Posts By Author » Rachel Marsden
Rachel Marsden: NSA’s PRISM Program Falls Victim To An Ego Trip
12 Jun 2013 
12:04 am
PARIS — Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor on the lam for having dumped some classified documents on the desk of a British reporter, says that he doesn’t consider himself a hero, but his girlfriend’s blog paints a different picture, with delusions of grandeur dating back more than three months. If only the NSA’s PRISM Program was as significant as their sense of self-importance.
Snowden’s Hawaii-based dancer-girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, repeatedly refers to herself as a “super hero” on her blog, which is full of weird, spy-related postings that have …
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Rachel Marsden: Who are Turkey’s agents provocateurs?
5 Jun 2013 12:04 am
PARIS — To believe the media narrative, the “Arab Spring” has arrived in yet another Islamic nation — Turkey this time — snowballing at record speed from a single protest over the fate of trees under an urban-development plan. This simplistic explanation might have more merit if Turkey wasn’t the staging ground for Western interests in Syria.
Spontaneous, organic protest movements have certain characteristics. They’re relatively small and easily contained. Without being fueled deliberately, they burn out quickly. Perhaps most notably, they have an acute, compelling genesis. Someone taking to Twitter …
Rachel Marsden: Russia’s big test
29 May 2013 12:02 am
PARIS — The war in Syria is Russia’s to lose. Arguably, it could very well end up being Russia’s biggest test as a player on the world stage since the end of the Cold War.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, are meeting here in Paris this week to discuss the possibility of discussions. The topic of whether to allow Iran at the adults’ negotiating table with the nonplastic cutlery is sure to come up, further delaying any seriousness to the notion of ending the …
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Rachel Marsden: Fogle fiasco underscores America’s intelligence problem
22 May 2013 12:02 am
PARIS — Given that no one is officially denying it, it’s fairly safe to say that Russia’s domestic security service recently slammed America’s foreign spy service face-first into the Moscow pavement — blond wig and all — in the person of diplomatic staffer and unconfirmed CIA case officer Ryan Fogle.
When you’re benefiting from official diplomatic cover and find yourself tucking your hair into a blond wig and heading out with your compass and a written cash-for-treason offer for your target, perhaps you should revise your plan. The asset you recruit …
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Rachel Marsden: China’s low-profile imperialism
15 May 2013 12:02 am
PARIS — Hardly a day goes by without America-bashers accusing the U.S. of “imperialism” or “interventionism.” Meanwhile, China is largely exempt from that sort of criticism from the same crowd. If only they’d listen to the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria and a few other stray voices.
In late 2011, I had the privilege of sitting on a panel in Morocco with Lamido Sanusi, the aforementioned Central Bank of Nigeria governor, who’s on a mission to clean up Nigerian corruption. Sanusi told me that the moment an official can …
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Rachel Marsden: Is America about to checkmate Russia?
8 May 2013 12:02 am
PARIS — As U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry meets with his Russian counterparts this week in Moscow to discuss Syria, much of the world is wondering what America’s endgame is. But what if we are already witnessing it? What if America’s ultimate exit strategy for the Syrian conflict is to have it grind on ad infinitum because there’s very little advantage to doing anything else?
Increasingly, it’s Russia that has the most to lose from the ongoing hostilities in Syria. What if America has successfully applied the old Soviet-era (and …
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Rachel Marsden: Five major hindrances to counterterrorism efforts
1 May 2013 12:02 am
PARIS — In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, it’s only natural to ask why some terrorists are only caught after they’ve inflicted carnage on innocent civilians. What went wrong?
Here are a few significant reasons why authorities still manage to miss terrorism until it’s too late:
1. It doesn’t help that U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper understated the threat when he told Congress in March that counterterrorism efforts “have degraded core al-Qaeda to a point that the group is probably unable to carry out complex, large-scale attacks in …
Rachel Marsden: Boston bombing case parallels Toulouse attacks
24 Apr 2013 12:04 am
PARIS — The details revealed so far in the Boston Marathon bombing case are strikingly similar to those of a high-profile case in France last year. Both exemplify the modus operandi of today’s young jihadist.
Naturally, it all starts with an immersion in Islamic extremism. The North Caucasus region where the Boston suspects spent their childhood — a region where there has been a great deal of separatist violence since the collapse of the Soviet Union — ended up being dominated by a radical Saudi Islamic warlord, Ibn al-Khattab, who waged …
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Rachel Marsden: Nanny-state freeloaders celebrate Thatcher’s death
17 Apr 2013 12:03 am
PARIS — As dignitaries gather in London to pay their respects to one of modern history’s greatest leaders, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who died last week at the age of 87, the riff-raff of Great Britain have emerged, subsidized by either the state or by mummy and daddy, to rejoice in her death.
Case in point: Britain’s Daily Mail reports that the architect of plans to disrupt Thatcher’s funeral on Wednesday is a 25-year old Oxford student whose parents live in a $1 million house. Photographs in various British …
A socialist lawmaker’s fiscal double life
11 Apr 2013 12:03 am
PARIS — The left revels in sex scandals involving preachy conservative moralists, but when members of the left get caught up in seedy financial scandals, so perverted and twisted is their relationship with money that the effect can be equally jaw-dropping and salacious.
Former French Budget Minister Jerome Cahuzac, who left his Socialist government post earlier this year amid allegations of a secret Swiss bank account, now faces a formal investigation for allegedly laundering the proceeds of tax evasion.
This would be less of a big deal if Cahuzac himself hadn’t been …
Rachel Marsden: A socialist lawmaker’s fiscal double life
10 Apr 2013 12:04 am
PARIS — The left revels in sex scandals involving preachy conservative moralists, but when members of the left get caught up in seedy financial scandals, so perverted and twisted is their relationship with money that the effect can be equally jaw-dropping and salacious.
Former French Budget Minister Jerome Cahuzac, who left his Socialist government post earlier this year amid allegations of a secret Swiss bank account, now faces a formal investigation for allegedly laundering the proceeds of tax evasion.
This would be less of a big deal if Cahuzac himself hadn’t been …
Rachel Marsden: Capitalism isn’t dying
7 Apr 2013 12:01 am
PARIS — Be careful about how you interpret what you’re seeing, as your eyes might be deceiving you. That’s the advice I offered viewers the other day on Russia’s global TV network’s flagship program, “CrossTalk,” when explaining that capitalism isn’t facing any sort of crisis, but rather is just being subverted by socialists, Wall Street con artists and various anti-capitalist wishful thinkers who are corrupting the once-straightforward relationship between work and benefit.
It has become common to describe the now-defunct Occupy Wall Street movement as a rebellion against the perceived failure …
NATO cyber-warfare treatise is long overdue
27 Mar 2013 12:04 am
PARIS — The Internet went crazy last week over what was described in hyperventilating tweets as NATO’s plan to kill hackers. “NATO-Commissioned Report Says Killing Hackers Is Basically OK,” blared one tech blog headline, nicely reinforcing the paranoia. That makes it sound as if the governments of NATO countries are looking for any excuse to vaporize anyone with a computer, doesn’t it? The more irrationally jumpy among us might imagine that these governments are just waiting for the guy beside us at the local Starbucks to fire up his iPad …
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A European bailout unlike any other
20 Mar 2013 12:03 am
PARIS — The European Union’s $13 billion bailout plan for Cyprus has nothing to do with socialism but rather with much greater stakes. This is the EU attempting to outmaneuver an uncharacteristically flat-footed Vladimir Putin and Russia in a key battleground, over long-festering issues: transparency, corruption, and support of Syria and Iran. This is also a case of the EU calling out a Trojan-horse country embedded inside the eurozone.
In exchange for the $13 billion from the EU, Cyprus would have to impose a one-time tax on bank deposits, increase corporate …
The deal that America and Russia must make following Chavez’s death
13 Mar 2013 12:03 am
PARIS — A chess piece has fallen in Latin America. The road to prosperity and peace for the citizens of many countries — probably even yours — runs through the recent death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and a counterintuitive deal between two nations.
Depending on whom you speak to, Chavez was either a jerk or a hero whose face should be immortalized as a two-tone T-shirt decal. What cannot be denied is that Transparency International rates Venezuela the most corrupt country in South America. Couple that with the fact that …
Have they no shame?
6 Mar 2013 12:02 am
PARIS — Is there anything people can possibly do these days to disgust or unnerve themselves? Or is the only barrier to bad behavior massive societal shunning, the likes of which isn’t noticed by those who are too engrossed with themselves to pay attention?
I’m asking this because it seemed that everywhere I looked recently, I was bombarded by stunning acts of shamelessness — to the point where shamelessness arguably WAS the major trend in the news. Let’s look at a few examples.
– The “sequester”: The U.S. Congress wants us to …
Rachel Marsden: Leggo my ‘Argo’: Iran’s unhealthy fixation on Ben Affleck
27 Feb 2013 12:03 am
PARIS — When Ben Affleck’s “Argo” — a film based on the true-life, CIA-assisted Canadian operation to rescue American diplomats during the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979 — won the Oscar for Best Picture, all I could think about was how badly Iran blew a prime opportunity to keep quiet for once.
Iranian Culture Minister Mohammad Hosseini is so incensed with the portrayal of his country in “Argo” that the government is financing a film in response. Look, Canadians took issue with some “Argo” distortions, too — mainly because, as former …
Pentagon keyboard jockeys can now out-decorate combat heroes
20 Feb 2013 12:03 am
PARIS — U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced last week that the Pentagon has created a new military award for keyboard cyber-warriors and drone joystick jockeys.
The Distinguished Warfare Medal will recognize those whose ability to incinerate a designated target from the comfort of an office chair wasn’t prohibitively affected by a jumpy trigger finger on the joystick from a mid-shift java jolt. Or, as Panetta put it: “The medal provides distinct, department-wide recognition for the extraordinary achievements that directly impact on combat operations, but that do not involve acts of …
‘Assassination memo’ a first step in setting new warfare parameters
13 Feb 2013 12:02 am
PARIS — A leaked U.S. Department of Justice white paper supporting the killing of terrorists overseas who happen to hold American citizenship is causing mass hyperventilation across America. Although average Americans needn’t fear the possibility of being picked off by a drone one night while scarfing down macaroni and cheese and watching the game, there is concern that the government is grossly overstepping its bounds by targeting U.S. citizens for extermination.
The document, which the clueless have dubbed the “drone memo,” contains precisely zero instances of the word “drone” or any …
Delusions of the anti-war crowd
6 Feb 2013 12:03 am
PARIS — The anti-war types are unhappy with France’s foray into Mali to help that country’s troops eradicate balkanizing terrorism at the request of the Malian government. If even the French aren’t “allowed” to go to war — and under a Socialist president, no less — then who can?
It would indeed be nice if there were no wars anywhere on Earth. It would also be great to own five BMWs and three private islands. Both are equally unlikely scenarios, yet only the first is accepted as plausible by the perpetually …
Farm Bill is 80% Food Stamps
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