As the White House faces questions about secret internet and telephone surveillance programs, investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill says, "There's a chill that's been sent through the national security reporting community."

Scahill, who investigated the United States' covert operations in the war against terrorism in a new documentary, "Dirty Wars," told Top Line in an interview recorded prior to the most recent NSA leaks that sources inside the government have grown fearful of talking to the media.

"Many sources that I used to be able to talk to through encrypted e-mail or with chats using OTR, off the record software, they won't do it anymore," Scahill said. "It's either in person or nothing. ... There's a real fear on the part of whistleblowers and sources that the Espionage Act is going to come knocking on their door one day under the Noble Peace Prize-winning, Constitutional law professor, Democratic president."

In his documentary, Scahill makes the case that the Obama administration has overstepped its stated goals of "targeted killings" of terrorists in places like Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia.

Asked if he thinks the U.S. is creating more terrorists than it is killing, Scahill responded: "I think we're creating more enemies than we are killing terrorists. When I was in Yemen, people were saying, 'You consider al Qaeda terrorism. We consider the drones terrorism.'"

Psychopaths are drawn to and uniquely capable within politics. They are charismatic, show no remorse, crave power and rise to the top. Leading psychologists have built the literature on the corporate form, but statist psychopathy bears investigation.

Pathocracy - "A system of government where a small pathological minority takes over a society of normal people." - Andrew M. Lobaczewski in Political Ponerology

Kyriarchy - A social hierarchy based on domination rather than spontaneous, voluntary order. All states are necessarily kyriarchical because the government is a monopoly on violence. Psychopaths rise to the top of coercive hierarchies like helium balloons rise to the ceilings of rooms.

Psychopathy

"Psychopaths are social predators and like all predators they are looking for feeding grounds. Wherever you get power, prestige and money you will find them."

~ Robert Hare, Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, leading psychopathy researcher

It requires a certain mindset to want to rule others. This person believes they are qualified to and morally justified in making life-changing decisions for millions at the point of a gun (state law).

Desire to rule is one thing, but the qualities that enable one to rise in the political hierarchy are perhaps rarer and more pernicious. Psychopaths are manipulative, charming, narcissistic and excellent liars. Most importantly, they score low on the empathy scale - showing little or no remorse for inflicting suffering (and readily violate the non-aggression principle). As children, many psychopaths torture animals and bully peers. They learn to mimic the normal outward display of emotionality, but it is purely an act.

The first in an occasional series exploring the amalgamation of political and financial interests between Government legislators and the world's biggest industries.

To know what Fascism really is and why we must fight it and destroy it here in America, we must first of all know what it is we are fighting, what the Fascist regimes really are and do, who puts up the money and backs Fascism in every country (including the United States at this very moment), and who owns the nations under such regimes, and why the natives of all Fascist countries must be driven into harder work, less money, reduced standard of living, poverty and desperation so that the men and corporations who found, subsidize and own Fascism can grow unbelievably rich.

~ George Seldes, 1943

Now more than at any other time in history are we unwitting fodder in the merciless growth of corporate conglomerates. Tacitly accepted and often even championed as a necessary ingredient for the 'progress of civilisation', the globalisation of today's corporate captalism is something its Founding Fathers in 1930s Italy and Germany could only dream about. While it's debatable that large profit-making enterprises are necessary in providing affordable and essential products and services to a growing population, the unabated merging of political and financial interests between Government legislators and the world's biggest industries is arguably one of the biggest problems facing humanity today. It has led to corruption, greed, nepotism and 'moral hazard' on an absolutely gargantuan scale. It has brought obscene levels of prosperity to the minority of wealthy insiders while the majority of planet earth's inhabitants have fallen victim to economic disparity, extreme poverty, cultural disintegration, environmental catastrophe, pollution, sickness and a plethora of accompanying negative social issues.

Maybe Francis Fukusyama was right about 'free market' capitalism heralding the end of history (as we know it), except that there's nothing free about it because the markets are rigged.

Nawaz Sharif took office as Pakistan's prime minister for an unparalleled third time on Wednesday, vowing to tackle the country's crippling electricity crisis and issuing an urgent call for the end of American drone strikes on Pakistani soil.

"The chapter of daily drone attacks should stop," a grave-faced Mr. Sharif told the packed lower house of Parliament, where he won a comfortable majority of votes to become prime minister. "We respect the sovereignty of other countries, but others should also respect our sovereignty."

Those comments resonated with many Pakistanis who view the C.I.A. missile strikes as a troubling symbol of American aggression - even if they occasionally kill Pakistan's own enemies, like the country's deputy Taliban leader, Wali ur-Rehman, who died in an attack last week.

The judgment of Daniel "Pentagon Papers" Ellsberg is definitive; "There has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material". And that includes the release of the Pentagon Papers themselves. Here is the 12-minute video by The Guardian where Snowden details his motives.

By now, everything swirling around the US National Security Agency (NSA) points to a black box in a black hole. The black box is the NSA headquarters itself in Fort Meade, Maryland. The black hole is an area that would include the suburbs of Virginia's Fairfax County near the CIA but mostly the intersection of the Baltimore Parkway and Maryland Route 32.

There one finds a business park a mile away from the NSA which Michael Hayden, a former NSA director (1999-2005) told Salon's Tim Shorrock is "the largest concentration of cyber power on the planet". [1] Hayden coined it "Digital Blackwater".

Here is a decent round up of key questions still not answered about the black hole. But when it comes to how a 29-year old IT wizard with little formal education has been able to access a batch of ultra-sensitive secrets of the US intelligence-national security complex, that's a no-brainer; it's all about the gung-ho privatization of spying - referred to by a mountain of euphemisms of the "contractor reliance" kind. In fact the bulk of the hardware and software used by the dizzying network of 16 US intelligence agencies is privatized.

A wave of attacks has killed seventy people and injured dozens across Iraq after several days of relative calm.

No group has claimed responsibility for Monday's attacks, but officials say the main suspects are militants linked to al-Qaeda.

A triple bombing at a vegetable market in the town of Judaida al-Shat in Diyala province left at least 13 people dead and injured 50 people.

"I was selling watermelon and suddenly I heard a powerful blast at the entrance of the market," local farmer Hassan Hadi said.

"I fled from dust and smoke when a second blast turned the place into hell," he added.

On Monday evening, at least 29 people died and 80 were injured in a series of car bomb attacks targeting army and police checkpoints in Mosul.

Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive - whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency's phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism - especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.

The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

An FBI agent almost shot a Detroit cop on Wednesday at a gas station while filling up. It wasn't the agent or the cop's fault. It was the cop's bosses, who came up with the lame brain idea to simulate a purse snatching and then invite a TV crew to film your reaction Detroit. The immediate supervisor of these cops had no idea this was happening until they called him.

"The event takes place. The officer takes the purse, runs around the gas station. As he's running, an off-duty FBI agent is pumping gas. He witnesses the whole thing. He gives chase. He pulls his weapon, and as he turns the corner around the gas station, he's stopped by another officer, who identifies herself as a police officer and don't shoot, don't shoot, this is a scenario," said Inspector Shawn Gargalino with the Detroit Police Department.

That is the same description of events we got from four other ranking law enforcement officials, including Lieutenant Chuck Flannagan, a 28-year veteran of DPD.

"It's a tragedy waiting to happen. In fact, I understand an FBI agent did pull a weapon because he didn't believe it was a staged, and some officers had to run forward to prevent him from possibly shooting an officer. We have enough robberies at gas stations that most people aren't going to assume it's a mock robbery," he said.

Private companies are getting rich probing your personal information for the government. Call it Digital Blackwater

Amid the torrent of stories about the shocking new revelations about the National Security Agency, few have bothered to ask a central question. Who's actually doing the work of analyzing all the data, metadata and personal information pouring into the agency from Verizon and nine key Internet service providers for its ever-expanding surveillance of American citizens?

Well, on Sunday we got part of the answer: Booz Allen Hamilton. In a stunning development in the NSA saga, Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald revealed that the source for his blockbuster stories on the NSA is Edward Snowden, "a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton." Snowden, it turns out, has been working at NSA for the last four years as a contract employee, including stints for Booz and the computer-services firm Dell.

The revelation is not that surprising. With about 70 percent of our national intelligence budgets being spent on the private sector - a discovery I made in 2007 and first reported in Salon - contractors have become essential to the spying and surveillance operations of the NSA.

From Narus, the Israeli-born Boeing subsidiary that makes NSA's high-speed interception software, to CSC, the "systems integrator" that runs NSA's internal IT system, defense and intelligence, contractors are making millions of dollars selling technology and services that help the world's largest surveillance system spy on you. If the 70 percent figure is applied to the NSA's estimated budget of $8 billion a year (the largest in the intelligence community), NSA contracting could reach as high as $6 billion every year.

But it's probably much more than that.

Insisting that attempts at "100 percent security" will always come with inconveniences, President Barack Obama said "we're going to have to make some choices as a society." NBC's Pete Williams reports.

The National Security Agency has at times mistakenly intercepted the private email messages and phone calls of Americans who had no link to terrorism, requiring Justice Department officials to report the errors to a secret national security court and destroy the data, according to two former U.S. intelligence officials.

At least some of the phone calls and emails were pulled from among the hundreds of millions stored by telecommunications companies as part of an NSA surveillance program. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, Thursday night publicly acknowledged what he called "a sensitive intelligence collection program" after its existence was disclosed by the Guardian newspaper.

Ret. Adm. Dennis Blair, who served as President Obama's DNI in 2009 and 2010, told NBC News that, in one instance in 2009, analysts entered a phone number into agency computers and "put one digit wrong," and mined a large volume of information about Americans with no connection to terror. The matter was reported to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose judges required that all the data be destroyed, he said.

Another former senior official, who asked not to be identified, confirmed Blair's recollection and said the incident created serious problems for the Justice Department, which represents the NSA before the federal judges on the secret court.