In other spying news, it came to light recently through a television programme and book that anarchist organisation DAM in the UK was infiltrated. I haven't read the book by the copper/spy myself just read an extract on another forum. I saw the tv propgram though about the cops who even went to the lengths of having children with women they were spying on (and then disappeared into thin air!), absolutely disgusting stuff. Weren't memebers of DAM close to the origins of the ICC?

(Edit/Update)

Ok, so I couldn't quite remember the history of the origins of the ICC but it turns out (thanks Wikipedia!) that part of the ICC was formed by a split from DAM (Direct Action Movement/Solidarity Federation) called World Revolution. However, the dates don't match. Here is where I read about the spying/infiltration:

The Undercover book claims three SDS spies were sent into anarchist groups in the early 1990s - DAM 1990-1993, and two in Class War. One was the one Shayler has previously described meeting, though Francis/'Black' recounts the scene differently:
 

One was in place in February 1992 when he had a meeting in a London safe house with David Shayler, the MI5 officer later jailed for breaking the Official Secrets Act after leaking details of alleged incompetence in the secret services. Shayler had at that time been assigned to investigate whether Class War posed a threat to British democracy. The SDS officer supplied intelligence to the Security Service, and had become an official MI5informant, designated the code number M2589.

According to Shayler, the ‘peculiar arrangement’ in which the SDS officer lived the life of an anarchist for six days a week, returning only occasionally to his friends and family, had ‘affected the agent psychologically’. Shayler recounts: ‘After around four years of pretending to be an anarchist, he had clearly become one. To use the service jargon, he had gone native. He drank about six cans of Special Brew during the debrief, and regaled us with stories about beating up uniformed officers as part of his “cover”. Partly as a result, he was “terminated” after the 1992 general election. Without his organisational skills, Class War fell apart.’

According to Black, the true story was a little different. He says the SDS officer in question was a ‘top end’ operative who served the unit well. During the encounter with the MI5 officer, he acted the part of a coarse anarchist because he had little time for Shayler, who was perceived to be a ‘desk wanker’ – though Black concedes that ‘some MI5 desk officers who came out to talk to us were superb and we had a very, very good relationship with them’.

http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/tout-exposed-mark-stone-kennedy-exposed-as-undercover-police-officer.262238/page-55#post-12350090

So, Snowden has been granted temporary assylum in Russia under the promise that he won't engage in any more activity to "harm the United States." Interestingly, just before this, the US had attempted to give Russia assurances that it wouldn't execute or torture Snowden. Of course, its already been demonstrated that the US has committed torture in the recent past. What good is a torturer's word that it won't torture? Of course, this is made all the more ironic by the fact that the Russian state has treaty obligations not to extradict anyone to a place where they may face execution without reasonable assurances to the contrary, even though the Russian state almost certinaly enages in extra-judicial executions even beyond its territorial limits (Litvinenko?) They are all a bunch of hypocrites and snakes playing a game of kabuki theatre for our consumption. If I were Snowden, I'd continue to sleep with one eye open. He might just find himself a very useful pawn in the game of Russo-American relations.

radicalchains wrote:

In case anyone's missed it, the Wikileaks source Bradley Manning has been given life in prison. A pretty good deterrent and warning to others.

I think Manning's sentencing hearing is still ongoing, but yes he could be sentenced to prison for the rest of his life. The guy who held the three young women hostage in Cleveland was sentenced to life plus 1000 years today. However grievous his crime was this just comes off as totally gratuitous--a symbol of just how powerful and perpetual the state thinks it is. Does it really expect to be around 1000 years from now?

It's not hard to find the symptoms of decomposition and crisis in both the Bradley Manning and NSA spying scandals. Manning was apparently an 'unstable' and troubled personality who would never have been accepted in the US military let alone in a sensitive intelligence role if it wasn't for the dire shortage of manpower as a result of Iraq, etc., which meant the military deliberately resorted to recruiting not only 'unfit' individuals like Manning but the predictable crop of psychopaths, gang members and criminals, etc. who then equally predictably went on to commit atrocities on civilians...  Manning himself extraordinarily managed to copy millions of classified documents by the devious and cunning ruse of…er, copying them on cds while pretending to sing along to Lady GaGa…

I also find it illuminating that the key facts in the whole NSA spying scandal together with its GCHQ link appear to have been extracted from…a set of powerpoint slides! The involvement of private contractors like Snowden in the most secret core of the US secret state and the privatisation of its most secret programs surely says something about the growing incapacity of even the most powerful capitalist state to function in a coherent, consistent way without resort to a bunch of contractors. This is not to underestimate the threat such state activity poses, but I think it does raise a questionmark about the ability of the state to make effective use of the mass of data it collects and to act on it - which must inevitably come down to a bunch of workers employed in a huge bureaucracy. The history of intelligence is already littered with huge examples of bureaucratic incompetence, missed clues, catastrophic failures etc.- and that was before the current crisis.

I used to think, with reference to MH above, that the sheer weight of information available to the intelligence services could never be effectively processed. But whatever incompetencies of the secret services in the past - and they didn't do bad in helping to set up and defeat the miners in Britain in the mid-80's  for a major victory of the bourgeoisie  for example - we are now at another level for the effectiveness of surveillance and the filtration and classification of all and any threats to the ruling class. I don't think that it matters that this is "contracted out". In fact this very contracting out shows the widespread nature of the totalitarian state under its democratic disguise. Armies, fighting forces across the world, particularly of the American and British states have had a large element of contracting out for some time npw. There are more "contracted out" soldiers paid for by the US in Iraq now and I guess it's similar in Afghanistan. Individual soldiers under their democratic leaders have been turned in psychopaths, gangsters and atrocity-committing criminals for many decades now. I think that one could argue that this tendency to brutalisation, which emanates from a system which is itself fundamentally criminal from the perspective of humanity, has, along with its spying activities, been perfected along with programmes, procedures and  technology. The element of decomposition is also shown in the development of these brutal and parasitic elements of the state.

I think that Alf should have checked with his masters in Paris Central before announcing on libcom that this site was back up and running.

I generally agree with AS's post above. Just a point of clarification though over the 150 militias existing in Libya - it was in fact 150 in the third city of Misrata alone. Still in Libya, more weight is being given to rumours that the attack on US "installations" in Benghazi, September 11 last, was against dozens of CIA agents based there who were involved in transporting weapons from Libyan armouries to Turkey in order to be transported on to Syrian "rebels". There doesn't seem much doubt that Libyan weaponry has been sent to Syria via the CIA.

On Boston: two likeable lads, an ordinary kitchen appliance, ie, a pressure cooker and there's no amount of surveillance that will pick that up (even though the US was explicitly warned by the Russians). On the British undercover cops and the unfortunate women "raped by the state": For the great part, the protests that these women were involved in were totally innocuous, no threat to the state whatsover and, if anything, a boost to the democratic process (that is "we are free to protest"). However, as Serge showed in general, the police forces have to conjure up threats - indeed in some of these cases in Britain it was the police agents themselves that were the most active threats - in order to ingratiate themselves with their masters in the state and justify their own existence and expenditure. All this is siezed upon by a state that is totally paranoid about any threat to it, real or imagined.

Now we know how many work at the infamous Paris Center.