To MI5 with love

The Economist‘s succinct summary of the draft investigatory Powers bill:

The government has been caught between the civil-liberties lobby and the intelligence agencies, with much dancing back and forth in the press over the past few weeks, but has come down on the side of the spies. It is in agreement with the public: a recent YouGov poll found Britons think spies should be given more powers (perhaps reasoning that Tesco knows more about them than MI5 ever will). Though civil-liberties groups, empowered by the information leaked by Edward Snowden, are louder than ever, the government has decided to speak for its intelligence agencies, who cannot speak for themselves.

I agree with everything here, except the last clause. Clearly the Economist hasn’t been reading the right-wing press, or listening to the spooks’ charm offensive on the media in the months leading up to publication of the draft bill.

US foreign policy in a nutshell

From Bill Moyers:

“ISIS is seen in Washington as a grave terrorist threat with the potential to knock over the unpopular and unstable regimes of the Middle East (i.e., our client states) like bowling pins. Yet the Washington Consensus sees as the key to defeating ISIS the undermining of the regime of Bashar al-Assad, ISIS’s principal military enemy. If a US general in 1942 declared the only way to defeat the Wehrmacht would be for us to fight Nazi Germany and the USSR simultaneously, he would have been committed to a lunatic asylum.”