About the Snowden disclosures, the Oregon Democrat told the NSA chief: 'the truth always manages to come out'

The Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday held a hearing, ostensibly to investigate various issues raised about the NSA's activities. What the hearing primarily achieved instead was to underscore what a farce the notion of Congressional oversight over the NSA is.

In particular, the current chair of the Senate Committee created in the mid-1970s to oversee the intelligence community just so happens to be one of the nation's most steadfast and blind loyalists of and apologists for the National Security State: Dianne Feinstein. For years she has abused her position to shield and defend the NSA and related agencies rather than provide any meaningful oversight over it, which is a primary reason why it has grown into such an out-of-control and totally unaccountable behemoth.

Underscoring the purpose of yesterday's hearing (and the purpose of Feinstein's Committee more broadly): the witnesses the Committee first heard from were all Obama officials - Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander, Deputy Attorney James Cole - who vehemently defended every aspect of the NSA. At the conclusion of their testimony, Feinstein announced that it was very, very important to hear from the two non-governmental witnesses the Committee had invited: virulent NSA defender Ben Wittes of the Brooking Institution and virulent NSA defender Timothy Edgar, a former Obama national security official. Hearing only from dedicated NSA apologists as witnesses: that's "oversight" for Dianne Feinstein and her oversight Committee.

Come gather round people wherever you roam. And admit that the bullshit around you has grown.

Students used to get out of tests and assignments by explaining to sympathetic professors that they had been busy protesting the war on Vietnam. The times they are a changin'.

Today college professors lead teach-ins to protest the absence of an all-out U.S. war on Syria. Back then, the public and the government trailed behind the activists. Now the public has grown enlightened, and in a significant but limited way won over the government, blocking the missile strikes, but it's not just the U.S. President who looks mad enough to spit over the casus belli interruptus. Professors are pissed.

The University of Virginia's law school has another law school next door belonging to the U.S. Army. The University has built a research "park" next door to the Army's "Ground Intelligence Center." State funds are drying up, and the Pentagon's tap has been left all the way open. This Central Virginian military industrial academic complex is where Washington finally had to turn to find anyone willing to pretend the famous aluminum tubes in Iraq might be for scary, scary nukes. In defense of that record, this week is Iraq War Beautification Week at the University of Virginia's Miller Center, always a gung-ho proponent of militarism.

Perhaps your real life is so rich you don't have time for another.

Even so, the US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how you will respond to televised propaganda.

The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual "nodes" to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.

Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a "synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information", according to a concept paper for the project.

"SWS provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP)," the paper reads, so that military leaders can "develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners".

• Report says images of flag-draped coffins reduces support for military action
• It adds special forces and mercenary deaths don't hit public as hard
• MOD says document is to foster 'debate' and is not policy

Repatriation ceremonies for the remains of dead soldiers should have a lower profile in order to make war more palatable to the British public, according to a report for the Ministry of Defence.

It examines how to sway 'casualty averse' public opinion, a situation commonly known as 'body bag syndrome', and was published by the MoD's strategy formulation unit.

The document suggests that the MoD should 'reduce the profile of the repatriation ceremonies' where coffins carrying deceased soldiers are brought back to UK bases such as RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire.

It discusses ways to 'reduce public sensitivity' and methods of explaining that 'risks are knowingly and willingly undertaken' by armed forces personnel.

Suggestions included making greater use of the SAS and other special forces, as well as mercenaries, because it claims losses sustained by the elite soldiers and hired guns do not have the same impact on the public and press.

In his dramatic speech in New York, Bolivian President Evo Morales called for the UN to be moved out of the US and for Barack Obama to be tried for crimes against humanity. Speaking to RT, Morales explained his controversial proposals.

In his most controversial demand, Morales said that Obama should face an international trial with human rights watchdogs among the judges. The Bolivian president accused his US counterpart of instigating conflicts in the Middle East to make the region more volatile and to increase the US's grip on the natural resources it abounds in. He gave Libya as an example of a country where "they arranged for the president to be killed, and they usurped Libya's oil."

"Now they are funding the rebels that fight against presidents who don't support capitalism or imperialism," Morales told Eva Golinger of RT's Spanish sister channel, Actualidad.

"And where a coup d'état is impossible, they seek to divide the people in order to weaken the nation - a provocation designed to trigger an intervention by peacekeeping forces, NATO, the UN Security Council. But the intervention itself is meant to get hold of oil resources and gain geopolitical control, rather than enforce respect for human rights."

The US also operates in the same imperialist way outside the Middle East, Morales argued. At the General Assembly Obama said that the US "is prepared to use all elements of our power, including military force, to secure these core interests" in the Middle East. Among the core interests, he mentioned "the free flow of energy from the region to the world." Morales said that Obama's statement should make any country possessing natural resources worried.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and his American counterpart Barack Obama have held a telephone conversation as the Iranian president was wrapping up his visit to New York for the 68th annual session of the UN General Assembly.

Rouhani received the call from Obama on Friday as he was in a car heading to the John F. Kennedy International Airport to fly back to Tehran, IRNA reported.

The two heads of state stressed Tehran and Washington's political will to swiftly resolve the West's dispute over Iran's nuclear energy program, and exchanged viewpoints on various topics, including cooperation on different regional issues.

During the telephone conversation, Rouhani and Obama also assigned Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and US Secretary of State John Kerry to quickly set the stage for cooperation between the two counties.

The phone conversation is the first direct communication between the Iranian and US presidents since Iran's Islamic Revolution of 1979.

On September 26, 2013, Turkey made the rather eyebrow-raising decision to put its long range missile defense eggs in a Chinese basket, announcing it had awarded a US$3 billion contract to the People's Republic of China for its truck-mounted "shoot and scoot" FD-2000 system.

The Chinese FD-2000 is based on the Hong Qi missile, which has been around since the 1990s. The FD-2000 is an export version of the HQ-9 that appeared in 2009 and is marketed as a next-generation improvement on the Russian S-300 system, but whose fire control radar looks more like the radar matching US-based Raytheon's Patriot missile system (with the implication that the PRC filched the technology, maybe with some help from Israel). [1]

Defense correspondent Wendell Minick relayed the description of the FD-2000 that China provided at a 2010 Asian arms show:

It can target cruise missiles (7-24 km), air-to-ground missiles (7-50 km), aircraft (7-125 km), precision-guided bombs and tactical ballistic missiles (7-25 km). "FD-2000 is mainly provided for air force and air defense force for asset air defense to protect core political, military and economic targets," according to the brochure of China Precision Machinery Import and Export Corporation (CPMIEC), the manufacturer of the system. It can also coordinate with other air defense systems to "form a multi-layer air defense system for regional air defense." [2]

Turkey is procuring 12 of these systems (it had originally requested 20 Patriot systems when Syria heated up and got six for a year, since renewed).

If any extra evidence was needed to shatter the myth of a "revolution" struggling for a future "democratic" Syria, the big news of the week cleared any remaining doubts.

Eleven, 13 or 14 "rebel" brigades (depending on the source) have ditched the "moderate", US-propped Syrian National Council (SNC) and the not-exactly Free Syrian Army (FSA). The leaders of the bunch are the demented jihadis of Jabhat al-Nusra - but it includes other nasties such as the Tawhid brigades and the Tajammu Fastaqim Kama Ummirat in Aleppo, some of them until recently part of the collapsing FSA.

The jihadis practically ordered the myriad "moderates" to submit, "unify in a clear Islamic frame", and pledge allegiance to a future Syria with Sharia law as "the sole source of legislation".

One Ayman al-Zawahiri must be having a ball in his comfortable, drone-proof hideout somewhere in the Waziristans. Not only because his call for a multinational jihad - a la Afghanistan in the 1980s - is working; but also because the US-run SNC has been exposed for the toothless rodent that it really is.

And facts on the ground keep corroborating it. The al-Qaeda-propped Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant took over a town near the Bab al-Salam border crossing with Turkey that was held by the FSA because the FSA was accused of fighting for "democracy" and close ties with the West. Wrong; the FSA wants those ties but under a Muslim Brotherhood-controlled regime. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant - of which Jabhat al-Nusra is the main Syrian component - wants a Talibanized Syriastan.

Pulitzer Prize winner explains how to fix journalism, saying press should 'fire 90% of editors and promote ones you can't control'

Seymour Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism - close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of editors in publishing and get back to the fundamental job of journalists which, he says, is to be an outsider.

It doesn't take much to fire up Hersh, the investigative journalist who has been the nemesis of US presidents since the 1960s and who was once described by the Republican party as "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist".

He is angry about the timidity of journalists in America, their failure to challenge the White House and be an unpopular messenger of truth.

Don't even get him started on the New York Times which, he says, spends "so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would" - or the death of Osama bin Laden. "Nothing's been done about that story, it's one big lie, not one word of it is true," he says of the dramatic US Navy Seals raid in 2011.

Tehran (FNA)- American news channel CNN fabricated the remarks made by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in response to the network's question about the Holocaust.

The CNN aired its interview with Rouhani on Tuesday but the news channel added to or changed parts of his remarks when Christiane Amanpour asked him about the Holocaust.

Here is the exact transcript of the Farsi text according to the CNN broadcast:

من قبلا گفتم که من تاریخ دان نیستم و ابعاد حوادث تاریخی را تاریخ دانان باید تبین کنند، بیان کنند و توضیخ بدهند. اما به طور کلی هرگونه جنایتی که در تاریخ علیه بشریت اتفاق افتاده باشد و از جمله جنایتی که نازی ها انجام دادند چه در مورد یهودیان و چه در مورد غیر یهودیان از نظر ما کاملا محکوم است همانطور که امروز هم اگر جنایتی انجام شود علیه هر ملتی یا هر دینی یا هر قومیتی یا هر اعتقادی، ما آن جنایت و نسل کشی را محکوم می کنیم بنابراین کار نازی ها محکوم است, ابعادی که شما می گویید به عهده مورخین و محققین است که آن ابعاد را روشن کنند. من محقق تاریخی نیستم

Here is the exact English translation of President Rouhani's remarks:

Rouhani's: "I have said before that I am not a historian and historians should specify, state and explain the aspects of historical events, but generally we fully condemn any kind of crime committed against humanity throughout the history, including the crime committed by the Nazis both against the Jews and non-Jews, the same way that if today any crime is committed against any nation or any religion or any people or any belief, we condemn that crime and genocide. Therefore, what the Nazis did is condemned, (but) the aspects that you talk about, clarification of these aspects is a duty of the historians and researchers, I am not a history scholar."

And here is what the CNN translation says: