Diane Feinstein shows her cards

Some of this reads very much like the report from the Somalia commission

Statement on Intel Commi...Enator Dianne Feinstein

Snowden at SXSW

A Shortage of History

Q. You cut me off at the pass. Mr. President, do you think it was proper for the United States to restore the Shah to the throne in 1953 against the popular will within Iran?

THE PRESIDENT. That's ancient history, and I don't think it's appropriate or helpful for me to go into the propriety of something that happened 30 years ago.

- Jimmy Carter
News Conference
Feb 13, 1980

Bruce Laingen, a career diplomat who was chief of the U.S. embassy staff, was the highest-ranking hostage. One day, after Laingen had spent more than a year as a hostage, one of his captors visited him in his solitary cell. Laingen exploded in rage, shouting at his jailer that this hostage-taking was immoral, illegal and "totally wrong." The jailer waited for him to finish, then replied without sympathy.

"You have nothing to complain about," he told Laingen. "The United States took our whole country hostage in 1953."

The Smithsonian

For members of the intelligence community, the war was directly linked to the recent past; they saw deep-rooted reasons for Vietcong successes and Saigon government failures.  As far as the intelligence community was concerned, history was alive and gaining its revenge in Indochina; as far as the principals were concerned (and it was a very American attitude that Vietnamese events and history began only after the Americans took charge), nothing had existed before because it had not been done, tended to, and examined by Americans. The Americans were tempting history by ignoring it; after all, in the past they had been able to dominate events by the sheer force of their industrial capacity, which had exempted them from much of the reality of the world.

- David Halberstam
The Best and the Brightest
pg 532-3

There were many ways in which the former members of the Soviet Union in eastern Europe could have been given security for the future. Nato chose to provide that security by moving eastward to the borders of Russia. The then president, Gorbachev, in negotiating with secretary of state, James Baker, had insisted that Nato should not move one foot east – this was an area of traditional Russian influence. President Clinton pushed to expand the Nato alliance to the very borders of Russia. There was talk of Ukraine and Georgia being included.

The move east, despite the negotiations held with Gorbachev, was provocative, unwise and a very clear signal to Russia: we are not willing to make you a co-operative partner in the management of European or world affairs; we will exercise the power available to us and you will have to put up with it.

Malcolm Fraser

The Guardian

March 3, 2014

Snowden on Snowden

Written testimony to European Parliament

Civil Liberties, Justice, and Home Affairs Committee

Cool image from EU Parliament Justice Committee website

The Crimean War 2.0

The first Crimean War gave us Florence Nightingale and Trichophyton rubrum.  Who knows what NATO will give us now.

Detail of Franz Roubaud's panoramic painting The Siege of Sevastopol (1904)

[The Crimean War] "was not the result of a calculated plan, nor even of hasty last-minute decisions made under stress. It was the consequence of more than two years of fatal blundering in slow-motion by inept statesmen who had months to reflect upon the actions they took. It arose from Napoleon's search for prestige; Nicholas’s quest for control over the Straits; his naïve miscalculation of the probable reactions of the European powers; the failure of those powers to make their positions clear; and the pressure of public opinion in Britain and Constantinople at crucial moments."^[11]

 Clough, Shepard B., ed. (1964). A History of the Western World. p. 917.
via Wikipedia 

Ukraine: there's no way out unless the west understands its past mistakes
Western leaders mostly paint the whole dispute as totally one-sided:  it is all Russia's fault. But the Crimea crisis is directly related to the misguided steps taken after the Soviet Union's fall

Malcolm Fraser
The Guardian, 3 March 2014

"Ex-Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg arrested by terror police" - BBC

Excellent.  The UK has "terror police". These must be the same guys who stopped Miranda at Heathrow.

Terror makes everything different.  There are different laws, different offences, different police, and no Magna Carta to speak of.  Even though this guy has never been charged with any crime - domestic or international - he was denied entry to Canada in 2011.

Churchill got this one right:

You might however consider whether you should not unfold as a background the great principle of habeas corpus and trial by jury, which are the supreme protection invented by the British people for ordinary individuals against the State. The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and whether particularly to deny him judgement by his peers for an indefinite period, is in the highest degree odious, and is the foundation of all totalitarian Governments whether Nazi or Communist.

Return of the Serial Proroguer Part 3

Later the same decade...

Who is Glenn Greenwald?  All London was convulsed with this question.  Also, the Five Eyes, NATO, the UN, AIPAC, ISAF, the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Enterprise Institute, FOX News, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, MI5 and 6, the NSA and its clones, GCHQ, UKIP, EU, G8/20, the OAS, most of Brazil, the FSB, all of China, and The Advocate.

He likes dogs. 

He is a Person of No Consequence. He has not been to the right schools, fellowship "programs", institutes, workshops, retreats, meetings, clubs, and bars.  Unlike say, Anne-Marie Slaughter, who is a consultant for McDonald's.

And yet, he is disturbing the natural order of things. My assignment was to get as close to him as possible, sent by the Woman in Black, "M", or possibly "J", or even "GG".  He had holed up in Rio in an isolated house in a famous suburb with his now well-known partner and roughly a dozen dogs, supplemented by monkeys who dropped in from the adjacent rainforest.  It was a zoo.

I approached cautiously on foot, carrying my Harley-Davidson.  I blended in with the locals.

To be continued...