Your journey will look something like this…

Putin is absolutely right but he fails to go on and mention just what aggression means:

At the Nuremberg Trials, aggression was defined as:

essentially an evil thing…to initiate a war of aggression…is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

A war of aggression contains within it all the crimes that follow and thus is the supreme war crime. Without the explicit approval of the UNSC, according to the United Nations Charter, any military action is thus an aggressive war and by logic of the Nuremberg Precedent (which formed the foundation of international law post-WWII) is a war crime.

Not like that has stopped the United States before however.

What some would call “savage imperialism” and others “a future for which America is both the gatekeeper and the model.”, the history of America using force goes back as far as the origins of this nation, of the colonies which formed the nation.

Whatever you wish to call it, it is undeniable that in the past two decades alone, the United States has seen itself use force in numerous conflicts–force which may have been legally used or not, more often it was not legal:

• The Gulf War
• Kosovo
• The Iraq War
• The Afghanistan War
• The Libya Intervention

Just to name a very small slice of the overt actions taken up

Influential countries already bypass the United Nations, namely the United States. The United States acts as a sort of rouge state, repeatedly ignoring UN assembly votes, international court rulings, and anything which does not agree with America’s interests.

BOOM! goes the dynamite

If anyone was taking it seriously that whole tidbit about destroying any information regarding officials of the U.S. Government, do understand that this clause completely eviscerates Clause 7. Now, the ISNU is allowed to keep information about the activities, policies, and views of U.S. officials but you have to ask: how will they figure out which of the SIGINT relates to those things?

There is exactly one way to do this: by going through all of the data regarding the government officials.

After going through all of the data, the ISNU can then make judgement about what relates to these officials and if it happens to see secrets we don’t want it to see, well that’s too bad (but technically it didn’t happen since they destroyed everything on recognition).

One should note however that outside of the government, intelligence officials have deemed it necessary to watch government officials of all branches on all levels and allow Israel to store information regarding activities, policies, and views. Such information will most likely be used as blackmail or political maneuvering, there is really no other purpose for letting Israel keep this data than to report back to the US with it and feed it to relevant lobbying groups such as AIPAC or AIPAC or AIPAC.

Again, the disgust with civil liberties, with basic rules of law, with decency even, is thinly veiled.

This subsection, in conjunction with one of the final stipulations of the agreement, once thoroughly analyzed reveal the purpose of the whole entire agreement: to allow the United States to bypass domestic spying laws regarding privacy and such by outsourcing the job to *trusted allies like Israel.

Nevermind the fact the United States considers Israel to be one of the most aggressive intelligence agencies in the world when it comes to spying on the United States. Or that they are one of our targets for cyber attacks.

Let’s break it down:

This document whizzes by quite a few alarming circumstances which include, but by no means are limited to:

• The NSA spying on all U.S. Government officials including those within the White House, Cabinet, agencies, Congress, US Federal Courts, and the Supreme Court.

• The NSA, “on good faith”, handing over internal surveillance on aforementioned persons while weakly stating that Israel should “destroy [this] on recognition” and “process only for purposes unrelated to intelligence against the U.S.”

• The NSA’s ability, without oversight, to store communications and raw metadata of its own government officials

• The fact that this program is essentially what Bradley Manning went to jail for 35 years over: sharing classified documents with those unauthorized to see them. This agreement does not authorize Israel to view classified internal United States documents, it states that quite explicitly.

On point one, the fact that the NSA has the ability (legally or not) internalized right to spy on not only all American citizens' communications, but the communications of its government officials should give pause. It makes it clear that not only does the NSA store all information, perpetually, as many whistle-blowers have insisted (and the NSA has denied, vehemently) but that there is no sense of privacy or regulation within the intelligence community’s quest to save America. Not even the President, the Supreme Court, or Congress are safe from being spied on. Not a single branch of government.

Seeing as how such a program is enthusiastically supported by the corporate media and politicians across the spectrum, it is unlikely this program will be removed barring extreme public pressure. Such a program could prove dangerous in the future if a serious neoconservative came to power and began the inexorable march towards totalitarian government (already too easy in a perpetual war state and apathetic civil society with at best weak democratic institutions).

On to points two and three…the handing over of all collected data to Israel to sift through. The United States is not a nation that leaves things to chance, especially not its intelligence. It spies, after all, on everything from corporations, allies, citizens, and as we now know, government officials. Don’t forget, they also actively sought out ways to break encryption and forced internet companies to make encryption standards under the NSA’s control..

With all of these programs being closely held secrets from even allies–other than the UK who was our junior partner in may of these endeavors–you have to wonder why would the US give it free willy to Mossad? Well, the existence of Israel is guaranteed to some extent with access to this information as they can better ascertain potential risks (maybe?) and Israel is of most import in the 50+ year long proxy-war(s) carried out by the United States against the Middle East, a war very important as it will determine who will control the “greatest material prize in history”: Middle East oil.

In addition, handing over all this information allows the Israeli government to spy on the United States' citizens, possibly catching any data that the NSA may fail to notice (or acting on data in ways best kept off the record). It would be far-fetched to believe that this data was given to Israel with the assumption they would never, ever dare abuse it or spy on our citizens or use it in any way against us. Such a belief would be, quite simply, insane.

• On point four, this is as about as close as you can get to seeing the contempt for due process of law or civil liberties. The United States' stance towards its citizens is similar to how it acts on the world stage: “do as I say, not as I do”. So we–being the United States–can give other governments information we obtained from illegally watching our citizens and government officials, but you–a concerned citizen–better not even think about revealing our illegal surveillance systems legally to press organizations that support transparency.

This agreement is as a whole a great example of how much disregard the United States, like any historical great power, cares little for concepts such as rights or statues. Those are pesky limiting stipulations, they interfere with its awesome might, and so they are non-issues except in a contradictory way when the state is promising to protect them by destroying them.

#Noam Chomsky

In other words, ensure American hegemony prevails. This entails policies ranging from discretely nurturing revolutions to spying on major transnational corporations which are not based in the US.