Defense attorneys for the Chicago teen arrested for terrorism in a 2012 sting will be not have access to government surveillance documents, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, upholding a lower court's decision without comment.

Lawyers for Adel Daoud requested access to the surveillance application that prosecutors submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to show that the teenager was targeted by an FBI-orchestrated sting because of computer searches related to a term paper. Last January, US District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman ruled that for the first time such access ought to be granted. After the 7th Circuit Court overturned the ruling, Daoud's lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court.

"Without access to FISA materials, it is virtually impossible for defendants to challenge the lawfulness of the government's surveillance of them," Daoud's appeal said.

Daoud, a US citizen of Egyptian origin, was arrested in September 2012 during a FBI sting operation. According to the federal prosecutors, he was contacted by undercover FBI agents posing as terrorists in May that year, and discussed a plot to kill a large number of Americans.

The government claims Daoud picked out the target - a popular Chicago bar - while the undercover agents suggested and provided the means of carrying out the attack. The 18-year-old was arrested as he was allegedly pressing the button on a fake detonator, intending to blow up the bar.

American historian D.F. Fleming, writing of the post-World War II period in his eminent history of the Cold War, stated that "Greece was the first of the liberated states to be openly and forcibly compelled to accept the political system of the occupying Great Power. It was Churchill who acted first and Stalin who followed his example, in Bulgaria and then in Rumania, though with less bloodshed."

The British intervened in Greece while World War II was still raging. His Majesty's Army waged war against ELAS, the left-wing guerrillas who had played a major role in forcing the Nazi occupiers to flee. Shortly after the war ended, the United States joined the Brits in this great anti-communist crusade, intervening in what was now a civil war, taking the side of the neo-fascists against the Greek left. The neo-fascists won and instituted a highly brutal regime, for which the CIA created a suitably repressive internal security agency (KYP in Greek).

In 1964, the liberal George Papandreou came to power, but in April 1967 a military coup took place, just before elections which appeared certain to bring Papandreou back as prime minister. The coup had been a joint effort of the Royal Court, the Greek military, the KYP, the CIA, and the American military stationed in Greece, and was followed immediately by the traditional martial law, censorship, arrests, beatings, and killings, the victims totaling some 8,000 in the first month. This was accompanied by the equally traditional declaration that this was all being done to save the nation from a "communist takeover". Torture, inflicted in the most gruesome of ways, often with equipment supplied by the United States, became routine.

George Papandreou was not any kind of radical. He was a liberal anti-communist type. But his son Andreas, the heir-apparent, while only a little to the left of his father, had not disguised his wish to take Greece out of the Cold War, and had questioned remaining in NATO, or at least as a satellite of the United States.

Andreas Papandreou was arrested at the time of the coup and held in prison for eight months. Shortly after his release, he and his wife Margaret visited the American ambassador, Phillips Talbot, in Athens. Papandreou later related the following:

I asked Talbot whether America could have intervened the night of the coup, to prevent the death of democracy in Greece. He denied that they could have done anything about it. Then Margaret asked a critical question: What if the coup had been a Communist or a Leftist coup? Talbot answered without hesitation. Then, of course, they would have intervened, and they would have crushed the coup.¹

Another charming chapter in US-Greek relations occurred in 2001, when Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street Goliath Lowlife, secretly helped Greece keep billions of dollars of debt off their balance sheet through the use of complex financial instruments like credit default swaps. This allowed Greece to meet the baseline requirements to enter the Eurozone in the first place. But it also helped create a debt bubble that would later explode and bring about the current economic crisis that's drowning the entire continent. Goldman Sachs, however, using its insider knowledge of its Greek client, protected itself from this debt bubble by betting against Greek bonds, expecting that they would eventually fail. ²

In the years following the beginning of the Bush administration's "war on terror," a series of revelations have exposed the horrific torture practices used against prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, CIA "black sites" and other prisons abroad, as a matter of state policy.

These barbaric practices, which were documented in stomach-churning detail in the CIA torture report released last year, are rooted in the aims of US imperialism to plunder and dominate the world, and to suppress by force all opposition to its predatory aims. But the same ruling class that is waging imperialist war abroad is waging a class war at home, presiding over the enormous enrichment of the financial oligarchy at the expense of the working class.

There is no hard line between the foreign and domestic policy, a fact that was given concreteness this week in the revelation, published in the Guardian newspaper, that one of the top interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had pioneered the methods he used at the torture camp working as a detective in Chicago.

Sometimes one can't help but wonder if this whole Obamacare fiasco is ever going to end. It's like a recurring bad dream...an infinite nightmare that keeps returning, with new plot twists and horrible surprises every evening.

The latest blunder (to put it mildly) involves tax forms.

From the AP:

In a new setback for the health care law and the people it's supposed to help, the government said Friday it made a tax-reporting error that's fouling up the filings of nearly a million Americans.

After a successful sign-up season, the latest goof could signal new problems with the complex links between President Barack Obama's health care overhaul and the nation's income tax system.

Officials said the government sent the wrong tax information to about 800,000 HealthCare.gov customers, and they're asking those affected to delay filing their 2014 returns. The issue involves a new government form called a 1095-A, which is like a W-2 form for health care for people who got subsidized private coverage under Obama's law.

People can find out whether they're affected by logging in to their accounts at HealthCare.gov, where they should find a message indicating whether they were affected or not. They also can check by phoning the federal customer service center at 800-318-2596.

Separately, California announced earlier that it had sent out inaccurate tax forms affecting about 100,000 households. The state is not part of the federal market but runs its own insurance exchange.

Islamic State has kidnapped at least 90 Assyrian Christians in northeast Syria, Reuters reported, citing a monitoring group.

The abductions happened after dawn, as villages inhabited by the ancient Christian minority were raided by the terrorist group near the town of Tel Hmar, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Tel Hmar is situated in the countryside of the city of Hasaka, controlled primarily by Kurds.

The monitor had no details on the abducted people, except that they were kidnapped from two villages, Tal Shamiram and Tal Hermuz, following the attack by Islamic State fighters, AFP reported.

"A history of false flag attacks used to manipulate the minds of the people! "In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule."
― Friedrich Nietzsche

"Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death".
- Adolph Hitler

"Why of course the people don't want war ... But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
- Hermann Goering, Nazi leader.

"The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened".
- Josef Stalin

There are many documented false flag attacks, where a government carries out a terror attack ... and then falsely blames its enemy for political purposes.

In the following 53 instances, officials in the government which carried out the attack (or seriously proposed an attack) admits to it, either orally or in writing:

Israel was accelerating construction of the new settlements on the occupied Palestinian territories throughout 2014, setting a 10-year record for the number of construction tenders issued. The overall increase in construction starts reached 40 percent.

With the US-brokered talks with the Palestinian Authority breaking down last April, the Netanyahu government has been putting out an unprecedented number of construction tenders, maintains the group Peace Now in a report published on Monday.

The anti-settlement watchdog claims that in 2014 the Israeli government invited bids for building contracts in the settlements that were triple those in Netanyahu's previous terms in office in 2009-2013.

Kiev's Ministry of Information Policy recently put out the call for volunteers to troll the internet with pro-Kiev nonsense. Here's their slick new resource: i-army.org. As of Monday, over 13,000 people had signed up. From Fort Russ, we learn:

The counter number UA-3789523 can be found through search engines and, apart from other sites, also yields a personal web page belonging to Andrey Bogdanovich, a journalist and the deputy chair of the "Democratic Alliance" political party.

He is also the director of several business projects, including the Web101 web studio, whose clients include...the Russian Embassy to Ukraine!

Andrey is also an active member of the administrative commission at the Kiev City Administration and collects funds for the punitive operation on the Donbass.
...
In addition, the UA-37889523 also yields the site skoty.info, on which "peaceful demonstrators" were compiling lists of inconvenient individuals.

An angry John Key has lashed out at the Opposition after it criticised his decision to send New Zealand troops to Iraq, saying "Get some guts and join the right side."


The blistering attack came after he announced he was sending a non-combat training mission with Australia to Taji Camp, north of Baghdad in Iraq, to help train Iraqi troops fighting ISIS. Up to 143 New Zealand personnel will be sent, although the deployment will not be a badged mission. It will be reviewed after nine months and last no more than two years.

Making the announcement to Parliament this afternoon, Mr Key said of the Islamic State or ISIS fighters who have taken over parts of Iraq and Syria and conducted barbaric killings: "This brutal group and its distressing methods deserve the strongest condemnation." He said New Zealand did not shy away from its responsibilities when the rule of law was under threat.

If anything ISIS' brutality had worsened since his national security speech last November. Mr Key said the ability of ISIS to motivate Islamic radicals threatened the security not just of the Middle East, but regionally and locally.

"New Zealand is a country that stands up for its values. We stand up for what's right. We have an obligation to support stability and the rule of law internationally. We do not shy away from taking our share of the burden when the international rules-based system is threatened. We have carved out our own independent foreign policy over decades and we take pride in it."

Mr Key said force protection would be deployed in Iraq to support New Zealand's trainers.

On Thursday, the White House released its "2015 Economic Report of the President," presenting it as an argument for "middle-class economics."

The document seeks to justify Obama's scheme, spelled out in his most recent budget proposal, to slash corporate taxes by up to ten percentage points. The report attempts to obscure the fact that such a windfall for the corporate-financial elite will dramatically increase social inequality, claiming instead that it will "increase productivity, output and living standards."

The document falsifies both present economic reality and the development of the US economy in the post-World War II period in order to argue for further pro-corporate "reforms."

It declares that, in the aftermath of the 2008 Wall Street crash, "a successful multifaceted policy response, including actions by the President, Congress, and the Federal Reserve, combined with the determination of the American people, has enabled the US economy to dig out of that deep hole, putting more people back to work, reducing the unemployment rate, and creating a virtuous cycle in which higher consumer purchasing power supports greater economic activity and job creation."

In reality, the majority of new jobs have been low-wage, including a large percentage of part-time and temporary positions. Wages have stagnated or declined, and benefits have been slashed. Millions remain unemployed and millions more have dropped out of the labor market.

Combined with virtually unlimited cash handouts to the banks, the lowering of working class living standards has provided the basis for the so-called "recovery"—a recovery for the rich and the super-rich, not the working class.