2014: The Erosion of Democracy and Accountability   29 Dec 2014

By Ann-Marie de Veer
Saturday 27 December 2014

The year 2014 began in the wake of seven months of revelations sourced by the whistleblower Edward Snowden who had exposed the illegal mass surveillance of the Worlds' public by ECHELON, a global signals intelligence (SIGINT) network operated by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US). The information that was subsequently released by numerous media outlets throughout the World identified the UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the US's National Security Agency (NSA) as the rogue agencies primarily responsible for the illegal intrusion into the private lives of the people.

Seven weeks earlier, on 7 November 2013, the UK's Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) of Parliament had held its first ever public hearing into the issues raised by the reports. The 90 minute charade that ensued was clearly intended to both mislead and placate the general public as an analysis of the event demonstrates. Over in the US, on 17 January 2014, while the CongressionalIntelligence Committee (CIC), which includes members of the Senate and the House of Representatives, were continuing with their combative stance on the debacle, Obama launched into a verbose dictum offering a recipe of non-change change:

The Facade of Representative Parliamentary Democratic Accountability
Nostalgia, Deceit and Lies: The Tradecraft of Obama
Result: Neither the UK, nor the US, have curtailed their illegal mass surveillance of the public or been held to account for their actions: in fact, both GCHQ and the NSA have gone on to legalise and expand their activities respectively.

Across the English Channel, in July and August of 2013, the Merkel regime in Germany were busy trying to bury a story that had appeared in the local media in which their complicity in the mass surveillance of the German public was clear. Pofalla, the head of the Bundestag's Chancellery at that time, rebuffed the accusations claiming that the German SIGINT service, theBundesnachrichtendienst (BND), were merely using the XKEYSCORE programme for testing purposes only. However, Pofalla's resignation in December 2013 and the subsequent release of Bundestag documents revealed that the BND and the NSA were in bed together. Not soon after, on 17 February In Australia, the Abbott regime were also busy refuting the activities of its SIGINT agency, theAustralian Signals Directorate (ASD), who, in cooperation with the Australian Secret Intelligence Service] (ASIS), had conducted intelligence operations against Timor Leste for the sole purpose of defrauding it of its mineral assets:

In Flagrante Delicto: The BND and the NSA
Australia: A Thief By Any Other Name Would Be As Villainous
Result: Neither the German regime, for its mass surveillance of its people, nor the Australian regime, for its use of SIGINT for commercial purposes, have been held to account for their actions.

As the year progressed, up in Scotland, we began to see evidence of just how far the English security services, and its willing accomplices, were prepared to go to ensure that the Scott's did not secede from the UK in the September referendum on independence. Over in Central and Southern Asia it became clear that the Western Industrial Military Complex was winding down its operations in Afghanistan and had moved on to a new target in Eastern Europe, Ukraine. The subsequent use of subversion, insurgency and state sponsored terrorism bore all the hallmarks of Western neocolonialism, including the collateral damage:

MI5 Subversion of State Power in Scotland
MH17 Collateral Damage in Botched False Flag Operation
Result: As expected, democracy was successfully subverted in Scotland by the English while over in Ukraine, its Air Force, under the direction of their Western neocolonial masters, murdered 298 innocent people aboard Flight MH17.

Thus, the European Theatre of Operations was beginning to warm up and thereby justify the existence of NATO who were about to become an irrelevance. Not long after, the US, the UK and a coalition of warmongers found themselves busy with a foe in the middle-east, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a group of insurgents they had created to oust the al-Assad government in Syria as part of their Arab Spring wave of revolutions to divide and conquer the region. A little further to the west in Libya, North Africa, an earlier element of that wave of destabilisation which included the insurgency, subversion and coup d'état of the Gaddafi government was also beginning to unravel:

Obama Entraps Coalition Partners in Operation Inherent Resolve
Khalifa Haftar: The West's Power Broker in Libya

Result: The US, the UK, and the myriad of subservient and sycophantic regimes supporting them are, once again, back in the middle-east creating the demand for armaments and weapons that the Western Industrial Military Complex needs for its survival.

The fact that these events, like many others that have occurred throughout the year, are the result of policies pursued by Western nations, in particular, is quite telling. What is also telling is the inability of the majority of the public, who do not approve of these policies, to hold their governments to account: the people have become completely powerless in the face of a growing plutocracy who are led by autocratic despots.

As Plato once said:

Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.

That the people of Europe, North America, and other Western nations have endured yet another year of diminishing democratic rights coupled with an inability to hold the powerful to account is not in question. The question is whether the erosion of democracy and a lack of accountability will continue in 2015 or can the people prevail.
The prognosis does not look good.

ENDS

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