INTERVIEW - Prince Harry With President Obama 2017

Prince Harry Interview Barack Obama on How He Felt During Trump Inauguration



FULL INTERVIEW (37:30)

NSA - Why Can't They Keep Their Own Secrets?

WRONG!  IMO Snowden is a TRAITOR not a whistleblower.

"Why has NSA failed to keep its own secrets?" by Mark Urban, BBC News

WASHINGTON:  The past week has been a wretched one for the US National Security Agency (NSA), with revelations of large-scale trawling of phone call data in France and Spain, as well as of eavesdropping on German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

During these months, since thousands of files copied by former NSA contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden started leaking into the public domain, the US has been compared to an Orwellian Big Brother state.

But I cannot help wondering, if the NSA is as powerful as its critics have claimed, why has it been so useless at protecting its secrets?

Where are the worm viruses unleashed into the computer systems of newspapers that have published US secrets?  The court orders to prevent additional disclosures?  And, if you enjoy spy fiction, the deniable operators climbing over balconies in Brazil or Hong Kong to steal laptops or indeed terminate their owners?

The American system of official secrecy has for years operated on the basis of targeting the leaker "pour decourager les autres".

In August, the trial of Private Bradley Manning ended with a 35 year sentence for passing classified material to Wikileaks.

As for this latest bout of revelation, involving information about phone and internet spying that is much more highly classified than anything Pte Manning had access to, on the surface it seems only the British authorities have acted in an attempt to stop further publication.

British intelligence officers have watched journalists destroying some computers at the Guardian newspapers.

'Aspects of incompetence'

And David Miranda, the partner of one of the journalists holding the largest amount of Snowden files, was also stopped in August as he changed planes at Heathrow airport, questioned and had memory devices confiscated.

Indeed, the Miranda episode is pretty much the only one since the publication of the Snowden stories that suggests some kind of joined up response aimed at frustrating further publication.

It had the hint, with its foreknowledge of Mr Miranda's travel plans and the fact that he was carrying these files, of an operation based on precisely the kind of intelligence gathering that Mr Snowden has warned of.

In the US though there has been pretty much nothing.  And this is despite the fact that it is common journalistic knowledge that the Guardian journalists sitting on a great many more files, drip feeding them into the public domain, have been operating in New York.

There are aspects of incompetence to it.

Mr Snowden was part of an army of more than 800,000 people with clearance to access such damaging material, and was able to get it again when working with a contractor despite concerns having been expressed at the CIA about his motives.

Some "lessons learned" studies have been launched within the intelligence community, but not yet with any result in terms of cutting the numbers given access to such secrets, or barring from similar work the contractor that employed him.

As for the media, well this crisis should put to bed the idea that that a call from the White House to the editor of the Washington Post or New York Times can simply squash a story like this.

There have been no US legal attempts to force journalists to destroy or turn over what they have, and in the UK a DA Notice on the subject has been widely ignored.

Even the PR response has been limited and ill co-ordinates.  Monday's New York Times comments that "the administration has seemed uncertain about how to handle the reports", concerned the interception of the German leader's mobile phone.  Last week, the attempts of one former NSA director to fight back turned into farce when his briefings to journalists by phone were overheard by a fellow passenger on a train who started tweeting updates.

Spying allegations

The latest revelations, about tapping world leaders phone calls, also leave one wondering what use the content of Ms Merkel's calls were to US policy makers?

The White House has tied itself in knots over whether to admit the president was actually briefed on what she was saying, but it can hardly be said that it gave the US some amazing advantage in the bilateral relationship with Germany.

Some in Washington have detected in the President's unwillingness to take stronger action in defence of the NSA, a desire to see the vast intelligence bureaucracies that grew up after 9/11 cut down to size.

Whether or not that is the case, any attempt to halt the revelations by legal action would inevitably have brought accusations of an assault on cherished constitutional freedoms.

So the leaks continue and today we discover that the NSA recorded the call data (i.e. the numbers dialed and duration, rather than the actual content) of 60m Spanish calls during one month.

Perhaps Kafka rather than Orwell provides the better literary template for this ongoing story.

The NSA has grown into a huge data-mining bureaucracy driven by its own organizational imperatives.

It pursues ever greater coverage, storage of data, staff and budget.

In many cases it does things because it can, rather than because somebody has asked whether the information is useful, whether it is worth the potential price if discovered, or whether the activity can actually be prevented from coming into the public domain.

SYRIA - BBC UK Report

"A fork in the road for UK foreign policy" by Mark Urban, BBC News 8/29/2013

The prospect of parliamentary opposition preventing the UK joining in US military action over Syria is a defining moment in British foreign policy.  It poses questions both about the future of the UK-US alliance and the ability of the British prime minister to make war without a majority in the House of Commons.

To be clear, there have been important moments before when a British government has declined to take part in a US-led campaign.  Perhaps the two most significant were former Prime Minister Harold Wilson's decision not to commit British troops to Vietnam and John Major's to give the 1992 intervention in Somalia a wide berth.

There were differences of view back then between different government departments or Cabinet members.  I can remember, for example, from talking to Whitehall figures at the time that the Ministry of Defense was hostile to the idea of deploying to Somalia, whereas the Foreign Office was more positive about the idea.

In the end though both the Wilson and Major governments made judgements, political ones, after hearing the views of various experts or interested parties.

Although the Wilson decision in particular was characterized by some at the time as a significant setback to the UK-US relationship there was no lasting damage and the two countries have happily joined forces to rain destruction on their foes in the years since.

Today's situation is different because it would appear that Prime Minister David Cameron is unable to deliver military support to the US despite his insistence that the two countries must stand together and that action must be taken to deter Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime from further use of chemical weapons.

Change in stance

From US President Barack Obama's point of view, this could transform the UK from the position of his country's most dependable ally into a significant complicating factor as he seeks to reassure a reluctant Congress and public that the US must act.

Mr Cameron's potential inability to deliver UK support reflects a failure to convince people, experts and public alike, that action against Syria is in the UK national interest.  This is a particular irony given his 2010 electoral stance that British governments had sometimes been too ready to support the US without a proper consideration of whether it would benefit the country to do so.

Throughout the past two years, I have found contacts in the British military, Foreign Office, and intelligence services pretty much unanimous in opposing direct intervention in Syria, or in reciting all the practical difficulties that would prevent such action having a positive effect.

On Wednesday a senior military figure described to me the proposed limited cruise missile and airstrikes as "naïve and childlike", suggesting they would be too small to have any major effect on the regime and could produce all kinds of unintended consequences.

Do it "properly", with extensive support to the opposition over a prolonged period, or don't do it was the message - and it was given with a strong implication that there was no will in the US or UK to make a commitment of that kind.

'Royal Prerogative'

It has been Downing Street that has repeatedly returned to the issue of armed intervention in Syria, albeit with occasional support from the Foreign Secretary, William Hague.  But despite this determination, and the appalling images of suffering emerging from that country, neither the professionals in Whitehall nor the wider public have warmed to the case for getting more deeply involved.

So while Harold Wilson or John Major recognized that expert advice or public opinion were helpful in shunning a role in a US-led war, Mr Cameron tried to go against the grain and appears, barring a reversal of political fortunes, to have come unstuck as a result.

The dangers, in terms of White House views of Britain, of failing to deliver support are significant.  It is already the case that many in Washington refer bitterly to Britain's failure to "stay the course" in southern Iraq or deliver a more positive outcome there.

There have been times when a British prime minister has managed to launch military operations despite public hostility or deep divisions.  The gulf between public reluctance to get involved and a PM doing what he or she felt was necessary in order to maintain the UK-US relationship or Britain's permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council could be finessed or ignored.

This was a political reality, but also a constitutional matter, with Downing Street regarding itself as having "the Royal Prerogative", the ability to go to war without a vote of Parliament.

Under former Prime Minister Tony Blair this became increasingly hard to maintain, and of course, he recognized the importance of getting a Commons vote in favor of military action in Iraq.

At the time the Bush White House, seeing the political cost of doing so and potential for a humiliating defeat in the Commons, offered Mr Blair a way out.  He declined to withdraw UK forces from the invasion.

Now it would appear that the ability of a British government to commit to military action without broad parliamentary support in any but the most urgent emergency has gone.  Given the war weariness and indeed anti-Americanism of much of the British public, that has important implications for the future of UK-US relations.

AIRLINES - Frenchman Attempted Hijack of US Jet

"Frenchman 'posing as pilot' found in US jet cockpit" BBC News 3/22/2013

A Frenchman has been charged with impersonating a pilot after he was found in the cockpit of a plane due to take off in Philadelphia, police say.

Philippe Jernnard, from La Rochelle, France, was wearing a shirt with an Air France logo and a blazer with epaulets.

He was discovered in the jump seat behind the pilot on a US Airways plane on Wednesday evening, an officer said.

The FBI is investigating the incident and police said they expect federal charges may be filed.

Mr Jernnard, 61, faces state charges including criminal trespassing, tampering with records, impersonating a person privately employed, and providing false identification to law enforcement, Philadelphia police told the BBC.

When he was found in the cockpit, Mr Jernnard identified himself as a 747 pilot for Air France, authorities said.

The suspect, who had a ticket for the US Airways flight to Florida, could not provide proof of his credentials.

He was also reportedly carrying a fake Air France crew identification card.

Officer Christine O'Brien says Mr Jernnard became argumentative and was escorted from the plane.

He is being held on $1m bail (£657,000), US media report.