp that the U.S. military has, over these last 13 years, made a dreadful hash of significant parts of the planet.

And in a sense, it all began with the urge of top officials of the Bush administration to turn torture into an essential go-to option in the war on terror -- that is, not just to cross but obliterate a moral line so old and obvious that no "enhanced interrogation techniques" should have obscured the crimes being committed from American consciousness. In these years, as I've written, our government became a crime-free zone (except for those who wanted to release information to the American people about what's actually going on in their name behind the closed doors of the national security state). Increasingly, it's gained something of the look of a criminal enterprise. Imagine, as Greenberg does at the end of her piece, what a future museum in Washington dedicated to the post-9/11 era might feature -- and then take that little stroll down TomDispatch's version of memory lane with my introduction and Greenberg's piece from seven years ago. Tom]

According to the New Yorker's Paul Kramer, here's what A.F. Miller of the 32nd Volunteer Infantry Regiment wrote in a letter to the Omaha World-Herald in May 1900 from the Philippines about the treatment of a prisoner taken by his unit: "Now, this is the way we give them the water cure. Lay them on their backs, a man standing on each hand and each foot, then put a round stick in the mouth and pour a pail of water in the mouth and nose, and if they don't give up pour in another pail. They swell up like toads. I'll tell you it is a terrible torture."