Over the last 40 years, the U.S. government has relied on extreme fear-mongering to demonize transparency. In sum, every time an unwanted whistleblower steps forward, we are treated to the same messaging: You're all going to die because of these leakers and the journalists who publish their disclosures! Lest you think that's hyperbole, consider this headline from last week based on an interview with outgoing NSA chief Keith Alexander:

The NSA engages in this fear-mongering not only publicly but also privately. As part of its efforts to persuade news organizations not to publish newsworthy stories from Snowden materials, its representatives constantly say the same thing: If you publish what we're doing, it will endanger lives, including NSA personnel, by making people angry about what we're doing in their countries and want to attack us.

But whenever it suits the agency to do so-meaning when it wants to propagandize on its own behalf-the NSA casually discloses even its most top secret activities in the very countries where such retaliation is most likely. Anonymous ex-officials boasted to the Washington Post last July in detail about the role the agency plays in helping kill people by drones. The Post dutifully headlined its story: "NSA Growth Fueled by Need to Target Terrorists."

And now, Keith Alexander's long-time deputy just fed one of the most pro-NSA reporters in the country, the Los Angeles Times' Ken Dilanian, some extraordinarily sensitive, top secret information about NSA activities in Iraq, which the Times published in an article that reads exactly like an NSA commercial:

FT. MEADE, Md. - In nearly nine years as head of the nation's largest intelligence agency, Gen. Keith Alexander presided over a vast expansion of digital spying, acquiring information in a volume his predecessors would have found unimaginable.

In Iraq, for example, the National Security Agency went from intercepting only about half of enemy signals and taking hours to process them to being able to collect, sort and make available every Iraqi email, text message and phone-location signal in real time, said John "Chris" Inglis, who recently retired as the NSA's top civilian.

The overhaul, which Alexander ordered shortly after taking leadership of the agency in August 2005, enabled U.S. ground commanders to find out when an insurgent leader had turned on his cellphone, where he was and whom he was calling.

"Absolutely invaluable," retired Gen. David H. Petraeus, the former U.S. commander in Iraq, said in an interview as he described the NSA's efforts, which led to the dismantling of networks devoted to burying roadside bombs.

What makes this morning's disclosure most remarkable is what happened with last week's Washington Post report on the MYSTIC program, which, said the Post, provides "comprehensive metadata access and content" for entire countries where it is used. The agency "has built a surveillance system capable of recording '100 percent' of a foreign country's telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place," reported the Post.

The program, noted the Post, has been in use in one country since 2011, and "planning documents two years later anticipated similar operations elsewhere." Specifically, the fiscal year 2013 intelligence budget identified "five more countries" in which the agency planned to implement the system.

The Post did not report the names of any of those five countries, nor did it name the one where MYSTIC is already operational. Instead, "at the request of U.S. officials, the Washington Post is withholding details that could be used to identify the country where the system is being employed or other countries where its use was envisioned." The paper posted a short excerpt from the budget document's discussion of MYSTIC but withheld and redacted the passages that revealed the names of these countries.

A primary argument NSA typically makes in such cases is that disclosure would endanger the lives of NSA personnel by inviting retaliation from people in those countries who might become angry when learning that their calls are being intercepted en masse. From the Post article: "NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines, in an e-mailed statement, said that 'continuous and selective reporting of specific techniques and tools used for legitimate U.S. foreign intelligence activities is highly detrimental to the national security of the United States and of our allies, and places at risk those we are sworn to protect.'"

Leave aside how corrupted this rationale is: It would mean that no bad acts of the U.S. government should ever be reported, lest those disclosures make people angry and want to attack government agents. Indeed, that is the rationale that the Obama administration used to protect evidence of Bush-era torture from disclosure (to disclose torture photos, Obama said, "would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger").

What is so extraordinary is that the NSA-at exactly the same time it is telling news organizations that disclosing its collect-it-all activities will endanger its personnel-runs to its favorite L.A. Times reporter and does exactly that, for no reason other than to make itself look good and to justify these activities. ("'Absolutely invaluable,' retired Gen. David H. Petraeus, the former U.S. commander in Iraq, said.")

This demonstrates how brazenly the NSA manipulates and exploits the consultation process in which media outlets are forced (mostly by legal considerations) to engage prior to publication of Top Secret documents: They'll claim with no evidence that a story they don't want published will "endanger lives," but then go and disclose something even more sensitive if they think doing so scores them a propaganda coup. It also highlights how cynical and frivolous are their claims that whistleblowers and journalists Endanger National Security™ by reporting incriminating information about their activities which they have hidden, given how casually and frequently they disclose Top Secret information for no reason other than to advance their own PR interests. It's the dynamic whereby the same administration that has prosecuted more leakers than all prior administrations combined freely leaks classified information to make Obama look tough or to help produce a pre-election hagiography film.

Thus, writes the L.A. Times: Thanks to Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, the world came to know many of the agency's most carefully guarded secrets. Actually, in this case, the NSA's "most carefully guarded secrets" were spilled thanks to Chris Inglis and the paper's own Ken Dilanian. But because the purpose was to serve the NSA's interests and to propagandize the public, none of the people who pretend to object to leaks-when they shine light on the bad acts of the most powerful officials-will utter a peep of protest. That's because, as always, secrecy designations and condemnations of leaks are about shielding those officials from scrutiny and embarrassment, not any legitimate considerations of national security or any of the other ostensible purposes.
(c) 2014 Glenn Greenwald. is a journalist, constitutional lawyer, commentator, author of three New York Times best-selling books on politics and law, and a staff writer and editor at First Look media. His fifth book, No Place to Hide, about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world, will be released in April 2014. Prior to his collaboration with Pierre Omidyar, Glenn's column was featured at Guardian US and Salon. 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.

NEW ZEALAND HAS decided to change its flag. This was only briefly mentioned in the media here. But it is a significant example for us.

The old flag is based on the British one, the Union Jack, which signifies the union of England, Scotland and Ireland. The three different crosses are integrated in an intricate design.

But what does this flag mean for today's New Zealanders? Very little. Sure, they are close to the United Kingdom and to the Anglo-Saxon civilization, but they are a new nation, a separate nation, with a separate history, geopolitical orientation and national character.

A national flag should unite all the citizens of a country, evoke their loyalty and strengthen their patriotism. It certainly should not leave out significant portions of the population.

Therefore the government of the southern island-state has decided to discard the flag that has a meaning only for a part of the population and adopt a new one, which will be meaningful to all. A competition for a new design is under way.

This belatedly follows the example of Canada, another former British "dominion", which discarded a similar flag and adopted a new one, in a wise effort to create a symbol which would appeal both to the English-speaking and the French-speaking Canadians, as well as to the Innuit and other indigenous peoples.

THE PROBLEM with our flag is very much the same. Adopted by one of the first Zionist congresses, it is based on the Jewish prayer shawl and the ancient Shield of David. It was designed for a world-wide political movement whose aim was to create a secure homeland for the Jewish people. With the establishment of the State of Israel it became its national flag.

It serves today as the flag of the state, the flag of the international Zionist movement, and, in the eyes of some, the flag of all Jews.

It is not, however, the flag of all of Israel's citizens. For the Arab citizens it means nothing except discrimination and exclusion. It reminds them, everywhere and at all times, that they are at best second-class citizens, present but no quite belonging.

From the first day of the state, I have advocated the adoption of a new, inclusive flag. Like today's New Zealanders I felt that with all due respect to our origin, history and cultural background, we Israelis live in a different reality. A large number of our co-citizens are not Jewish, and the symbols of our state should reflect this.

Frankly, I also think that it is not a very good flag. Flags should be seen from a distance. Originally, flags were used to mark the place of the king in a battle, so that every soldier knew where his commander was. It should stand out.

The colors of our flag - white and light blue - are aesthetic, but ineffective. Against the background of the blue sky and the white clouds, it almost disappears. Raise together a dozen white-and-blue and a single red flag, and your eyes will be drawn to the red one.

BUT THE main argument against the flag is less aesthetic than political.

Long before Binyamin Netanyahu came up with the ploy of demanding that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the "Nation-State of the Jewish people", our flag already reflected this pretense.

It is much more than the flag of an ordinary state. It embodies the claim of the state to represent all the Jews around the world.

Have the Jews been asked whether they want to be represented by the government of Israel?

Curiously enough, this question is never raised. Not by the Palestinians, not by the Americans, not even by the Israelis themselves.,p> Before our government demands that the Palestinian leadership recognize Israel as the Nation-State etc, should not the Jews in Los Angeles, Moscow and Johannesburg be asked?

Without a world-wide referendum of the Jewish Diaspora and the affirmative answer of a large majority, the Israeli claim is baseless. Indeed, it is a form of imperialism, an effort to impose by force a kind of sovereignty on a subject people.

Before such a referendum can take place, several questions must be answered: Who is a Jew? A son or daughter of a Jewish mother? What about a Jewish father? People converted to the Jewish religion? By whom? Only by an Orthodox rabbi? What about converts accepted by "reform" or "conservative" rabbis? What about atheists, can they become Jews represented by Israel?

About all these questions there is no agreement among the Israelis themselves. So what meaning does the demand for recognition have, except as a ploy to sabotage peace negotiations?

THE QESTION of a referendum also arose this week in a different context.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is restless again. True, his entire ministry is on strike. The main office and all the Israeli embassies in the world are shut. But Lieberman does not rest.

This week he announced that he had instructed the legal advisor of the ministry to submit a legal opinion about his proposal for territorial exchanges. According to his plan, a large area of sovereign Israeli territory inhabited by Arab citizens would be transferred to the future Palestinian state, together with its population, in return for Palestinian areas inhabited by the settlers.

The undisguised purpose of the swap would be to reduce the number of Arab citizens, making the Jewish state more Jewish.

On the face of it, this may be seen as a fair proposal.

First of all, it means that Lieberman is for the establishment of a Palestinian state next to Israel. For an extreme rightist, that by itself is remarkable.

All Israeli ultra-nationalists are facing a dilemma: what is more important, geography or demography? The Jewishness of the entire land which was promised to us by God, or the Jewishness of the population of the Jewish state?

The bulk of the rightist movements prefer the land to the people. They want to keep all the country "from the sea to the river," even if it means that the Palestinians will be a majority of the population. For them, an eternal occupation would be a good solution, an apartheid state is also acceptable.

Another wing of the rightist camp believes that it is more important to have a state in which the number of non-Jews would be negligible, guaranteeing that the Jewish state would remain Jewish forever. The Lieberman solution is designed to achieve this.

For this purpose, Lieberman is prepared to change the geography of Israel in such a way that the "narrow waist" would become even narrower. Between Netanya on the sea and Palestinian Tulkarem, the state is now only 14 km wide. Lieberman would narrow this even more. Since the narrowness of the state is often quoted as the reason for annexing the West Bank, this by itself is quite remarkable.

THE LEGAL advisor took his task seriously and produced a long and well-reasoned report. He dealt mainly with the question whether such a solution would be compatible with international law. Nor surprisingly, considering his situation, his answer was yes.

No population would be removed. No property expropriated. The Palestinians living there would be able to retain their Israeli citizenship, if they desire it, as well as their Israeli social security rights. They would just cease being inhabitants of the State of Israel and become inhabitants of the State of Palestine.

A fair, even benevolent solution. Except for one little point: the Palestinian inhabitants would not be asked.

After a thorough study of precedents, the legal advisor concluded that international law does not demand a plebiscite. And indeed, Lieberman strongly objects to any such consultation.

Why? Because the people concerned have already made it absolutely clear that they would refuse such a transfer.

That is a great compliment for Israel. In spite of all the discrimination, in spite of all the justified complaints, the Arab citizens of Israel wish to remain a part of the state, rather than become a part of the future Palestinian state.

Their second-class status is obvious. The news reminds us of it almost daily. What is less obvious, but not less real, is that the Arab population is deeply rooted in Israeli reality, economic and political.

The other side of the coin is that Israel derives large benefits from this population. They work in the Israeli economy. They pay taxes. The argument that they do not pay their share is a myth - one cannot live in Israel without paying taxes, both direct and indirect (unless one is very rich).

MANY COUNTRIES in history have learned that expelling a population is often extremely harmful for the economy. When France expelled the protestant Huguenots, it became a poorer country. Prussia, which invited them in, became rich and powerful. This is even more true for the expulsion of the Jews and Muslims from Spain and Portugal. Both countries deteriorated, while the Ottoman Empire, which embraced the Jews, profited.

The Arab citizens of Israel are a great asset for the state. Far from getting rid of them, we should do everything possible to make them feel at home.

The tempo of U.S. military occupation of Africa quickens by the day. Seizing every real and manufactured crisis as an opportunity, Washington has created a continental infrastructure that has already reduced most African armies to appendages of U.S. foreign policy, dependencies of the Pentagon. American armed forces operate across the length and breadth of Africa and exercise effective control over the armies of nearly all of the continent's constituent states.

According to a study by Nick Turse, AFRICOM, the U.S. military command, last year carried out "activities" in every country on the continent except Western Sahara, Guinea Bissau, Eritrea, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Madagascar and Somalia. Somalia doesn't show up in AFRICOM's 2013 mission schedule because the country is nominally under the auspices of African Union "peacekeeping" forces. However, the U.S. and Europe pay for every African soldier and weapon engaged in the occupation of Somalia, while the overall operation is run by the CIA. (Egypt is considered part of the Middle East, for U.S. military purposes.)

Especially in recent years, the U.S. often acts in concert with France, whose national ideology is white supremacy - no matter whether socialists or conservatives control the government - and which has never accepted decolonization in principle or practice. The Tuareg and, later, jihadist rebellion in Mali, and the destabilization of the Central African Republic - both French semi-colonies - brought France and AFRICOM into intimate operational contact, with the U.S. acting as airlift for French forces in Africa.

Born in the last year of George W. Bush's presidency but thoroughly a creature of the Obama administration, AFRICOM has molded its public persona around the bogus doctrine of humanitarian military intervention, or Responsibility to Protect (R2P). AFRICOM has usurped much of the U.S. State Department's food aid distribution duties on the continent, and provides medical care to hundreds of thousands of African military families, thus cementing a bond between the Pentagon and virtually all the continent's armies - none of which can move effectively through Africa's undeveloped terrain without U.S. logistical support. The African Union seeks legitimacy through "peacekeeping" missions that it is wholly incapable of executing without financing, equipment, training and every other conceivable support from AFRICOM or the U.S. clandestine services.

President Obama orchestrated the Joseph Kony hysteria of 2011 as an excuse to send at least 100 U.S. Special Forces troops to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, the Central African Republic and the new state of South Sudan. Kony had been in hiding for years, maybe dead, his Lord's Resistance Army decimated and no danger to Uganda, which has felt safe enough to send many thousands of its troops on (well-paid) "peacekeeping" missions around the continent, at U.S. request. The Green Berets have not yet found the elusive Kony-monster - although they have been busy dealing with South Sudan's civil war between U.S.-allied generals.

Late last month, Obama used the failure to find Kony as the rationale for sending a unit of Osprey troop-carrying aircraft to Uganda, including 150 Air Force Special Operations troops to service and guard them. No matter what the Pentagon calls it, the deployment constitutes a Special Operations base, and no doubt a precursor to other bases throughout the region. (U.S. military doctrine requires such air mobility between bases.) Uganda says the Osprey deployment is temporary. However, it appears that Joseph Kony has a few more good years left as Africa's bin Laden, the search for whom requires the movement of mountains of men, machines, money and weapons - all, of course, to save little children from capture by the boogeyman of central Africa. A humanitarian military intervention.

The Ospreys and Special Forces troops are a small part of AFRICOM's continental theater of war. The largest U.S. unit on permanent duty in Africa, the 2nd Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Infantry Division, "carried out 128 separate 'activities' in 28 African countries" during 2013, according to Nick Turse. Those nations include Niger, Uganda, Ghana, Malawi, Burundi, Mauritania, Niger, South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Chad, Togo, Cameroon, SAo TomE and Príncipe, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Lesotho, Ethiopia, Tanzania, South Sudan, and Cameroon. In previous military exercises, up to 36 African nations have participated - all of them outfitted with U.S. command-and-control communications equipment, requiring American trainers and maintenance.

To the extent that AFRICOM ensnares the militaries of the continent in dependence on the Pentagon, African sovereignty becomes a very bad joke. Many millions are at risk from the very presence of a military command whose reason-for-being is instability and war - and which must create such conditions to ensure its continued existence on the continent. Six million have already died in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the eastern regions of which were militarily seized by AFRICOM's most reliable partners, Rwanda and Uganda. More than a million have died in Somalia, and who knows how many in the Somali-populated Ogaden region of Ethiopia, since the U.S.-backed 2006 Ethiopian invasion, the aftermath of which has made the Horn of Africa a bastion of AFRICOM and its proxies. AFRICOM brass are most proud of their role in the 2011 bombing and regime change in Libya, a disaster that has destabilized not only Libya but the entire tier of the continent to the south - justifying renewed French intervention and the ensuing Franco-American alliance as "humanitarian" co-protectors of Africa.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel could teach US President Barack Obama one or two things about how to establish a dialogue with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

As if Obama would listen. He'd rather boost his constitutional law professor self, and pompously lecture an elite eurocrat audience in the glittering Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, like he did this Wednesday, on how Putin is the greatest threat to the US-administered global order since World War II. Well, it didn't go that well; most eurocrats were busy taking selfies or twittering.

Putin, meanwhile, met with the CEO of German engineering and electrical conglomerate Siemens, Joe Kaeser, at his official residence outside Moscow. Siemens invested more than US$1.1 billion in Russia over the past two years, and that, Kaeser said, is bound to continue. Angela was certainly taking notes.

Obama couldn't behave otherwise. The constitutional law expert knows nothing about Russia, in his (meager) political career never had to understand how Russia works, and may even fear Russia - surrounded as he is by a coterie of spectacularly mediocre aids. His Brussels rhetorical tour de force yielded absolutely nothing - apart from the threat that if Putin persisted in his "aggression" against eastern Ukraine or even NATO members-countries the president of the United States would unroll a much stiffer sanction package.

What else is new, considering this by supreme CIA asset and former Pentagon head in the first Obama administration, Bob Gates, is what passes for political analysis in the US.

The $1 trillion game-changer

Demonized 24/7 by the sprawling Western propaganda machine as a ruthless aggressor, Putin and his Kremlin advisers just need to play Sun Tzu. The regime changers in Kiev are already mired in a vicious catfight. And even Ukraine's acting Prime Minister Arseniy Petrovych "Yats" Yatsenyuk has identified the gloomy times ahead, stressing that the signature of the economic part of the association agreement between Ukraine and the EU has been postponed - so there will be no "negative consequences" for industrialized eastern Ukraine.

Translation: he knows this will be the kiss of death for Ukrainian industry, on top of it coupled with an imminent structural adjustment by the International Monetary Fund linked to the EU (maybe) bailing out a bankrupt Ukraine.

Asia Times Online's Spengler coined a formulation: "A specter is haunting Europe, and that is the specter of a Russian-Chinese alliance at the expense of Europe." The alliance is already on - manifested in the G-20, the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. There are military technology synergies on the horizon - the ultra-sophisticated S-500 air defense system is to be unveiled by Moscow, and Beijing would absolutely love to have it. But for the real fireworks, just wait a few weeks, when Putin visits Beijing in May.

That's when he will sign the famous $1 trillion gas deal according to which Gazprom will supply China's CNPC with 3.75 billion cubic feet of gas a day for 30 years, starting in 2018 (China's current daily gas demand is around 16 billion cubic feet).

Gazprom may still collect most of its profits from Europe, but Asia is its privileged future. On the competition front, the hyper-hyped US shale "revolution" is a myth - as much as the notion the US will be suddenly increasing exports of gas to the rest of the world any time soon.

Gazprom will use this mega-deal to boost investment in eastern Siberia - which sooner rather than later will be configured as the privileged hub for gas shipments to both Japan and South Korea. That's the ultimate (substantial) reason why Asia won't "isolate" Russia. ( See Asia will not 'isolate' Russia, Asia Times Online, March 25, 2014.)

Not to mention the much-anticipated "thermonuclear" (for the petrodollar) possibility that Russia and China will agree payment for the Gazprom-CNPC deal may be in yuan or rubles. That will be the dawn of a basket of currencies as the new international reserve currency - a key BRICS objective and the ultimate, incendiary, new (economic) fact on the ground.

Time to invest in Pipelineistan

Even though its centrality pales compared to Asia, Europe, of course, is not "expendable" for Russia. There have been rumbles in Brussels by some poodles about canceling the South Stream pipeline - pumping Russian gas underneath the Black Sea (and bypassing Ukraine) to Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Greece, Italy and Austria. The Bulgarian Economy and Energy Minister, Dragomir Stoynev, said no way. Same for the Czech Republic, because it badly needs Russian investment, and Hungary, which recently signed a nuclear energy deal with Moscow.

The only other possibility for the EU would be Caspian gas, from Azerbaijan - following on the trail of the Zbig Brzezinski-negotiated Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline, which was conceived expressly to bypass both Russia and Iran. As if the EU would have the will, the speed and funds to spend billions of dollars to build yet another pipeline virtually tomorrow, and assuming Azerbaijan had enough supply capacity (it doesn't; other actors, like Kazakhstan or ultra-unreliable Turkmenistan, which prefers to sell its gas to China, would have to be part of the picture).

Well, nobody ever lost money betting on the cluelessness of Brussels eurocrats. South Stream and other energy projects will create a lot of jobs and investment in many of the most troubled EU nations. Extra sanctions? No less than 91% of Poland's energy, and 86% of Hungary's, come from Russia. Over 20% of the foreign lending of French banks is to Russian companies. No less than 68 Russian companies trade at the London Stock Exchange. For the Club Med nations, Russian tourism is now a lifeline (1 million went to Italy last year, for instance.)

US Think Tankland is trying to fool American public opinion into believing what the Obama administration should be applying is a replay of the "containment" policy of 1945-1989 to "limit the development of Russia as a hegemonic power". The "recipe": weaponize everybody and his neighbor, from the Baltic nations to Azerbaijan, to "contain" Russia. The New Cold War is on because, from the point of view of US so-called "elites", it never really left.