Top-secret documents from the National Security Agency and its British counterpart reveal for the first time how the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom targeted WikiLeaks and other activist groups with tactics ranging from covert surveillance to prosecution.

The efforts - detailed in documents provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden - included a broad campaign of international pressure aimed not only at WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, but at what the U.S. government calls "the human network that supports WikiLeaks." The documents also contain internal discussions about targeting the file-sharing site Pirate Bay and hacktivist collectives such as Anonymous.

One classified document from Government Communications Headquarters, Britain's top spy agency, shows that GCHQ used its surveillance system to secretly monitor visitors to a WikiLeaks site. By exploiting its ability to tap into the fiber-optic cables that make up the backbone of the Internet, the agency confided to allies in 2012, it was able to collect the IP addresses of visitors in real time, as well as the search terms that visitors used to reach the site from search engines like Google.

Another classified document from the U.S. intelligence community, dated August 2010, recounts how the Obama administration urged foreign allies to file criminal charges against Assange over the group's publication of the Afghanistan war logs.

A third document, from July 2011, contains a summary of an internal discussion in which officials from two NSA offices - including the agency's general counsel and an arm of its Threat Operations Center - considered designating WikiLeaks as "a 'malicious foreign actor' for the purpose of targeting." Such a designation would have allowed the group to be targeted with extensive electronic surveillance - without the need to exclude U.S. persons from the surveillance searches.

In 2008, not long after WikiLeaks was formed, the U.S. Army prepared a report that identified the organization as an enemy, and plotted how it could be destroyed. The new documents provide a window into how the U.S. and British governments appear to have shared the view that WikiLeaks represented a serious threat, and reveal the controversial measures they were willing to take to combat it.

In a statement to The Intercept, Assange condemned what he called "the reckless and unlawful behavior of the National Security Agency" and GCHQ's "extensive hostile monitoring of a popular publisher's website and its readers."

"News that the NSA planned these operations at the level of its Office of the General Counsel is especially troubling," Assange said. "Today, we call on the White House to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the extent of the NSA's criminal activity against the media, including WikiLeaks, its staff, its associates and its supporters."

Illustrating how far afield the NSA deviates from its self-proclaimed focus on terrorism and national security, the documents reveal that the agency considered using its sweeping surveillance system against Pirate Bay, which has been accused of facilitating copyright violations. The agency also approved surveillance of the foreign "branches" of hacktivist groups, mentioning Anonymous by name.

The documents call into question the Obama administration's repeated insistence that U.S. citizens are not being caught up in the sweeping surveillance dragnet being cast by the NSA. Under the broad rationale considered by the agency, for example, any communication with a group designated as a "malicious foreign actor," such as WikiLeaks and Anonymous, would be considered fair game for surveillance.

Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute who specializes in surveillance issues, says the revelations shed a disturbing light on the NSA's willingness to sweep up American citizens in its surveillance net.

"All the reassurances Americans heard that the broad authorities of the FISA Amendments Act could only be used to 'target' foreigners seem a bit more hollow," Sanchez says, "when you realize that the 'foreign target' can be an entire Web site or online forum used by thousands if not millions of Americans."

GCHQ Spies on WikiLeaks Visitors

The system used by GCHQ to monitor the WikiLeaks website - codenamed ANTICRISIS GIRL - is described in a classified PowerPoint presentation prepared by the British agency and distributed at the 2012 "SIGDEV Conference." At the annual gathering, each member of the "Five Eyes" alliance - the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - describes the prior year's surveillance successes and challenges.

In a top-secret presentation at the conference, two GCHQ spies outlined how ANTICRISIS GIRL was used to enable "targeted website monitoring" of WikiLeaks (See slides 33 and 34). The agency logged data showing hundreds of users from around the world, including the United States, as they were visiting a WikiLeaks site -contradicting claims by American officials that a deal between the U.K. and the U.S. prevents each country from spying on the other's citizens.

The IP addresses collected by GCHQ are used to identify individual computers that connect to the Internet, and can be traced back to specific people if the IP address has not been masked using an anonymity service. If WikiLeaks or other news organizations were receiving submissions from sources through a public dropbox on their website, a system like ANTICRISIS GIRL could potentially be used to help track them down. (WikiLeaks has not operated a public dropbox since 2010, when it shut down its system in part due to security concerns over surveillance.)

In its PowerPoint presentation, GCHQ identifies its target only as "wikileaks." One slide, displaying analytics derived from the surveillance, suggests that the site monitored was the official wikileaks.org domain. It shows that users reached the targeted site by searching for "wikileaks.org" and for "maysan uxo," a term associated with a series of leaked Iraq war logs that are hosted on wikileaks.org.

The ANTICRISIS GIRL initiative was operated by a GCHQ unit called Global Telecoms Exploitation (GTE), which was previously reported by The Guardian to be linked to the large-scale, clandestine Internet surveillance operation run by GCHQ, codenamed TEMPORA.

Operating in the United Kingdom and from secret British eavesdropping bases in Cyprus and other countries, GCHQ conducts what it refers to as "passive" surveillance - indiscriminately intercepting massive amounts of data from Internet cables, phone networks and satellites. The GTE unit focuses on developing "pioneering collection capabilities" to exploit the stream of data gathered from the Internet.

As part of the ANTICRISIS GIRL system, the documents show, GCHQ used publicly available analytics software called Piwik to extract information from its surveillance stream, not only monitoring visits to targeted websites like WikiLeaks, but tracking the country of origin of each visitor.

It is unclear from the PowerPoint presentation whether GCHQ monitored the WikiLeaks site as part of a pilot program designed to demonstrate its capability, using only a small set of covertly collected data, or whether the agency continues to actively deploy its surveillance system to monitor visitors to WikiLeaks. It was previously reported in The Guardian that X-KEYSCORE, a comprehensive surveillance weapon used by both NSA and GCHQ, allows "an analyst to learn the IP addresses of every person who visits any website the analyst specifies."

GCHQ refused to comment on whether ANTICRISIS GIRL is still operational. In an email citing the agency's boilerplate response to inquiries, a spokeswoman insisted that "all of GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorized, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight."

But privacy advocates question such assurances. "How could targeting an entire website's user base be necessary or proportionate?" says Gus Hosein, executive director of the London-based human rights group Privacy International. "These are innocent people who are turned into suspects based on their reading habits. Surely becoming a target of a state's intelligence and security apparatus should require more than a mere click on a link."

The agency's covert targeting of WikiLeaks, Hosein adds, call into question the entire legal rationale underpinning the state's system of surveillance. "We may be tempted to see GCHQ as a rogue agency, ungoverned in its use of unprecedented powers generated by new technologies," he says. "But GCHQ's actions are authorized by [government] ministers. The fact that ministers are ordering the monitoring of political interests of Internet users shows a systemic failure in the rule of law."

Going After Assange and His Supporters

The U.S. attempt to pressure other nations to prosecute Assange is recounted in a file that the intelligence community calls its "Manhunting Timeline." The document details, on a country-by-country basis, efforts by the U.S. government and its allies to locate, prosecute, capture or kill alleged terrorists, drug traffickers, Palestinian leaders and others. There is a timeline for each year from 2008 to 2012.

An entry from August 2010 - headlined "United States, Australia, Great Britain, Germany, Iceland" - states: "The United States on August 10 urged other nations with forces in Afghanistan, including Australia, United Kingdom, and Germany, to consider filing criminal charges against Julian Assange." It describes Assange as the "founder of the rogue Wikileaks Internet website and responsible for the unauthorized publication of over 70,000 classified documents covering the war in Afghanistan."

In response to questions from The Intercept, the NSA suggested that the entry is "a summary derived from a 2010 article" in the Daily Beast. That article, which cited an anonymous U.S. official, reported that "the Obama administration is pressing Britain, Germany, Australia, and other allied Western governments to consider opening criminal investigations of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and to severely limit his nomadic travels across international borders."

The government entry in the "Manhunting Timeline" adds Iceland to the list of Western nations that were pressured, and suggests that the push to prosecute Assange is part of a broader campaign. The effort, it explains, "exemplifies the start of an international effort to focus the legal element of national power upon non-state actor Assange, and the human network that supports WikiLeaks." The entry does not specify how broadly the government defines that "human network," which could potentially include thousands of volunteers, donors and journalists, as well as people who simply spoke out in defense of WikiLeaks.

In a statement, the NSA declined to comment on the documents or its targeting of activist groups, noting only that the agency "provides numerous opportunities and forums for their analysts to explore hypothetical or actual circumstances to gain appropriate advice on the exercise of their authorities within the Constitution and the law, and to share that advice appropriately."

But the entry aimed at WikiLeaks comes from credentialed officials within the intelligence community. In an interview in Hong Kong last June, Edward Snowden made clear that the only NSA officials empowered to write such entries are those "with top-secret clearance and public key infrastructure certificates" - a kind of digital ID card enabling unique access to certain parts of the agency's system. What's more, Snowden added, the entries are "peer reviewed" - and every edit made is recorded by the system.

The U.S. launched its pressure campaign against WikiLeaks less than a week after the group began publishing the Afghanistan war logs on July 25, 2010. At the time, top U.S. national security officials accused WikiLeaks of having "blood" on its hands. But several months later, McClatchy reported that "U.S. officials concede that they have no evidence to date that the documents led to anyone's death."

The government targeting of WikiLeaks nonetheless continued. In April 2011, Salon reported that a grand jury in Virginia was actively investigating both the group and Assange on possible criminal charges under espionage statutes relating to the publication of classified documents. And in August of 2012, the Sydney Morning Herald, citing secret Australian diplomatic cables, reported that "Australian diplomats have no doubt the United States is still gunning for Julian Assange" and that "Australia's diplomatic service takes seriously the likelihood that Assange will eventually be extradited to the US on charges arising from WikiLeaks obtaining leaked US military and diplomatic documents."

Bringing criminal charges against WikiLeaks or Assange for publishing classified documents would be highly controversial - especially since the group partnered with newspapers like The Guardian and The New York Times to make the war logs public. "The biggest challenge to the press today is the threatened prosecution of WikiLeaks, and it's absolutely frightening," James Goodale, who served as chief counsel of the Times during its battle to publish The Pentagon Papers, told the Columbia Journalism Review last March. "If you go after the WikiLeaks criminally, you go after the Times. That's the criminalization of the whole process."

In November 2013, The Washington Post, citing anonymous officials, reported that the Justice Department strongly considered prosecuting Assange, but concluded it "could not do so without also prosecuting U.S. news organizations and journalists" who had partnered with WikiLeaks to publish the documents. According to the Post, officials "realized that they have what they described as a 'New York Times problem'" - namely, that any theory used to bring charges against Assange would also result in criminal liability for the Times, The Guardian, and other papers which also published secret documents provided to WikiLeaks.

NSA proposals to target WikiLeaks

As the new NSA documents make clear, however, the U.S. government did more than attempt to engineer the prosecution of Assange. NSA analysts also considered designating WikiLeaks as a "malicious foreign actor" for surveillance purposes - a move that would have significantly expanded the agency's ability to subject the group's officials and supporters to extensive surveillance.

Such a designation would allow WikiLeaks to be targeted with surveillance without the use of "defeats" - an agency term for technical mechanisms to shield the communications of U.S. persons from getting caught in the dragnet.

That top-secret document - which summarizes a discussion between the NSA's Office of the General Counsel and the Oversight and Compliance Office of the agency's Threat Operations Center - spells out a rationale for including American citizens in the surveillance:

"If the foreign IP is consistently associated with malicious cyber activity against the U.S., so, tied to a foreign individual or organization known to direct malicious activity our way, then there is no need to defeat any to, from, or about U.S. Persons. This is based on the description that one end of the communication would always be this suspect foreign IP, and so therefore any U.S. Person communicant would be incidental to the foreign intelligence task."

When NSA officials are asked in the document if WikiLeaks or Pirate Bay could be designated as "malicious foreign actors," the reply is inconclusive: "Let us get back to you." There is no indication of whether either group was ever designated or targeted in such a way.

The NSA's lawyers did, however, give the green light to subject other activists to heightened surveillance. Asked if it would be permissible to "target the foreign actors of a loosely coupled group of hackers ... such as with Anonymous," the response is unequivocal: "As long as they are foreign individuals outside of the US and do not hold dual citizenship ... then you are okay."

NSA Lawyers: "It's Nothing to Worry About"

Sanchez, the surveillance expert with the Cato Institute, says the document serves as "a reminder that NSA essentially has carte blanche to spy on non-Americans. In public statements, intelligence officials always talk about spying on 'terrorists,' as if those are the only targets - but Section 702 [of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act] doesn't say anything about 'terrorists.' They can authorize collection on any 'persons reasonably believed to be [located] outside the United States,' with 'persons' including pretty much any kind of group not 'substantially' composed of Americans."

Sanchez notes that while it makes sense to subject some full-scale cyber-attacks to government surveillance, "it would make no sense to lump together foreign cyberattackers with sites voluntarily visited by enormous numbers of Americans, like Pirate Bay or WikiLeaks." Indeed, one entry in the NSA document expressly authorizes the targeting of a "malicious" foreign server - offering Pirate Bay as a specific example -"even if there is a possibility that U.S. persons could be using it as well." NSA officials agree that there is no need to exclude Americans from the surveillance, suggesting only that the agency's spies "try to minimize" how many U.S. citizens are caught in the dragnet.

Another entry even raises the possibility of using X-KEYSCORE, one of the agency's most comprehensive surveillance programs, to target communications between two U.S.-based Internet addresses if they are operating through a "proxy" being used for "malicious foreign activity." In response, the NSA's Threat Operations Center approves the targeting, but the agency's general counsel requests "further clarification before signing off."

If WikiLeaks were improperly targeted, or if a U.S. citizen were swept up in the NSA's surveillance net without authorization, the agency's attitude seems to be one of indifference. According to the document - which quotes a response by the NSA's Office of General Counsel and the oversight and compliance office of its Threat Operations Center - discovering that an American has been selected for surveillance must be mentioned in a quarterly report, "but it's nothing to worry about."

The attempt to target WikiLeaks and its broad network of supporters drew sharp criticism from the group and its allies. "These documents demonstrate that the political persecution of WikiLeaks is very much alive," says Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish former judge who now represents the group. "The paradox is that Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks organization are being treated as a threat instead of what they are: a journalist and a media organization that are exercising their fundamental right to receive and impart information in its original form, free from omission and censorship, free from partisan interests, free from economic or political pressure."

For his part, Assange remains defiant. "The NSA and its U.K. accomplices show no respect for the rule of law," he told The Intercept. "But there is a cost to conducting illicit actions against a media organization." Referring to a criminal complaint that the group filed last year against "interference with our journalistic work in Europe," Assange warned that "no entity, including the NSA, should be permitted to act against a journalist with impunity."

Assange indicated that in light of the new documents, the group may take further legal action.

"We have instructed our general counsel, Judge Baltasar Garzon, to prepare the appropriate response," he said. "The investigations into attempts to interfere with WikiLeaks' work will go wherever they need to go. Make no mistake: those responsible will be held to account and brought to justice."
(c) 2014 Glenn Greenwald. was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. His most recent book is, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book"How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "A Tragic Legacy," examines the Bush legacy. He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism.

THIS IS a declaration of love. Three loves, actually.

I love Achinoam Nini. I love her from afar. I have never met her.

I love her for what she did a few weeks ago.

The Israeli organization of composers and writers had awarded her a prize for Life Achievement. Though only 44 years old, she certainly deserved it. She is a wonderful singer.

Noa (as she is called abroad) did something very unusual: she refused the prize.

Her reason: another singer, Ariel Zilber, was to receive the same distinction with her.

Noa is an outspoken leftist. Zilber is an outspoken rightist. Is that a reason to refuse a prize?

Throughout the country there was an outcry. How dare she? What about freedom of expression? What about artistic liberty?

Rightists denounced her vociferously. They were joined by many righteous leftists. True, they say, Zilber is a rightist, but democracy demands that freedom of expression be safeguarded for all, even - and especially - for those who express objectionable views.

Even old Voltaire was brought into the fray. "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

SO WHAT has Zilber said that moved Noa to refuse to stand with him on the same platform?

For one thing, he has expressed his abysmal hatred for homosexuals. "To be a homo is a perversion," he declared, and demanded that they be banned from society.

Not only they. All secular people. "The seculars have nothing to offer, only to get sick with AIDS and look at naked women. Phooey!"

Gays and seculars are not the only damned people. Leftists may be even worse. "All leftists should be expelled and sent to the devil. They are Amalek!" As every Jew knows, God commanded the Children of Israel to kill all Amalekites so that their very name be eradicated forever. King Saul, a national hero, was dethroned by the prophet Samuel because he did not kill all his Amalekite prisoners, men, women and children.

But this is only part of Zilber's public persona. He also believes that Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, should be immediately released. He praised Baruch Goldstein, the settler who murdered 29 Muslims at prayer in the Hebron Ibrahimia mosque (called by Jews the "Cave of Machpela."

He also sympathizes with the "Price Tag" thugs, the Ku Klux Klan settlers who go out at night to terrorize defenseless Arab villagers. They do the right thing, because "the Arabs are not worth anything. They don't know how to do anything but kill!"

To cap it all, Zilber proclaimed: "Kahane was right!" Rabbi Meir Kahane was condemned by the Supreme Court of Israel as a fascist, and his "Kach" movement was outlawed - an almost unique judgment where Jews are concerned. To round things off, Zilber also wrote and composed a song on this theme.

Does this person deserve the protection of Freedom of Speech? Jews all over the world condemn the French government for tolerating the detestable anti-Semite Dieudonne M'bala M'bala, the inventor of the neo-Nazi "quenelle" salute. But this demagogue is a moderate compared to Zilber.

Should Noa appear on the same stage with this "Gift of God"? Or, if she had been living in the German Weimar republic three generations ago, with a clownish demagogue called Adolf Hitler? And would our bleeding-heart democrats have denounced her for refusing?

WELL, I for one admire her. Hers was an act of selflessness. In doing what she did, she was making a huge sacrifice. She will be boycotted by all right-wing audiences. She will not be invited to festivals by organizers who shake in their boots when thinking about the loss of government subsidies.

I remember that 45 years ago, after the outbreak of the first intifada, there was a large demonstration for peace in what later became Rabin Square in Tel Aviv. Practically all artistic celebrities of the day were there. Artists fought amongs each other for the right to appear.

These days are long past. Even well-known leftist artists are now afraid to express an opinion. God forbid. It could mean financial ruin.

So where did Noa find the courage to stand up and refuse? Both her parents are Yemenites - as was, curiously enough, Silver's mother, a famous singer in my youth. As a rule, Yemenites - like other Oriental Jews - tend to be rightists.

The solution to the riddle may be that she grew up in the US, where her father was working. Being educated there in Jewish schools in the 70s and 80s may have implanted certain values.

I love her.

I LOVE Anat Kam.

Anat was a soldier. Her military duties gave her access to secret documents. She copied 2000 documents of them, which contained evidence of war crimes committed by Israeli soldiers, and gave them to a reporter from Haaretz. The paper published the secret report on one such incident. The army investigators discovered the source.

After almost two years of house arrest, Anat was condemned to a long prison term. On appeal, it was reduced to four years. Last week, after two years and two months in prison, she was freed on parole. A few days later, she revealed her present state of mind in a newspaper interview.

It is a good read. Anat is very intelligent and observant. Her description of her prison experience is vivid and fascinating. It appears that the prison authorities treated her comparatively well. Before entering prison she was very afraid of being beaten up or raped. However, the inmates of the women's prison, though mostly primitive patriots, did not hold her traitorous past against her and with few exceptions befriended her. Women who had murdered their children or lovers asked for her assistance in writing petitions. Anat seems to be a person with a lot of empathy.

She is bitter about Haaretz and the reporter, who, she believes, betrayed her trust out of fear. One can also be bitter about the peace camp in general, which was so afraid that almost nobody raised his/her voice in defense of her courageous act.

What made me sad was her contrition. She declares in the interview that she is sorry for what she did.

I believe that she isn't sorry because of the heavy price she paid. At the age of 28, she has to begin her life anew, branded as a traitor to her people. Four precious years have been stolen from her. She refuses to emigrate. "Why should I? This is my home!" she declares.

What makes her regret her action is the belief that it was all for nothing. She thinks that unlike the revelations of her American comrades in/without arms, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, who changed the world, her own deed has borne no fruit. It has changed nothing.

I want to take issue with that belief. It is not true. Courageous actions like these, committed by dedicated individuals, are never useless. They stand as an example. They encourage others. They testify for the human conscience. They plant a seed. Just as the sea consists of many drops, historic changes are built up from many, many individual acts like this.

I LOVE Daphni Leef.

She is the young woman - like Anat, she is 28 years old - who, furious at the rent demanded from her, put up a tent in a boulevard in central Tel Aviv to live in. The protest grew spontaneously and climaxed in an unprecedented mass demonstration of 400 thousand people.

The movement had an impact on last year's elections. Yair Lapid, a TV personality who had done nothing to help the demonstrators, adopted their slogans and won a huge vote in the election. Two of Daphni's collaborators were elected to the Knesset. But Daphni herself dropped out of public view.

I never spoke with her except for a few words at one of the demonstrations. I criticized her for ignoring the big national problems, like the occupation, and concentrating on the price of apartments and cheese.

This week she reappeared - on the prisoners' bench in court. Though all her demonstrations had been strictly non-violent, in one of them some pushing took place. The police mishandled Daphni, her arm was injured. But, as usual, the police blamed Daphni for attacking the policemen and disturbing public order.

The Judge threw the case out.

I LOVE these three women, because they show us that in Israel there are young people who obey their conscience.

They make us proud to be Israeli.

As long as we have youngsters like these, ready to stand up for democracy, peace and justice, take risks and make personal sacrifices, Israel has a future.

Hundreds of low-wage surveyors scour the depopulated streets of Detroit, mapping the extent of "blight" that has consumed the city. The three-person teams of the Blight Removal Task Force are financed by private corporations and foundations whose mission is the "orderly" destruction of the nation's largest Black metropolis, to clear the way for a "new" city - one in which marginalized people like the surveyors themselves will be relegated to the shadows. The resulting data-base will allow real estate moguls like Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert, the task force sugar daddy, to create an urban grid that maximizes land values and forms the basis of future city planning. The corporate schemes that flow from the survey, beginning with recommendations to be released in late March, will dictate the types of people that the city will accommodate, and their "place" - if any - in the new urban configuration. Other corporate-financed demolition planners, under the so-called Detroit Blight Authority, have already begun clearing land for private exploitation.

There is no question that Detroit's state-imposed bankruptcy has dramatically quickened the pace of the land rush. However, private capital has always positioned itself on the ground floor of urban planning in the United States, where cities are first configured by profiteers and then occupied by those populations that can manage to fit themselves into the capitalist-contoured framework. The phenomenal, stunning - and wholly unplanned - explosion of Black urban pluralities and majorities in the Sixties and Seventies occurred when capital followed white populations in flight from the cities. Capital later reasserted itself, paving the way for gentrification with its "renaissance" projects in cities across the nation, thoroughly suborning the newly established Black political (misleadership) class to the task of African American removal.

This mostly incremental process, streamlined through the normal intrigues of capitalist corruption of the public sphere, is always preceded by investments in corporate urban planning. Usually, such planning is carried out in secret, as a matter of course, with selected political "insiders" allowed a peek and a small slice as payment for facilitating the grand schemes. It is the methodical return of corporate capital that has capped and rolled back the growth of "Chocolate Cities" in the U.S.

However, some cities were too darkly chocolate for incremental transformation. Nature provided a miraculous opportunity for capital to put its plans on steroids in New Orleans, in 2005. As I wrote in the May 5, 2007 issue of Black Agenda Report, in response to Rev. Jesse Jackson's contention that "Katrina is a metaphor for abandoned urban America":

"The problem is not the lack of an urban policy, but the failure to formulate progressive Black urban policies and plans. Corporate America and finance capital have both general and detailed visions of what the cities should look like and which populations and enterprises will be nurtured and served by these new and improved municipalities - 'renaissance' cities of the (near and, in some places, very near) future.

"Corporate planners and developers believed they had been blessed by nature when Katrina drowned New Orleans, washing away in days the problem-people and neighborhoods that would ordinarily require years to remove in order to clear the way for 'renaissance.' "Greed led to unseemly speed, revealing in a flash the outlines of the urban vision that would be imposed on the wreckage of New Orleans. As in a film on fast-forward, the 'plot' (in both meanings of the word) unfolded in a rush before our eyes: Once the Black and poor were removed, an urban environment would be created implacably hostile to their return. The public sector - except that which serves business, directly or indirectly - would under no circumstances be resurrected, so as to leave little 'space' for the re-implantation of unwanted populations (schools, utility infrastructure, public and affordable private housing, public safety, health care)."

That having been accomplished, the corporate planners are tripping over themselves in haste to create the new urban grid. Since the dismantling of Detroit is a very public affair, the corporate planning process will also be more transparent than usual. The accelerated schedule of political atrocities surrounding the unprecedented dissolution of a major American city - and the breakneck speed with which the Wall Street juggernaut now moves in pursuit of its unfolding neoliberal agenda - will make the agony of Detroit a spectacularly ugly affair.

Lessons that should have been learned from Katrina will present themselves, again, with twists even more applicable to the rest of besieged urban America. With low-wage surveyors plodding Detroit's streets, providing data for corporations to create the new grid that will abolish their own neighborhoods, our 2007 analysis remains relevant:

"Had the post-1970 crop of urban Black leadership used the intervening decades to formulate urban plans and policies that transformed the cities in ways that served the needs of the new Black majorities and pluralities, they would now be capable of bargaining with onrushing capital - and would have had something to offer to the people...as corporations presented plans for the coup de grace on the Black majority. But the misleadership class spent their terms in office wasting the historical opportunity, and the window is rapidly closing."

Chocolate Cities Must Save Themselves

Back in 2003, at the urging of Bill Lucy, then head of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, I wrote a series of articles for BlackCommentator.com titled, "A Plan for the Cities to Save Themselves." The five-part project stretched over nearly a year, from August 2003 to July 2004. The central conclusion was that urban political activists must also be urban planners who are as knowledgeable about the cities in which they organize, as are their corporate enemies. Serious urban organizers/planners need to do thorough audits of the assets of their cities, just as the corporations do. As we wrote in Part Five:

Which is why what remains of a privileged population in the USA is being mobilized to support regime change in Syria, Thailand, Venezuela and the Ukraine, a health care marketplace in the USA, a zealous drive to destroy Iran and an equally fanatic attempt at declaring Russia a worse menace now than at the time of brain dead american anti-communism. Orwell might suffer a stroke and complete paralysis if he were alive to see what deranged lunacy now passes for news reporting. And he might stop breathing completely at the form taken by some allegedly progressive social activism.

As the crisis builds many well meaning people are led to make it worse by swallowing a forced diet of propaganda and not only accepting that as a healthy meal but having it fuel idiotic pursuit of what they are told would be a better world if only elected foreign governments would collapse and their people become more devout worshipers at the church of the market. Where to begin?

The Olympics have long been nothing more than a massive global advertising campaign to occupy minds with products and orgies of jingoism, but when in a state on the west's hit list we get far more than the average criticism of this international marketing flesh pot. Attacks on Putin's Russia and the Ukraine leadership are related and both display hopeless ignorance on the part of American public opinion, which is exactly as American public opinion shapers would have it.

Suddenly, Americans who might pass out or be horrified at being forced to listen to what is called "punk rock" are moved to ecstatic fan worship by stories of pussy power Russian women who hate Putin and represent as much public opinion in their country as cricket fans do in the USA. And a nation with an economic crisis gripping millions, suffering an open season on shooting civilians and an ecological problem with fossil fuel use growing worse each day is supposed to be outraged because stray dogs in Sochi are mistreated and gays in Russia are not as free as homeless people are here. Hello?

An elected leader in the Ukraine, whatever his faults, is under attack by forces that might want the nation split in two, and that may yet result from the present assault. An attempt to incorporate parts of the Ukraine culturally aligned with the west into the NATO military shopping mall, thereby creating a further menace to Russia, is supported by manipulated american public opinion from conservative Fox to moderate PBS and including some Pacifica progressives (?) anxious to look politically correct.

How can it be "democratic" for an elected regime in the Ukraine or Venezuela to be thrown out of office by an uprising of some citizens aided by U.S financing and many other outside forces? And now the spineless president who grovels before the Israeli lobby and remains mute at the savaging of Palestinians is making bold threats that violence in the Ukraine will incur harsh response from Master Race-Chosen People-Exceptional Nation headquarters in the USA.

Reports of mass vomiting from Vultures, Hyenas, Ghouls and others that feed on the dead may not be true but seem to make sense under these circumstances.

If the archconservative right demanded Obama be thrown out for his sins of socialism, Muslimism, alien birth or other fantasies entertained by some of these middle school dropouts, would American liberals and progressives rush to join the Tea Party? Actually, some might benefit from doing so if only to confront up close and personal a criticism of nothing more than personalities, which is common to both sides of the two-wings but really one-party TV show foisted on the nation as "democracy."

But present response to the situation referred to in the opening quote, especially from the dangerously crumbling minority that calls itself "the international community", needs to be a concern not only to the people in Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Thailand and the Ukraine, but even more to the people of the USA who play a major role in this crisis nearing a dangerous point of no return for the real international community.