Distinguished German lawyer and Executive Director of IALANA, International
Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Armaments, was elected President
of the International Peace Bureau at its recent meeting in Stockholm, Sweden.
On 12.09.2013 the
CEO of IALANA, Reiner Braun (Germany) at the General Assembly of the International
Peace Bureau (IPB ) in Stockholm, was elected President. As co-president, the
former UNESCO Assistant, Ingeborg Breines was re-elected .
The IPB is the
oldest international peace organization . It was awarded the 1910 Nobel Peace
Prize , and now has more than 300 member organizations.
The IPB is
committed to the vision of a world without war and nuclear weapons and
associated works extensively today in the international campaign "
Disarmament for Development ", a comprehensive disarmament will be
achieved through the 1.7 trillion dollars wasted by NATO on armaments every year in the face of tens of thousands of
children dying of hunger, poverty, never accepting a scandal of this magnitude.
In his
introductory speech, the new president of IPB, Reiner Braun declared:
"Disarmament and the prevention of further imperial wars are the challenges to
international peace movements he emphasised . Other greater and coordinated international efforts are needed to achieve
the great goal of Albert Einstein: " a world without war”.
Reiner Braun's interview with "Democracy Now" at the Chicago Counter-NATO Summit, May, 2012:
BERLIN: 20,000 PROTEST OBAMA/NSA SPYNET More than 20,000 protesters turned out on the streets of central Berlin, the German Capital, last Saturday September 7, to protest the recently revealed spook scandal of US worldwide spynet called "Prism" operated by the so-called "National Security Agency" -NSA. The network was revealed last month by the Edward Snowden files obtained by the whistleblower organisation Wikileaks. Mr Snowden is currently an exile in Moscow having been granted asylum by the RussianGovernment.
Thousands took to the streets in protests against Internet surveillance
activities by the US National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies,
and the German government's perceived lax reaction to them.
Organisers, among them the opposition Greens, The Left
and Pirates parties, said 20,000 people turned out. The protest was organised under the slogan
"Freedom Rather Than Fear" and demonstrators carried banners saying:
"Stop spying on us" and, more sarcastically: "Thanks to PRISM
(the US government's vast data collection programs) the government finally
knows what the people want".
"Intelligence agencies like the NSA shamelessly spy on telephone
conversations and Internet connections worldwide (and) our government, one of
whose key roles is the protection from harm, sends off soothing
explanations," said one speaker, Kai-Uwe Steffens.
On Thursday last week, newly leaked documents alleged that US and British intelligence
agencies have cracked the encryption that secures a wide range of online
communications - including emails, banking transactions and phone
conversations.
The
documents provided by former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden
to The New York Times, ProPublica and The Guardian suggest that the spy
agencies are able to decipher data even with the supposedly secure encryption
designed to make it private.
The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, had earlier
said that she was unaware of the PRISM programme until the media leaked
Snowden’s revelations. That statement was proven false by Der Spiegel
magazine, which was able to show that German Secret Services were also involved
in the NSA spying process.
While the German Chancellor has been careful in commenting about the
issue, Germany’s President Joachim Gauck has spoken out in defence of Snowden.
As cited by Reuters, the President said, ”This will normally only be
put right if information is made public. Whoever draws the public’s attention
to it and acts out of conscience deserves respect.” Furthering his
stance on the same, Gauck, while talking about the NSA programme, said, “The
fear that our telephones or mails are recorded and stored by foreign
intelligence services is a constraint on the feeling of freedom and then the
danger grows that freedom itself is damaged.” The demonstration
saw many protesters showing their ire for the German government’s actions.
The German government, in the meanwhile, is
planning to launch an initiative in order to reduce the criticism it is facing
for aiding in the US-led spying programme. To that end, two of Germany’s most
senior cabinet members have planned to request the United Nations to change its
current privacy legislation, which has remained unchanged since 1966, when
innovations like the cell phone and the Internet were not in existence.
GERMAN POLICE HELICOPTER BUZZED US CONSULATE IN FRANKFURT:
A German police helicopter has hovered over the US Consulate in Frankfurt, southwest Germany,
looking for a secret listening station, prompting a call from the American
Ambassador to Germany's Foreign Ministry.
The helicopter circled low over The US consulate in Frankfurt on August 28th on the
orders of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s chief of staff Ronald Pofalla, German
press reported on Monday. The helicopter flight, whose mission was to gather
evidence of the supposed spying station - hints at the German government’s lack
of trust in its ally's spying activities on German soil.
The helicopter reportedly
flew twice over the consulate at a height of 60 metres to photograph the site. It
was seen by the Americans, and reported to the US Embassy in Berlin which
immediately lodged a protest with Germany’s Foreign Ministry.
At the US Embassy, a spokesman told reporters: "The helicopter incident
was the subject of an Embassy conversation with the Foreign Ministry but, no
letter of complaint was sent to the German government."
Chinaware inside the consulate was apparently damaged during the flight
press reported, but, no evidence of a listening station was found.
Mrs Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert refused to comment directly on the
flight but said Germany’s security services would respond within the law when
they suspected foreign secret services of spying, newspaper Die Welt reported.
