Press TV has conducted an interview with E. Michael Jones, the editor of Culture Wars Online Magazine from South Bend, Indiana, to talk over the US lawmakers’ vote against legislation to curb NSA’s spying program.

– I would like to get your impression of this law that was passed by the US lawmakers who voted against legislation to curb NSA’s spying program but it was a close call, as I mentioned: 205 votes to 217. What is your impression?

– I think that the closeness of the vote shows one of the critical issues here namely that the most likely victims of this kind of spying are going to be the Congressmen themselves, the judiciary, the executive. This is the irony involved in this bill.

What you have here is the situation where there are so much data that is gathered that it is fundamentally useless. There are so much material here no one can sort through it but if you know what you are looking for, then it does become politically useful and the easiest way to know what you are looking for is to focus it on influential people.

So I think the irony here is that the Congress passed the bill that is now going to be used against them, files are going to be held on congressmen and they will be used to blackmail them into going along with the party line.

– E. Michael Jones, if I may have a response because aside from the officers being targeted in terms of spying and referred to as targets, it is to uncover inside knowledge of policy disagreements not to clear sort of cloud on what these policies could be on what topics. Do you not find that something to be wrong with that?

– I think that the fundamental bottom-line result of all of the spying is going to be a lack of trust, a lack of trust that goes all the way from the top of the society all the way to the bottom.

At the top of society people will be less candid with each other because they fear what they are saying will not be held in confidence. If that is the case, then it will be more and more difficult to communicate and all this is doing then is thwarting the communication that is necessary for an open society.

So the irony here is that we are creating the very security apparatus that paralyze places like East Germany under the Stasi and we are doing it in the name of freedom and democracy. That is one of the great ironies involved here.

– Regarding South America, we are looking here at a list: Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Argentina; data collection, phone records and of course different officials coming out like Argentina’s President Kirchner really outraged about this. Is this going to affect the relationship that the US has had whether it is minimal or close with different countries that I mentioned in South America?

– I think you have to deal with it from the point of view of state sovereignty. The first question is: does the government have a right to spy on its own people? The answer to that is across the board, no.

No, there is a certain element of privacy that is part of being a citizen. That notion of privacy has been redefined as basically something to do with abortion. It was redefined in the Roe versus Wade and the 1965 decision on birth control. With that redefinition, they have opened up this adversary of relationship that a country has to its own citizens.

Now every other country is in the same situation. If the United States is spying on the citizens in Brazil, then they are violating the sovereignty of the government of Brazil and so the Brazilians have a right to be mad at us.

– I have got to refer to something that comes to my mind regarding just spying in general of which an analyst has said the US goes around, does spying in whatever format and levels, why didn’t it then spy on these bank CEOs and different financial organizations that were for major a part responsible for the financial crisis that hit back in 2008? Surely, they might have been aware. It is a valid point; why wouldn’t the US then have reacted to something like that in terms of its vast spying program or why didn’t it entail some of these institutions like the banks and the financial organizations?

– Because the government represents the banks and it does not represent the average citizen. What we found out in the aftermath of Occupy Wall Street is that the FBI went immediately to the banks and asked them how to deal with the demonstrators.

In other words, the FBI does not represent the people of the United States. It represents the influential people, the movers and shakers, the bankers and so on and so forth in the United States. I think this outrage about spying I think that we are being a little hypocritical here when Obama says you guys are making a big deal out of it.

The United States is making a very big deal out of Mr. Snowden and what Mr. Snowden did was basically spy on the United States. So it is no big deal when the United States spies on other countries but if someone ever spies on the United States, then it is a very big deal and they want this guy back and put him in jail forever.

So all we are exposing here is this hypocritical double standard that the United States is trying to impose on the rest of the world.

– I wish we knew what some of these leaks were, especially what Glen [Gilmore] from the Guardian has said that Snowden has enough information to deal with devastating blow, enough information as a matter of fact to cause more harm to the US in a single minute than anyone else has ever had in American history. Do you think that is known as bluffing or do you think Glen [Gilmore] is bluffing on what Snowden has said?

– No, I am sure he has lots of devastating information but let’s look at the type of information it is. The information that Angela Merkel was collaborating with American security, that is going to be devastating for her political career, I think, because there is a lot of anti-American sentiment in Germany but in terms of the average American citizens, this has no relevance.

There is too much information. It is all these guys trying to drink out of a fire hose. It is impossible for this to have any implication for all of this data on all of these people. It just does not make any sense in that regard. Therefore, that is not the main issue.

– I need to mention that how the US has stated spying and hacking from China into its mainland but at the same time, you are having the Chinese saying that it is revealed that cell phone companies have been targeted, two universities hosting extensive internet traffic stealing the SMS data. So how could the US be pressuring China on this issue when it has been doing it itself to China?

– I would like to bring up the fact that my English colleague mentioned, the name of Walsingham. Walsingham was a notorious promoter of counterplots; he was a notorious promoter of agent provocateurs under the name of spying and I think that is precisely what we Americans have inherited from the English in groups like the FBI which are intimately involved in creating the very plots that they are supposed to be foiling.

Seventeen out of the last twenty plots have involved FBI agents going to troubled Islamic teenagers all in the name of national security and all in a totally counter-productive use of our resources.

An interview of Irdiplomacy.ir with Hossein Rooyvaran, an expert on Middle Eastern affairs

– A senior Taliban member has talked about establishing a base in Syria. Is there any precedence for the presence of the Taliban in Syria?

– The Taliban, as an organization, has, hitherto, not had any presence or activity in Syria, but its special relations with al-Qaeda are clearly defined and they both follow the same ideology. Considering the presence of al-Qaeda in Syria, through the al-Nusra Front and Ahrar ash-Sham, there is the possibility that they would pursue such a matter within the framework of the al-Qaeda organizations. That is why I assume that, by nature, the Taliban has no basis for its presence in Syria, but such a measure can be taken through al-Qaeda. It is on the basis of these religious and ethnic approaches that the Taliban has been attracted towards Syria.

– The commander of the Free Syrian Army has been killed by the al-Nusra Front. Serious rifts have been created among Bashar Assad’s opponents with the prolongation of the crisis in Syria. What are the differences between the opponents of the central government in Syria?

– Clashes and tension between the Free Syrian Army and the al-Nusra Front are inevitable because the Free Syrian Army pursues change in the political structure in Syria and has defined its objectives completely within the national framework. On the other hand, the al-Nusra Front seeks the establishment of an Islamic state in Syria. Therefore, the main difference between the objectives of these two groups is summarized in Syria. The Free Army considers Syria as a platform to reach power, but al-Qaeda’s power-seeking is based on the establishment of an Islamic state based on an al-Qaeda model. The contrast in their viewpoints has led to this confrontation.

This is not the first clash between them; they have clashed several times in Ras al-Ayn, Sheikhun, and Aleppo. Their recent clashes showed that some claims stating that the al-Nusra Front does not have a strong base and that it is the Syrian government and Syria’s supporters that exaggerate the extent of this front were incorrect. The reason is that the al-Nusra Front, at the present time, by assassinating Riad al-Asaad, the commander of the Free Syrian Army, showed that it has more power than the army and the success of this front in assassinating an individual who has certainly had bodyguards shows that the threat of al-Nusra in Syria is serious. There is the possibility that the Free Syrian Army and the opposition front which are mainly secular and reside in the West, and are of course organized by Qatar and Saudi Arabia, are not accepted by the al-Nusra Front and they would be assassinated in case any of them return to Syria.

– Under conditions when the US has put the al-Nusra Front on its black list due to its terrorist activities, this group is equipped with the heaviest military equipments. Is al-Nusra the secret receiving hand in Syria?

– Up until now, no country has announced having provided weapons to al-Nusra. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey have claimed to support the Free Syrian Army. Nevertheless, we witness that al-Nusra has better weaponry in the field. This by itself shows that the transfer of weapons from the Free Army to al-Nusra is automatically done. In other words, there is no control over the Free Army’s weapons and infiltrators have transferred these weapons to al-Nusra. On the ground, this is a fact that cannot be denied. Despite the fact that no supporter of the opposition admits having provide weapons to al-Nusra, in practice they fight in different fronts with better military readiness than the Free Syrian Army. Such a trend raises the question as to who provides weapons to them. In Syria, no group except the government and the Free Syrian Army possesses weapons. Therefore, there is a possibility that al-Nusra supporters infiltrate the Free Army.

– Do you consider a role for the Western countries in equipping al-Nusra and supporting its activities?

– The fact of the matter is that the West has led al-Nusra to be slaughtered in the fight against the Syrian Army. A military confrontation between these two is ultimately in the interest of the US and Israel. Al-Nusra has not yet received weapons directly from the US and the US has not officially admitted the transfer of weapons to them.

This is true in the case of Saudi Arabia. The only country in the Arab world supporting al-Nusra was Qatar which had worked with Takfiri Salafists. Nevertheless, the level of financial support had been more than military support. At the beginning, al-Nusra paid lots of money for Western weapons coming from Iraq and transferred them to Syria. This shows that the West has not tried to directly interact with al-Nusra and al-Qaeda. The West, rather, has tried to provide financial support to them through Qatar so that they could somehow obtain weapons. However, some of al-Nusra’s weapons have been obtained from the Syrian Army after the fall of some garrisons and/or most of these weapons have been attained indirectly through the Free Syrian Army.