US foreign policy
The Dust Has Settled: The Aftermath Of Iran’s Retaliatory Strikes On Israel
In the wake of escalating tensions between Israel and Iran, MintCast brings you an exclusive interview with Seyed Mohammad Marandi, Professor of English Literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran. Join MintPress as we delve into the unfolding events and gain insights into Iran’s perspective.
As the world’s attention remains fixated on the ongoing conflict in Gaza and the subsequent global student protests, focus has shifted to the broader implications of Israel’s actions, particularly concerning Iran. Recently, Israel’s bombing of the Iranian Embassy in Syria, followed by retaliatory drone attacks from Iran, sparked fears of further escalation. However, despite hawkish rhetoric from certain quarters, both sides seemed inclined to avoid further confrontation.
Against this backdrop, we sit down with Dr. Marandi to explore the mood in Iran amidst these turbulent times. Furthermore, we delve into the motivations behind Iran’s missile strikes on Israel, shedding light on the strategic rationale behind these actions.
Moreover, Dr. Marandi addresses Iran’s support for various groups across the region, including Ansar Allah in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon. We examine the extent of Iran’s involvement and the underlying rationale guiding its foreign policy decisions.
We revisit Dr. Marandi’s recent debate with TV host Piers Morgan, highlighting the nuances of language and the implications of demonizing terminology such as “regime,” offering valuable insights into the power dynamics shaping media discourse on Iran and its adversaries.
Piers Morgan is being taught a lesson by Dr Marandi @PiersUncensored #Iran @s_m_marandipic.twitter.com/NKhLR2Vj38
— Soureh 2 (@Soureh_design2) April 18, 2024
In this episode, we also explore the complexities of Iran’s nuclear program and the implications of its enrichment activities in the aftermath of the United States’ withdrawal from the JCPOA. Dr. Marandi also analyzes Iran’s economic strategies, including its burgeoning partnerships with Russia, China, and other BRICS nations, and the potential impact on its resilience against American sanctions.
Join MintPress as we unpack these pressing issues and gain a deeper understanding of Iran’s perspective on the evolving geopolitical landscape in the Middle East.
MintPress News is a fiercely independent media company. You can support us by becoming a member of Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and subscribing to our social media channels, including YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, check out rapper Lowkey’s video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Mnar Adley is an award-winning journalist and editor and is the founder and director of MintPress News. She is also president and director of the non-profit media organization Behind the Headlines. Adley also co-hosts the MintCast podcast and is a producer and host of the video series Behind The Headlines. Contact Mnar at mnar@mintpressnews.com or follow her on Twitter at @mnarmuh.
The post The Dust Has Settled: The Aftermath Of Iran’s Retaliatory Strikes On Israel appeared first on MintPress News.
America’s informal empire – what really went wrong in the Middle East
In this edited excerpt from the introduction to What Really Went Wrong, Fawaz A Gerges argues that US interventionism during the Cold War – especially in Iran and Egypt – steered the Middle East away from democracy towards authoritarianism, shaping the region’s political and economic landscape for decades to come.
At the end of the colonial era after World War Two, the Middle East was on the cusp of a new awakening. Imperial Britain, France, and Italy were discredited and exhausted. Hope filled the air in newly independent countries around the world. Like people across the decolonised Global South, Middle Easterners had great expectations and the material and spiritual energy needed to seize their destiny and modernise their societies. Few could have imagined events unfolding as disastrously as they did. Yet by the late 1950s, the Middle East had descended into geostrategic rivalries, authoritarianism and civil strife.
What clouded this promising horizon? Digging deep into the historical record, What Really Went Wrong critically examines flashpoints like the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s ousting of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in August 1953 and the US confrontation with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the mid-1950s. My argument is that such flashpoints sowed the seeds of subsequent discontent, hubris and conflict. I zero in on these historical ruptures to reconstruct a radically different story of what went wrong in the region, thus correcting the dominant narrative. My goal is to engender a debate about the past that can make us see the present differently.
What Really Went Wrong critically examines flashpoints like the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s ousting of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in August 1953 and the US confrontation with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the mid-1950s.
I argue that the defeat and marginalisation of secular-leaning nationalist visions in Iran and Egypt in the 1950s and ’60s allowed for Sunni and Shia pan-Islamism to gain momentum throughout the Middle East and beyond. Because of bad decisions made in the White House, power passed from popular leaders and sincere patriots to unpopular and subservient rulers, and the sympathy of the people was hijacked by Islamist leaders and movements. The consequences of events in both Iran and Egypt still haunt the Middle East today.
The dawn of US interventionism
The book’s core concern is with the legacy and impact of US foreign policy during the early years of the Cold War on political and economic development in the Middle East. It focuses on two major pieces of the puzzle: momentous events in Iran and Egypt in which America played a decisive role. Examining these, it shows how Anglo-American interventions in the internal affairs of the Middle East from the early 1950s (till the present) stunted political development and social change there and led the region down the wrong path to authoritarianism and militarism. The Middle East was reimagined as a Cold War chessboard, which left a legacy marked by dependencies, weak political institutions, low levels of civil and human rights protection, lopsided economic growth and political systems prone to authoritarianism. This is the antithesis of often-stated Western values rooted in democracy, human rights and the rule of law.
An informal empire emerges
Developing countries emerged into independence from a history that left its mark on their future. It was difficult enough for countries emerging from colonialism to build sound institutions, gain public trust and extend state authority, and America’s imperial ambitions and actions during and after the Cold War made this all the more difficult, if not impossible. With the foundations of imperialism far from completely dismantled, old structures persisted under new names. In some cases, it was more than just structures that perpetuated dependence. It was the very leaders and their descendants who were co-opted into a neocolonial reality. Anyone challenging that order was swiftly marked as an enemy of democracy and free markets.
With the foundations of imperialism far from completely dismantled, old structures persisted under new names.
Within living memory, the peoples of the Middle East viewed the US with awe and optimism. Unlike its European allies, America had never ruled over Muslim lands and appeared to have no imperial ambitions. Instead, Americans had built hospitals and major universities in the region. Washington could have built relations on the basis of mutual interests and respect, not dependency and domination. When the US signed an agreement with Saudi Arabia to begin oil exploration in 1933, the people of the region saw it as an opportunity to decrease their dependence on the “imperial colossus,” Great Britain. But from the Middle East to Africa and Asia, newly decolonised countries discovered that formal independence did not translate into full sovereignty. A creeping form of colonialism kept tying these countries to their old European masters and the new American power.
As the historian Rashid Khalidi noted, the US was following in the footprints of European colonialism. In his book Imperialism and the Developing World, Atul Kohli compares British imperialism during 19th century with America’s informal empire in the 20th. It might not have been formally called colonialism, but the effects were the same: Washington – often backed by London – pursued its interests at the cost of the right to self-determination and sovereignty of other peoples and countries.
Cold War divisions, US opportunism
Setting up defence pacts in the Middle East in the early 1950s to encircle Russia’s southern flank, Eisenhower’s Cold Warriors pressured friends and foes to join in America’s network of alliances against Soviet communism. Newly decolonised states like Iraq, Egypt, Iran (which was not formally colonised), and Pakistan had to choose between jumping on Uncle Sam’s informal empire bandwagon or being trampled under its wheels.
The Truman and Eisenhower administrations laid the foundation of an imperial foreign policy which was hardened by the Nixon and Reagan presidencies. The US provided arms, aid and security protection to the shah and to Israeli and Saudi leaders during the Cold War. This led to economic growth, but as Kohli notes, it was not evenly distributed throughout the region. After the end of the Cold War in 1989, US imperial foreign policy persisted with George W. Bush, who waged a global war on terror that saw the US invade and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq.
The US foreign policy establishment saw the world through imperial lenses that divided everything into binary terms – black and white, good and evil. In their eyes, the existential struggle against Soviet communism justified violence, collective punishment and all other means to achieve their ideological ends. In June 1961, then-CIA director Allen Dulles, declared that the destruction of the “system of colonialism” was the first step to defeat the “Free World.”
While establishing this foreign policy strategy, the US […] was also building the postwar international financial and trading and security institutions that allowed its competitive corporations to outperform others.
While establishing this foreign policy strategy, the US – as the dominant capitalistic superpower – was also building the postwar international financial and trading and security institutions that allowed its competitive corporations to outperform others. This global system of open, imperial economies disproportionately steered the fruits of the world’s economic growth to the citizens of the West, particularly Americans. Kohli argues that the US sought to tame sovereign and effective state power in the newly decolonised world. Regime change, covert and overt military interventions, sanctions to create open economies and acquiescent governments were all among the weapons of the informal Cold War imperialism, all wielded with the soundtrack of piercing alarm about the spectre of a Soviet communist threat.
The “Free World” fallacy
The project was not without opposition, however. Nationalist forces resisted the new imperialism, and US leaders escalated their military efforts to defeat indigenous opposition. With its thinly veiled imperialism, insubstantial justification for using military force and vague claims about impending threats to the “homeland”, the US began to lose credibility. Washington’s shortsighted views ultimately backfired, undermining security globally and forestalling good governance in the Middle East and beyond.
This imperial vision had ramifications for the West’s self-appointed role as the leader of the free world and defender of human rights, going well beyond reputation.
This imperial vision had ramifications for the West’s self-appointed role as the leader of the free world and defender of human rights, going well beyond reputation. Mistrust in the international liberal order has weakened international institutions and eroded deference to norms such as respect for human rights. What unfolds in Guantánamo Bay or Gaza, Palestine does more than hurt the individuals unjustly subject to illegal torture or civilians slaughtered by the thousands; it raises the global public’s tolerance for such abhorrent acts by having them unfold in the heart of the democratic West.
Understanding what happened in the Middle East
The book does not argue that democracy was bound to flourish in the Middle East if the US had not subverted the nascent democratic and anticolonial movements. Rather, America’s military intervention, its backing of authoritarian, reactionary regimes and neglect of local concerns, and its imperial ambitions created conditions that undermined the lengthy, turbulent processes that constitutionalism, inclusive economic progress, and democratisation require. The political scientist Lisa Anderson notes that “it is usually decades, if not centuries, of slow, subtle, and often violent change” that create the conditions for meaningful state sovereignty.
Though the experiences of the Middle East are not wholly unique, some characteristics are specific to the region, such as its contiguity to Europe and its vast quantities of petroleum, strategic waterways and markets which have proved irresistible to Western powers. Western powers have thus persistently intervened in the internal affairs of Middle Eastern countries as they have not in other parts of the world. This “oil curse” has triggered a similar geostrategic curse in the Middle East, pitting external and local powers against each other in a struggle for competitive advantage and influence. As the book explores, this convergence of curses has had far-reaching and lasting political and economic consequences for Middle Eastern states.
The book eschews historical determinism and offers a robust reconstruction of the international relations of the Middle East as well as social and political developments in the region. It also encourages us to reimagine the present in light of revisiting the past. In so doing, we can begin to see lost opportunities and new possibilities for healing and reconciliation.
Note: This excerpt from the introduction to What Really Went Wrong: The West and the Failure of Democracy in the Middle East by Fawaz A Gerges is copyrighted to Yale University Press and the author, and is reproduced here with their permission.
This book extract gives the views of the author, not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Read an interview with Fawaz A Gerges, “What really went wrong in the Middle East” from March 2024 for LSE Research for the World.
Watch Fawaz A Gerges interviewed by Christiane Amanpour about the US’s role in the Israel-Gaza war from December 2023 and by Fareed Zakaria about the prospect of a regional war in the Middle East from January 2024, both on CNN.
Main image: Secretary Dean Acheson (right) confers with Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran (left) at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C., 1951. Credit: The Harry S. Truman library.
Presidential Candidate Jill Stein On Gaza, The Two-Party System and US Militarism
Gaza is the “key issue of our era,” Green Party presidential hopeful Jill Stein told the MintCast today. “Every international law in the books is being broken,” she said, “This is not something that began on October 7. This is the continuation of ethnic cleansing and displacement that began in 1947 and 1948 with the displacement of 750,000 people.”
While Stein condemned Israel for its actions, she placed ultimate responsibility for much of the violence on Washington, telling MintCast host Mnar Adley that:
Quite simply, Joe Biden needs to pick up the phone and tell Israel to cease and desist from this war being conducted on Gaza, the blockade, the use of starvation as a weapon, the total violation of international law and the conduct of a genocide, which is going on. There is enormous agency that the United States has here: we are paying for this. We are supplying 80% of the weapons [to Israel]!”
Stein, a physician by trade, has been involved in the Green movement for decades. She first ran for office in 2002, attempting to become the governor of her native Massachusetts. In 2012 and 2016, she was selected as the Green Party’s presidential candidate. Running against Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, she received over 1% of the national vote. She is the overwhelming favorite to represent the Green Party in the 2024 presidential election.
Congress, Stein noted, has just approved $3.8 billion in aid to Israel, with another $17 billion pending for “not only continu[ing] its genocide but to expand its wars in the Middle East.”
Global public opinion is increasingly turning against the U.S., Stein warned, turning both Washington and Israel into “pariahs.” Even inside the United States, recent polling shows that a majority of Democratic voters consider Israeli actions to constitute genocide. And President Biden continues to offer unconditional support.
It seems this is pushing millions of voters to consider the Green Party as an alternative. Stein described the Democratic establishment as in a state of “panic” over the “widespread revolt” among its voter base, which could destroy the party’s chances of winning elections. She said they are fielding “an army of corporate lawyers to try to dirty trick us, to find little technicalities to throw us off the ballot.”
This is not a new phenomenon, as the Green Party has long dealt with the Democrats’ attempts to suppress them. However, what has changed, Stein said, is the party’s willingness to announce their intentions to limit democracy openly. As she told Adley:
There is such a heavy hand of censorship and political repression in this country that it is a struggle to simply participate in our democracy. Voters a clamoring for more voices and more choices. People revile the two zombie candidates that are being rammed down our throats and are very hungry for other options on the ballot.”
Watch or Listen to the full interview, in which the pair discuss Gaza, the military-industrial complex, and what a Jill Stein presidency would mean for the United States.
MintPress News is a fiercely independent media company. You can support us by becoming a member of Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and subscribing to our social media channels, including YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, check out rapper Lowkey’s video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Mnar Adley is an award-winning journalist and editor and is the founder and director of MintPress News. She is also president and director of the non-profit media organization Behind the Headlines. Adley also co-hosts the MintCast podcast and is a producer and host of the video series Behind The Headlines. Contact Mnar at mnar@mintpressnews.com or follow her on Twitter at @mnarmuh.
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Cognitive Dissonance: Perplexed US Foreign Policy is Prolonging Gaza Genocide
When the foreign policy of a country as large and significant as the United States is governed by a case of cognitive dissonance, terrible things happen.
These terrible things are, in fact, already taking place in the Gaza Strip, where well over 100,000 people have been killed, wounded or are missing, and an outright famine is currently ravaging the displaced population.
From the start of the war on October 7, the U.S. mishandled the situation, although recent reports indicate that Biden, despite his old age, has read the overall meaning of the October 7 events correctly.
According to the Axios news website, Biden had argued in a meeting with special counsel Robert Hur on October 8 that the ‘Israel thing’ – the Hamas attack and the Israeli war on Gaza – “has changed it all.”
By ‘change it all,’ he meant that the outcome of these events combined would “determine what the next six, seven decades look like.”
Biden is not wrong. Indeed, everything that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government and war council have done in Gaza points to a similar Israeli reading of the significance of the ‘world-altering’ events.
Netanyahu has proven his willingness to carry out genocide and starve millions of Palestinians because he still feels that the superior firepower of the Israeli army is able to turn back the clock and restore Israel’s military standing, geopolitical influence and global position.
He is wrong, and over five months of war and senseless killing continue to demonstrate this claim.
However, the American political gamble in the Middle East and the global repercussions of Washington’s self-defeating foreign policy make far less sense.
Considering Washington’s historic support for Israel, the U.S. behavior in the early days of the war was hardly a surprise.
The U.S. quickly mobilized behind Netanyahu’s war cabinet and sent aircraft carriers to the eastern Mediterranean, indicating the U.S. was ready for a major regional conflict.
Media reports began speaking of U.S. military involvement, specifically through the Delta Force, although the Pentagon claimed that the 2,000 U.S. soldiers were not deployed to fight in Gaza itself.
If it was not obvious that the U.S. was a direct partner in the war, U.S. mainstream media reports ended any doubt. On March 6, The Washington Post reported that “the United States has quietly approved and delivered more than 100 separate foreign military sales to Israel since the Gaza war began”.
With time, however, U.S. foreign policy regarding Gaza became even more perplexing.
Though in the early weeks of the war-turned-genocide, Biden questioned the death toll estimates produced by the Gaza Ministry of Health, the casualties count was no longer in doubt later on.
Asked on February 29 about the number of women and children killed by Israel during the war, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin answered without hesitation: “It’s over 25,000”.
Yet, the numbers are in constant growth, as well as U.S. shipments of weapons to Israel. “We continue to support Israel with their self-defense needs. That’s not going to change,” John Kirby, U.S. National Security Advisor, told ABC News on March 14.
This particular statement is worth a pause since it came after many media leaks regarding Biden’s frustration, in fact, outright anger in the way that Netanyahu is handling the war.
ABC News reported in early February that Biden has been “venting his frustration” over his administration’s “inability to persuade Israel to change its military tactics in Gaza.” Netanyahu, the outlet quoted Biden as saying, is “giving him hell”.
This is consistent with other recent reports, including one by Politico, claiming that Biden has privately “called the Israeli prime minister a ‘bad f*cking guy,’” also over his Gaza war stance.
Yet Netanyahu remains emboldened, to the extent that he appeared in a Fox News interview on March 11, openly speaking about ‘disagreements’ not only between Biden and Netanyahu’s governments but also between the U.S. President “and the entire Israeli people.”
It is glaringly obvious that, without continued U.S. military and other forms of support, Israel would not have been able to sustain its war on the Palestinians for more than a few weeks, thus sparing the lives of thousands of people.
Moreover, the U.S. has served as Israel’s vanguard against the vast majority of world governments who, daily, demand an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in the Strip. If it had not been for repeated U.S. vetoes at the UN Security Council, a resolution demanding a ceasefire would have surely been passed.
Despite this unconditional support, the U.S. is struggling to stave off a wider regional conflict, which is already threatening its political standing in the Middle East.
Therefore, Biden wants to regain the initiative by renewing discussions—though without commitment to real action—about a two-state solution and Gaza’s future.
Netanyahu is disinterested in these matters since his single greatest political achievement, from the viewpoint of his rightwing constituency, is that he has completely frozen any discussions on a political horizon in Palestine. For Netanyahu, losing the war means the unceremonious return to the old American political framework of the so-called “peace process.”
The embattled Israeli Prime Minister also knows that ending the war would constitute an end to his own government coalition, mostly sustained by far-right extremists like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. To achieve these self-serving goals, the Israeli leader is willing to sustain a clearly losing war.
Though Biden has completely “lost faith in Netanyahu,” according to the Associated Press, he continues to support Israel without openly questioning the disastrous outcomes of the war, not just on the Palestinian people, but also on the region and the world, including his own country.
Americans, especially those in Biden’s Democratic Party, must continue to increase their pressure on their administration so that it resolves its cognitive dissonance in Palestine. Biden must not be allowed to play this deadly balancing act, privately demanding for the war to stop while openly funding the Israeli war machine.
Though the majority of Americans already feel that way, Biden and his government have yet to receive the message. How many more Palestinians would have to die for Biden to hear the chants of the people, ‘Ceasefire now’?
Feature photo | March 2, 2024, Embassy of Israel, Washington, DC, USA. Thousands gathered in front of the Israeli Embassy calling for a ceasefire and demands for hands off Rafah. Robyn Stevens Brody | Sipa via AP
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is ‘Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out’. His other books include ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’.
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Immortal Technique on Gaza, the Hip-Hop Industry and More
It is now two months since Hamas’ surprise attack and Israel’s brutal response, and there are few signs that the slaughter will let up any time soon. The violence has captured the world’s attention and become the top story across the globe.
Unsurprisingly, then, the entertainment world has taken sides too. In the wake of the October 7 assault, more than 700 celebrities signed an open letter pledging support to the government of Israel. On the other hand, the hip-hop community has displayed solidarity with Gaza, with over 600 artists joining the Musicians for Palestine movement.
Joining MintCast host Alan MacLeod today to talk about Gaza and the music industry is Immortal Technique. Immortal Technique is an independent rapper and activist widely regarded as one of his generation’s most respected and gifted artists. He has used his platforms on social media to constantly speak out about the situation and educate his huge audience about colonialism, capitalism and imperialism. You can follow him on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.
Immortal Technique was keen to see the violence in Gaza as part of a bigger picture. “It is a continuation of the political aspirations of not just the United States, but [also] NATO,” he said. Israel has, for many decades, served as the United States’ local cop on the beat, an extension of the U.S. empire, hence the unwavering support in Washington D.C.
“There are some beliefs among revolutionaries and the left that need to be challenged,” the Peruvian-born MC told MacLeod today. One of them is the anti-Semitic trope that Israel pulls the strings in the U.S. “In reality,” he said, “it is the United States of America that is pulling all the strings for Israel. The United States uses the government of Israel to do the types of things that it cannot do.”
In 1981, for example, the United States got Israel to destroy an Iraqi nuclear reactor. Israel has also surreptitiously aided the apartheid government of South Africa and supplied weapons to the fascist Chilean dictatorship when it was too politically difficult for the U.S. to do so.
Ultimately, though, Immortal Technique argued that Washington is not making ordinary Israelis safer. “The United States cannot really protect Israel; it can only sell them weapons to brutalize their neighbors,” he said.
The pair also discussed the huge pressures on artists in the entertainment industry to toe the line on Israel/Palestine and the penalties that occur if they speak out.
Luckily for Immortal Technique, his unique status as an independent musician with no corporate bosses means he can speak freely. Steering clear of major record labels could be an option worth exploring for many in the business, he told MacLeod, stressing that signing to a major label means signing a lot of your life away. As he explained:
If you take the stairs and you fall down, you only fall down a flight. But if you take the elevator and the cable snaps, you are going to the bottom, motherfucker. You hear me? And that’s the difference between independence and being in the mainstream.”
The New York-based rapper explained further:
I have my own fan base. If I fall down the stairs, I’m falling, maybe a flight, and I can dust myself off. But if I am on a major label so I could make my career, I would have taken an elevator all the way up, and the moment I didn’t say anything, they would have clipped the cord, and I would have fallen all the way back down [to the bottom].”
Don’t miss today’s unique episode, and remember to subscribe.
“MintPress News” is a fiercely independent media company. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and subscribing to our social media channels, including YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Subscribe to MintCast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.
Also, be sure to check out rapper Lowkey’s video interview/podcast series, The Watchdog.
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.
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As Europe erupts over US spying, NSA chief says government must stop media | Glenn Greenwald
With General Alexander calling for NSA reporting to be halted, US and UK credibility as guardians of press freedom is crushed
The most under-discussed aspect of the NSA story has long been its international scope. That all changed this week as both Germany and France exploded with anger over new revelations about pervasive NSA surveillance on their population and democratically elected leaders.
As was true for Brazil previously, reports about surveillance aimed at leaders are receiving most of the media attention, but what really originally drove the story there were revelations that the NSA is bulk-spying on millions and millions of innocent citizens in all of those nations. The favorite cry of US government apologists -–everyone spies! – falls impotent in the face of this sort of ubiquitous, suspicionless spying that is the sole province of the US and its four English-speaking surveillance allies (the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand).
The head of the embattled National Security Agency, Gen Keith Alexander, is accusing journalists of "selling" his agency's documents and is calling for an end to the steady stream of public disclosures of secrets snatched by former contractor Edward Snowden.
"I think it's wrong that that newspaper reporters have all these documents, the 50,000 – whatever they have and are selling them and giving them out as if these – you know it just doesn't make sense," Alexander said in an interview with the Defense Department's "Armed With Science" blog.
NSA shares raw intelligence including Americans' data with Israel
• Secret deal places no legal limits on use of data by Israelis
• Only official US government communications protected
• Agency insists it complies with rules governing privacy
• Read the NSA and Israel's 'memorandum of understanding'
The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens, a top-secret document provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.
Details of the intelligence-sharing agreement are laid out in a memorandum of understanding between the NSA and its Israeli counterpart that shows the US government handed over intercepted communications likely to contain phone calls and emails of American citizens. The agreement places no legally binding limits on the use of the data by the Israelis.