America which is known as the freest country in the world has incarcerated more of it’s citizens than the rest of the world combined. 7.1 million Americans are either in prison, on probation or under correctional supervision. The numbers continue to climb each year as more prisons are built nationwide. News journalist Fareed Zakaria from CNN goes in depth to show viewers how much the American government as well as private corporations spend building prisons apposed to schools.
He goes on to say that our elected officials have been bought out by lobbyist. They want the politicians to pave the way for more prisons by passing more laws of enslavement to insure a steady flow of inmates to occupy the cells. America has entered into a hell like period where people are worth more in prison than free and working as all jobs are being shipped to China. America is being
de-industrialized and destroyed by design in the name of clean energy and saving the planet.
Government staged terror attacks are giving them the excuse to spy on Americans and destroy the Constitution which protects our freedom. An open air prison is being built around the population in the name of safety and security and the majority of people believe the government wants to protect them from terror which is government sponsored to create an atmosphere of fear.
It appears that things will have to get much worse before people realize the U.S. government has been high-jacked by International Bankers that now control our military and send them into ever expanding wars. They seek to destroy America by passing laws that will turn this country into a tyrannical police state where every human activity is monitored, taxed and eventually outlawed for any excuse they can think up.
the only thing that makes the benghazi affair deserving of the media shitstorm about the incident was the fact that a u.s. ambassador was directly implicated in an arms-running operation, and that his “allies” turned on him in the end, and murdered him when he tried to reign them in and bring the operation under direct control of the cia. so as to make the entire operation go “black” or “dark.” consider the significance of the evening of sept. 11, 2012 in the chaos of post-khadafi libya if the people storming the cia compound had not been resolute enough to risk coming under fire from even one armed american, but nevertheless had to be convinced of this by the use of deadly force.
in this fantasy scenario, there may have been a spirited protest which was fired upon by zealous security people who wanted to disperse the crowd before it became unmanageable. the full light of the world’s media – much of europe being just a hop across the mediteranean sea – would have been focused on the why the safety of a u.s. ambassador was threatened by protesters. and likely there might have been a news outlet somewhere in the world that would disclose that the protesters included friends and relatives of people who were said to be held inside the facility ambassador stevens was visiting – far from the actual u.s. embassy.
so, we know the cia has had numerous “dark” detention facilities scattered around the world. we also know that the u.s. has been arming terrorists in syria – who car-bombed turkey this weekend (5/11/13). where would be a better place to set up a secret detention facility than in a country torn apart by civil war? with entire arsenals up for grabs?
to continue with the fantasy scenario…suppose all of this came right out into the open in the international press – that the u.s. had set up a gun-running operation in libya to arm terrorist militias in syria, and that it was now engaged in a power struggle for control of the smuggling network with their libyan “islamicists” allies?
not a good story, and ambassador stevens would have had to resign in disgrace, and possibly end up in prison, whereas obama would have had to do something hugely sinister to make sure the public was too terrified to remember that embarrassing benghazi thing. there was the matter of his re-election to consider.
who would have been the winner in this imaginary scenario, and the benghazi affair had disgraced an ambassador, cost obama re-election, and possibly led to the collapse of the free syrian army? no one.
i can hardly see a romney administration being hesitant to get involved in either syria or iran in a more direct, official capacity. they could even call it a nato operation, with the help of the u.k. and france.
nothing good was happening in that compound, that night or any night after it had become a cia “darkops” site. if you want a good idea of what the implications of these types of secret operations are, delve into the iran-contra scandal that hounded the reagan white house – even after he left office, former advisers, aids, and cabinet members in his administration were being tried and jailed. i believe the final total was 46…
the point is, in both of these cases, cia cocaine smuggling rings were developed to help fund darkops. reagan’s network was revealed and collapsed, whereas the cia’s current network is still relatively intact, thanks largely in part to a lazy-ass american media always looking for an easy story to beat the next deadline, and greatly abetted in the cover-up by the hyper-ventilating, rabidly-rightwing windbags who keep shouting “benghazi! birth certificate! anti-christ!” but display a disappointing lack of curiosity about what was going on there. and don’t get me started on the liberals. if this had happened under a republican administration, there would be trials. but, so long as the cocaine smuggling can continue, no harm means no foul.
Don’t Believe What Either Party Is Saying About The Benghazi Attack
Apparently the U.S. has drones and SEALs on standby around the Mali and Eastern Libya area in case intelligence officers are able to locate those responsible for the consulate attack — which is hardly news. Though the timing is convenient, the position is unchanged from military options on the table Sept. 13, two days after the attack, when CNN reported that “drones and warships” were patrolling the area around Benghazi.
All of which makes what’s really happening more disturbing.
The reality on the ground is that the drones and SEALs have not much to go on and intelligence officers can’t triangulate a legitimate target. In fact, there’s not enough supporting evidence to point the finger at any one particular group of “insurgents. “
Initially, the finger pointed at a group recently dubbed “Ansar al Shariah” (Partisans, or Soldiers of Shariah, depending on who translates). But following the attacks Ansar released a statement saying it “didn’t participate in this popular uprising as a separate entity … the brigade didn’t participate as a sole entity … rather, it was a spontaneous popular uprising.”
The statement has since been corroborated by evidence on the ground. But like all statements coming from “terrorists” groups following attacks, diplomats in Washington simply replaced, or more accurately, washed it out with statements more convenient to their own domestic political ends.
Initially, for Obama and the Dems, the attack was just a protest gone horribly wrong. For Republicans, it was an “organized, planned, commando style raid.”
Republicans stated the use of weapons, like Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPGs), mortars, and Ak-47s, as evidence of a more militaristic approach. Those same Republicans, just a year earlier, however, were arguing concertedly for the issuing of those weapons to that same exact populace — and largely looked the other way as Egypt and Qatar dumped those weapons into the country.
- While details of the attack that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya last month may never be fully known, there is ample evidence neither the Obama administration’s initial accounts nor Republican portrayals of the incident are accurate.
- There is no intelligence suggesting that either the remaining core of al-Qaeda in Pakistan or its loose affiliates in Yemen and North Africa plotted, financed or directed the attack, which one of the U.S. officials described as amateurish.
- Instead, accounts from U.S. intelligence officials and Benghazi residents, along with evidence in the burned-out American diplomatic compound, point to a hasty and poorly organized act by men with basic military training and access to weapons widely available in Libya.
- “The partisan debate is feeding public misunderstanding of foreign events and the nature of diplomatic and intelligence work,” Paul Pillar, a former U.S. intelligence official, said in a telephone interview.
The report goes a step further when it says that Obama’s recent drone/warship report is basically the awkward position of political posturing, while intelligence forces him to publicly state that there isn’t enough “actionable” intelligence to mount a strike anywhere.
this article is one of the better ones on the affair, notable for not wanting to interpret the events so much as describe what was actually happening. from business insider. here’s more:
The CIA’s Benghazi Operation May Have Violated International Law
But don’t expect an confession from the CIA or the Obama administration.
“The CIA can’t admit their role because it compromises the cover of the facility, and that’s the most important thing,” Bob Baer, who spent two decades as a field officer in the CIA, told the Huffington Post. “You can never compromise cover.”
Since most of the Syrian opposition’s weapons are being handed out by the CIA, it would make sense that the heavy weapons that rebels are now using to shoot down regime aircraft came from a covert CIA operation.
The exposure of such an operation would raise serious issues since transferring arms to anyone associated with al-Qaeda—which may include some of the best fighters among the Syrian opposition—would violate a binding UN arms embargo that prohibits arms transfers by UN member states to countries or groups including al-Qaeda.
The Obama administration is equally hamstrung because any admission of gun-running would would validate Russia’s long-held position that it is arming radicals in Syria.
It is obvious that the CIA fingerprints are all over the Benghazi operation. It ran its own safehouse with what seems to be a score of actives. But as it turned out, not all the actives were CIA personnel. The Pentagon had issued a commercial contract shortly after the demise of Muammar Qaddafi a program to secure and/or buyback weapons that had belonged to the Libyan leader’s weapons stockpile. Of special importance was the reported plethora of hand-held ground-to-air weapons whose use by terrorists could be devastating.
The collection program was one reason for the CIA interest in Libya. The second should have been the presence of Islamist-infested armed gangs that had opposed Qaddafi. They had not disarmed; rather, they continued to operate in the Cyrenaica region and in Benghazi after the death of the Libyan leader. If the CIA made an effort to infiltrate or analyze the influence of jihadists groups operating around Benghazi and in eastern Libya, then the surprise attack on the US “consulate” on 9/11 underscores the fact that the effort was a failure.
But a weapons gathering program more than a year old cannot explain the large number of actives present in the CIA compound in September 2012.
Instead, the presence of a large safehouse with many actives indicates the direct CIA involvement in the movement of arms collected in Libya and shipped to rebels seeking to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria.
As suggested here earlier ( http://econwarfare.org/viewarticle.cfm?id=5109 ) the direct U.S. involvement in support of Syrian rebel forces was initiated shortly after a Petraeus’s visit to Turkey in March 2012. It occurred shortly after the Turkish government demonstrated willingness to support the overthrow of the Assad regime. Still, neither Washington nor Ankara wanted to show its hand. Both sought to hide their involvement through an operation that remains clandestine (albeit barely so) to the present date. - there is more, from the Cutting Edge
Report: Launch of CIA ‘cocaine coup’ planned after Romney win
For more than a year the CIA has been trafficking 300 kilos of cocaine a month from Ecuador to Chile for export on to Europe, according to recent credible media reports from Santiago, the Chilean capital.
Proceeds from the 300 kilo-a-month business have been used to create a war-chest to finance a Cocaine Coup in Ecuador that was scheduled to be “green-lighted” after the expected win in the just-concluded U.S. Presidential election—expected, at least, by some Agency officials—of Mitt Romney.
An unexpected side effect of the revelation of the plan, which has received little publicity, has been to focus an observer’s attention on what’s going on in the drug trade in Ecuador lately. The country’s history in the drug business, almost as rich as Switzerland’s with banks, goes back a long way.
When it comes to efficiently moving drugs, this is far from Ecuador’s first rodeo, and the drug network there is one of long-standing, (Wikileaks PDF).
So too is its relationship with both the the CIA and DEA.
“The operation is similar to the one carried out by the Agency in Central America during the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980’s, the source said.”
For example, when famous CIA drug pilot Barry Seal was first caught smuggling cocaine way back in 1979, he picked up his huge load of cocaine—it was 45 kilos; those were more innocent times—in Guayaquil, one of Ecuador’s three major seaports.
The Americans recently convicted of laundering money for the Ecuador-based network are no parvenus, either. One is a prominent Louisiana attorney; the other an aviation broker in Oklahoma. And both took direction from a drug pilot with his own long pedigree in the drug trade.
Jorge Arévalo Kessler has been flying drugs out of Ecuador since 1989, he states in an affadavit at his trial. He is the nephew of a long-time Mexican Secretary of Defense, and was the personal pilot of disgraced former Mexican President Carlos Salinas.
His American connections are visible too. When finally arrested, Arévalo Kessler was flying a former U.S. military plane that was part of the 1990’s Forest Service scandal, involving planes intended for firefighting diverted into CIA covert drug running operations, the most spectacular result being the C-130 busted on a runway at Mexico City’s Intl Airport carrying cocaine worth $1 billion.
Or maybe the most spectacular result was this: 14 firefighters burned to death in an out-of-control forest fire in Colorado in August of 1994. No planes were available to help. They’d all been leased out on more lucrative assignments.
The story of the CIA-DEA’s earmarked 300 kilos a month in support of an alleged CIA cocaine coup begins with Fernando Ulloa. Ulloa was an Inspector in the Chilean Federal Police (Policia de Investigaciones, or PDI). Over a year ago, he uncovered a drug ring operating out of the local CIA and DEA stations; with assistance and support from Chilean political authorities and the Chilean Army, the ring trafficks 300 kilos of cocaine a month.
Most cops see the world in black and white. So Ulloa immediately took his evidence to the Chilean Minister of the Interior in Santiago’s La Moneda Palace, mostly remembered for having been destroyed by the Chilean Air Force in the coup which took Socialist President Salvador Allende’s life in 1973.
No investigation was launched, however, and no action was taken.
When 10 Chilean police officials were recently charged with assisting a much smaller drug smuggling ring, the resulting public scandal gave Ulloa the opening (and the media coverage) to publicly accuse the Interior Minister, Rodrigo Hinzpeter, of covering up the much larger—and still active—CIA cocaine trafficking. - from mad cow morning news
A Tale of Cocaine Trafficking, Sex Crime Charges, Extraordinary Rendition & Julian Assange
As reported at Dailycensored.com on November 14, 2012, two sources have alleged that the CIA has been engaging in cocaine trafficking in Chile to fund an $88 million campaign to defeat President Rafael Correa in Ecuador’s upcoming presidential election: former British Diplomat Craig Murray, and Chilean journalist Patricio Mery Bell.
It is no secret that the US wants to see Correa defeated and the presidential election scheduled next month in Ecuador will see whether he is. He has enacted policies the US government considers adverse to US interests including closing the US military base in Ecuador. Moreover, it is likely the US sees the defeat of Correa as key to getting its hands on Julian Assange.
There is also the $19 billion judgment by an Ecuadorean court against Chevron for despoiling the Amazon rainforest. A group of the plaintiffs have recently begun initiating legal proceedings to seize Chevron’s assets in Canada, Brazil and Argentina.
The allegations of Cocaine trafficking are strikingly similar to cocaine trafficking by the CIA in the 1980s to fund the Contras in Nicaragua.
Patricio Mery Bell is head of the Panorama news service in Chile. In October 2012, Bell arranged to meet with the Ecuadorian president while Correa was in Chile, to present evidence of CIA cocaine trafficking in Chile to fund Correa’s defeat.
On his way to meet with Correa, Patricio Bell was arrested and charged with assaulting a woman. His cell phone, which contained evidence to be presented to Correa, was confiscated and never returned.
see these previous posts for more on the fake-ass war on drugs:
Patricio Bell claims he was set up by the woman accusing him, and it has been reported that the she has ties to a CIA backed anti Castro groups in Miami. The charges against Bell are suspiciously similar to those against Assange, but the coincidences don’t end there.
Craig Murray is the other person who has disclosed allegations that the CIA was trafficking cocaine in Chile to fund the defeat of Correa in Ecuador. Murray had two independent sources, one in the UK the other in Washington.
Craig Murray is a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who exposed torture, renditions and collusion between the CIA and British MI6. He was subsequently charged with extortion for sexual purposes and blackmailing people into sex in exchange for British visas. He did get his name cleared 18 months later.
Sex crime charges
The sex crime charges against Assange, Bell and Murray are part of a pattern of whistle blowers being charged with sex crimes which includes Iraqi weapons inspector Scott Ritter and Guantanamo Bay Chaplain James Yee.
As Craig Murray reported: after returning to the US, Iraqi weapons inspector Scott Ritter was entrapped in a computer sex sting set up by the FBI. Not coincidentally, this occurred after Ritter publicly stated that there were no weapons of Mass destruction in Iraq.
Chaplain James Yee exposed mistreatment of inmates at Guantanamo Bay. After espionage charges were dropped against him, Yee was convicted of adultery and having pornography on a government computer, only to have those convictions later overturned.
Sexual entrapment has long been used in espionage to blackmail adversaries and recruit spies. Now it appears it is being used against whistleblowers. - from project censored
loose lips sink black site prison in benghazi
In the immediate aftermath of the CIA chief’s resignation, skeptics quickly suggested that there was more to the story, especially given Petraeus’ role as head of the country’s intelligence agency and the relatively unscathing extramarital affair that he rightfully admitted to in citing his departure from office. As journalists and investigators tried to dig deep for info on the alleged mistress, Petraeus biographer Paula Broadwell, as expected the story took a drastic turn by Sunday when it was revealed that she may have been briefed on the truth of the Benghazi scandal while the rest of the country claws for answers.
A speech given by Broadwell only last month at her Alma matter suggests that she was given information about the terrorist attack that never made it to the American public.
“Now I don’t know if a lot of you heard this, but the CIA annex had actually had taken a couple of Libya militia members prisoner,” Broadwell told a crowd at the University of Denver alumni symposium on October 26. “And they think that the attack on the consulate was an effort to try to get these prisoners back. So that’s still being vetted.”
Broadwell’s address was publically available on YouTube until this weekend; it has since been removed, although mirrors have surfaced.
Until then, and even today, the CIA denies Broadwell’s claims that the CIA was holding anyone prisoner at what has long been described as a consulate building in Benghazi. Should her account prove true, however, it could mean that the agency had a secret black site prison in Libya, a fact long denied by Washington.
According to various reports (Wall Street Journal, Daily Telegraph, repeated in numerous European media organs), Libyan rebels were paid to steal arms from ex-government dumps. Weapons that did get into the hands of the rebels were re-purchased, using secret CIA slush funds – the ‘black money’ – which is never disclosed to Congress.
We learn that here is a strikingly similar parallel to the Iran-Contra arms-go-round mastermind, the Naval Marine Corps Lt.-Col Oliver North. In that infamous affair of mid-1980s, the US covertly paid the fundamentalist regime of Ayatollah Khomeini – then at war with the current US ally of convenience Iraq – for shipments of weapons, delivered to the Right-wing Contra terrorists engaged in a struggle against the popular Nicaraguan government.
Iran-Contra focused on a CIA network known loosely as ‘The Enterprise,’ weaved by North and composed of hand-picked private brokers, off-screen to the Congress, including arms traders, money launderers and soldiers of fortune (contractors). Daniel Ellsberg, immortalized as the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers (the military’s best kept Vietnam secrets), famously called Iran-Contra “quite the worst covert operation in US history.” It seems there is now convincing evidence of a rival candidate.
North was gleefully circumventing the Boland Amendment which forbade the US to arm the Contras. The Libyan Arms for Syria affair displays a similar false flag stamp, cloaked with the identical conspiracy of secrecy and deception.
Iran-Contra was exposed when a plane loaded with contraband Iranian weapons crashed in the Nicaraguan jungle. Ronald Reagan was able to escape the rap because he invoked the ‘afternoon nap’ escape clause. Benghazi is the new Contra moment. So what are Obama’s expectations in very similar circumstances, even as he celebrates his second triumphant political coronation?
With Al Qaeda shattered, U.S. counter-terrorism’s future unclear
Opinions differ over how much threat Al Qaeda’s factions pose and how U.S. policy and spending should change.
By Ken Dilanian, Los Angeles Times
Skilled in tracking foreign terrorists, Jarret Brachman once was a sought-after expert on Al Qaeda, advising several federal agencies and speaking regularly around the country.
Now the former research director of the Combating Terrorism Center, a think tank at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, has turned his focus away from Islamic militants. He spends most of his time consulting with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies about threats from domestic extremists and antigovernment militias.
“I have totally re-branded my career,” Brachman said. “I still do the Al Qaeda stuff, but there’s no interest, no demand…. We’ve broken Al Qaeda’s back, strategically.” -there’s more to this, from the l.a. times
as many doctors continue to push addictive drugs onto their patients for the profits of pharmaceutical companies, doctors with any sense of ethics continue to convince Americans to get off their fat, lazy asses and take care of themselves, rather than expecting pills to make everything better.
meanwhile, politicians use this epidemic to push for more surveillance on doctors and patients…but give pharmaceutical companies a free pass.
Prescription drug-related deaths continue to rise in U.S.
Despite efforts by law enforcement and public health officials to curb prescription drug abuse, drug-related deaths in the United States have continued to rise, the latest data show.
Figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal that drug fatalities increased 3% in 2010, the most recent year for which complete data are available. Preliminary data for 2011 indicate the trend has continued.
The figures reflect all drug deaths, but the increase was propelled largely by prescription painkillers such as OxyContin and Vicodin, according to just-released analyses by CDC researchers.
The numbers were a disappointment for public health officials, who had expressed hope that educational and enforcement programs would stem the rise in fatal overdoses.
“While most things are getting better in the health world, this isn’t,” CDC director Tom Frieden said in an interview. “It’s a big problem, and it’s getting worse.”
Drugs overtook traffic accidents as a cause of death in the country in 2009, and the gap has continued to widen.
Overdose deaths involving prescription painkillers rose to 16,651 in 2010, the CDC researchers found. That was 43% of all fatal overdoses.
The numbers come amid mounting pressure to reduce the use of prescription painkillers. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is considering a proposal to limit daily doses of painkillers and restrict their use to 90 days or less for non-cancer patients. The proposal also would make such drugs available to non-cancer patients only if they suffer from severe pain.
“The data supporting long-term use of opiates for pain, other than cancer pain, is scant to nonexistent,” Frieden said. “These are dangerous drugs. They’re not proven to have long-term benefit for non-cancer pain, and they’re being used to the detriment to hundreds of thousands of people in this country.”
Among the most promising tools to combat the problem, Frieden said, are computerized drug monitoring programs that track prescriptions for painkillers and other commonly abused narcotics from doctor to pharmacy to patient. Frieden said such programs should be used to monitor doctors’ prescribing as well as patients’ use.
“You’ve got to look at the data to see where the problems are,” he said. “You don’t want to be flying blind.”
In California, officials do not use the state’s prescription drug monitoring program, known as CURES, to proactively seek out problem patients or physicians. The state’s medical board initiates investigations of doctors only after receiving a complaint. Legislation awaiting action in Sacramento would increase funding for CURES and provide more investigators to police excessive prescribing, among other measures. – from the l.a. times
How Many are Dying From Prescription Drugs?
Nearly 20 percent of Americans have used prescription drugs for nonmedicinal reasons, three-quarters of whom may be abusing them. Legal prescription drug abuse is a silent epidemic, and is part of the reason why the modern American medical system has become the leading cause of death and injury in the United States. Authored in two parts by Gary Null, PhD, Carolyn Dean, MD ND, Martin Feldman, MD, Debora Rasio, MD, and Dorothy Smith, PhD, the comprehensive Death by Medicine article described in excruciating detail how everything from medical errors to adverse drug reactions to unnecessary procedures caused more harm than good.
In a June 2010 report in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, study authors said that in looking over records that spanned from 1976 to 2006 (the most recent year available) they found that, of 62 million death certificates, almost a quarter-million deaths were coded as having occurred in a hospital setting due to medication errors.
An estimated 450,000 preventable medication-related adverse events occur in the U.S. every year.
The costs of adverse drug reactions to society are more than $136 billion annually — greater than the total cost of cardiovascular or diabetic care.
Adverse drug reactions cause injuries or death in 1 of 5 hospital patients.
The reason there are so many adverse drug events in the U.S. is because so many drugs are used and prescribed – and many patients receive multiple prescriptions at varying strengths, some of which may counteract each other or cause more severe reactions when combined.
There are numerous repercussions to a society that eats, breathes and sleeps prescription medications, not the least of which is its impact on children. Between 2001 and 2008, there was a 36 percent increase in hospital admissions, and a 28 percent increase in emergency room visits, among children 5 and younger who had accidentally ingested medication. ER visits for ingestion of prescription opioid painkillers, such as Oxycodone, increased 101 percent!
And in 2009, there were nearly 4.6 million drug-related visits to U.S. emergency rooms nationwide, with more than half due to adverse reactions to prescription medications – most of which were being taken exactly as prescribed. When you add in the growing numbers of people who are using these drugs recreationally or due to addiction, you begin to see the magnitude of the problem that the pharmaceutical industry is propagating.
Unfortunately, this problem is now seriously impacting the next generation. When you were a teenager you may have snuck a beer or two at a party … nowadays teens will mix a variety of prescription pills together in a bowl and take a mouthful of them like candy! The kids think this is a safe way to get high, since they see their parents taking the same medications all the time, but it often turns out to be a literal prescription for disaster that can even be deadly. - from dr. mercola, The New Epidemic Sweeping Across America (and it’s Not a Disease)
The U.S. federal government spends nearly $4 billion on its drug war, the bulk of which is spent fighting cocaine. Nearly 1 million people are arrested each year for marijuana.
rush limbaugh’s famous bust for prescription drug addiction and prescription fraud helped glamorize prescription pill abuse and trivialized the problems because he got away with it.
Both drugs kill only a fraction of its users compared to the killer available at most pharmacies: Prescription painkillers. Since 2003, more overdoses have involved opioid analgesics than heroin and cocaine combined. Scientists have yet to confirm a single overdose of marijuana.
It’s tough to argue. Prescription painkillers are an epidemic. Popular Science recently published a fascinating graphic analyzing overdose deaths since 1999. The findings are alarming. Overdoses have doubled between 1999 and 2010, and half are from opioid pharmaceuticals such as Vicodin, OxyContin and Percocet.
In 2010, 38,239 died of overdoses of heroin, cocaine, alcohol, LSD, opium, mescaline, prescription pills and other drugs. Half of those, 16,651, were from opiates that are completely legal with a prescription, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Ex-President Clinton’s foundation vows to cut the number of OD deaths over next five years
Last April in East Harlem a retired police officer shot dead an armed gunman who held up a pharmacy looking for Oxycontin and Percocet. The suspect’s accomplice surrendered.
“The NYPD has seen firsthand the destructive power of addiction to Oxycontin,” Kelly said. “One of our own police officers who became addicted to the pills after incurring an injury on the job began robbing drug stores at gunpoint. He, like many others we’ve seen, demanded Oxy by name, but left the cash in an open register untouched.
“If that doesn’t illustrate the power of addiction, nothing does.”
Between 2004 and 2010 the rate of emergency room visits related to painkillers nearly tripled in the city, Kelly said.
In response, the NYPD and the Drug Enforcement Administration has formed a new unit that allows police access to a national database that tracks how controlled substances are distributed.
Police also started “Operation Safety Cap.” The department now has a database of nearly 6,000 area licensed pharmacists, Kelly said.
Officers are visting their businesses to make security recommendations — and many of them have agreed to let police place “bait bottles” on pharmacy shelves.
as always, the rich can get away with drug abuse, while the poor go to prison
Rush Limbaugh and prosecutors in the long-running prescription fraud case against him have reached a deal calling for the only charge against the conservative commentator to be dropped without a guilty plea if he continues treatment, his attorney said Friday.
Limbaugh turned himself in to authorities on a warrant filed Friday charging him with fraud to conceal information to obtain prescriptions, said Teri Barbera, a spokeswoman for the Palm Beach County Jail. He and his attorney Roy Black left about an hour later, after Limbaugh was photographed and fingerprinted and he posted $3,000 bail, Barbera said.
Prosecutors’ three-year investigation of Limbaugh began after he publicly acknowledged being addicted to pain medication and entered a rehabilitation program. They accused Limbaugh of “doctor shopping,” or illegally deceiving multiple doctors to receive overlapping prescriptions, after learning that he received about 2,000 painkillers, prescribed by four doctors in six months, at a pharmacy near his Palm Beach mansion.\
Limbaugh, who pleaded not guilty Friday, has steadfastly denied doctor shopping. Black said the charge will be dismissed in 18 months if Limbaugh complies with court guidelines. – from cbs news, Rush Limbaugh Arrested On Drug Charges
if people treated themselves with respect and developed healthy habits, they would not feel much need for prescription pills to make them feel better.
Where do we even start with this mess? How did America get to this point – where we are in danger of being over-run by the allies of a rogue intelligence agency that we are powerless against? How did the USA go from being the champion of the free world to being the greatest threat to the peace and security of its own citizens, and instant death from remote-control-in-the-skies for everyone else on earth?
It’s tempting to start out with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but the story starts with the creation of the CIA and the National Security State, founded in 1947 by President Harry Truman to address the fact that, with the war against fascism over, it was time for the US government to rid itself of communists and other socialists who had poured into President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal administration. The fear being that communists loyal to Russia’s revolutionary leader and communist party chairman Joseph Stalin would help him gradually transform the US into a communist state.
Government and business leaders wanted to ensure that there were “trusted people” in charge of things here, behind the scenes. These unaccountable, largely unknown people would be free to pursue their own agenda, without interference from government oversight and regulation. They set up fake businesses and NGOs. They hired CIA operatives to help facilitate business overseas and converted media mouthpieces to their cause.
They justified this by making sure the world knew of the dangers of “creeping socialism.” For years, the world was able to watch the Congress of the United States, along with their partners in business, destroy people’s lives by accusing them of being communists. Sometimes the accusations were merely petty acts of malice against people who had rejected the committee chairman’s homosexual advances – this happening in an era much more judgemental and less accepting of ANY expression of sexuality, much less one which many people could not comprehend.
Despite the fact that several courageous individuals succeeded in exposing the gross abuse of power of the anti-communists (even today, one of the more vocal anti-communists’ name is used to describe persecution for political gain – “McCarthyism.”), several of them retained power, and even increased this power in the decades afterwards – both Richard Nixon (HUAC) and Ronald Reagan (anti-communist president of the Screen Actors Guild) eventually took over the White House (in possession of the CIA since the intelligence/industry coup that had JFK assassinated), largely on the political clout earned in the 1940′s and 50′s anti-communist witch-hunts.
The longterm consequences of the 1963 coup has been a nation in a state of perpetual warfare. At first, the war was against the Communist Menace, anywhere on the globe (Greece, Iran, Guatemala, Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, the list goes on…). After the Soviet Union collapsed – as it was always intended to – the old Cold Warriors needed a new boogeyman to seek out and destroy anywhere an oil field or other valuable natural resources were in danger of being stolen from American corporations by foreigners.
However, in the 1970s a glitch in the system developed. The American people had become unwilling to finance and die for wars abroad, being fought for very unclear purposes. Two strategies were developed to compensate for this. First, blue-blood businessmen helped the CIA set up their own drug-running operations. This would give them international contacts, with people who would do just about anything for money. It would also give the CIA a ways of building a “black budget” of money from drug-running operations, with the good people of the United States and their elected representatives none the wiser.
Also, this allowed industries to develop their own private military and intelligence businesses. Both to set up their own smuggling networks, and to deal with those pesky foreigners who kept trying to utilize their nation’s natural resources for the benefit of the local population. How dare they!
This privatization and outsourcing of warfare for the benefit of multinational corporations picked up steam under the guidance of President James Earl Carter, who came up with the brilliant idea of recruiting and arming the most intolerant and violent people to be found on Earth and sending them to fight against the Soviet army in Afghanistan, rather than risk an outright war if the US were involved in some kind of official capacity. These mujahadeen eventually became the current crop of Afghan warlords and Opium barons. We are allegedly at war with this group, forever. We are currently arming this group. Not the exact same people, of course – but the ideology (or “theology” if you want to legitimize their insane version of Islam) remains the same. They exist to cause violence and chaos in countries not under the direct control of one of “their” Imans. There are no nations that fit this description, and the Holy Terror Army (a name i just made up and will now use to refer to any fundamentalist religion that resorts to extreme violence to impose it’s version of “god’s” law on nonbelievers) is spreading nightmarish violence around the world.
Prior to this current age of holy terror, acting President Ronald Reagan expanded the proxy wars to Angola, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Cambodia, and Grenada. His successor invaded Panama and Kuwait. And dirty old man Bill Clinton gave al Qaeda it’s biggest test, installing the CIA’s Holy Terror Army into the former Yugoslavia.
After that, the CIA/al Qaeda alliance was ready for the big time, and despite having trained, funded, and armed the Holy Terror Army, President Slick Willy justified military actions abroad by claiming they were targeting the workings of Holy Terror mastermind Osama bin Laden. This was the reason given for striking a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan being built to provide cheap prescription drugs to a continent being decimated by AIDS. Millions of Africans have died over the years due to this, and not just of AIDS - they’ve died of numerous maladies that could have been treated with pharmaceuticals, but the patent-holders demand prices that few people in Africa can afford.
Which brings us to 9/11/2001, the invasion of a country for fun and profit, and the start of a second perpetual war, the first one being the war on drugs, which the U.S. intentionally escalates by selling arms to drug cartels.
So, the CIA has assassinated an American President, set up an international drug-running operation which employs the most insanely violent people imaginable, and conducts wars with proxy armies which it cannot control, only finance. And the Government continues to use the war on drugs as a pretext to wage war on its own citizens, despite a proven will by the American public to legalize Ganja. But, this isn’t enough.
The war on terror has to be continually justified, despite a proven inability to militarily defeat a state of mind. Otherwise, it could lose its precious funding. Money is hard to come by, with the Government printing it as fast as it can in order to give it to European Banking cartels. There’s nothing left for the rest of us. I guess we are supposed to take solace in the roles left to us – fodder for their highly profitable, never-ending wars – and learn to love Big Brother.
Here in the spring of 2013, it looks as if the cycle has run its course, and the extreme violence of the late 20th century is finally coming back to its spawning grounds in North America. In the past two years, there have been numerous instances of mass shootings that were so obviously orchestrated by someone other than the “fall guy,” who usually ends up dead, that the Government is losing credibility. Washington has lost the Hearts and Minds campaign in the homeland, to the bloggers.
In addition to being nothing more than future collateral damage to our government, Americans are also guinea pigs in Monsanto’s GMO playground. They have been given immunity from prosecution for the damage their poisons are causing.
Our government is unaccountable to us. It is out of control, and the people in the positions of political power can only find solutions to the problems the banks, corporations, Holy War Terrorists, and drug cartel violence create by spreading more of the same.
If the US government continues to escalate the war of attrition it is waging against Americans, there may come a day when we welcome intervention by some foreign power. In the meanwhile, some countries may not wait for an invitation to intervene here. Just as they are saying about Syria, and like they said about Bosnia, the world cannot sit idly by and watch a violent regime continue to slaughter its own people.
It seems like our nation is doomed, and if we don’t want to go down with it, we had damn well better starting envisioning our lives in the ruins of the former United States, and living our lives to accommodate the changing world around us – one that an out-of-control CIA completely fucked over. I doubt the people of Yugoslavia had much of an idea how things would go after Tito died. Their society imploded. NATO intervened. Everything fell apart. Fortunes were lost in the destruction. New fortunes were made in the reconstruction – mostly for foreign corporations. And I don’t see things turning out much differently for us.
rob los ricos
The National Security State
The apparatus of the National Security State, largely established in the National Security Act of 1947, laid the foundations for the extension of American hegemony around the globe. In short, the Act laid the foundations for the apparatus of the American Empire. The National Security Act created the National Security Council (NSC) and position of National Security Adviser, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JSC) as the Pentagon high command of military leaders, and of course, the CIA.
The first major foreign operation carried out by the National Security State, or rather, the “secret government,” was the overthrowing of a democratically elected government in Iran. In 1952, the British were concerned at the efforts of Iran’s new Prime Minister Mohommad Mossadeq, in nationalizing Iran’s oil industry, taking the monopoly away from British Petroleum. So the British intelligence, the SIS, proposed to the Americans a joint operation, and the CIA obliged.
On January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his farewell address to the nation in which he warned America and indeed the world about the growing influence of the National Security State in what he referred to as the “military-industrial complex”:
“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Eisenhower was speaking from the point of view of having first-hand knowledge of this “influence” in the corridors of power, himself as President being unable to challenge it, and unable to do so simply in the first decade of the American Empire. He was warning against the influence of the interconnected relationship and organized power of the military, government, and industry, in that the growing influence of this “complex” was so vast that it threatened to take over the government and subvert democracy itself. It was the functions of this complex that saw profit created through war and empire, and thus, there was a constant drive and impetus towards pursuing empire and resorting to war. If you build a massive military structure, you are going to use it; if it is profitable to go to war, you will go to war.
Prescott Bush, the father of GHW Bush, later wrote Clover Dulles, the widow of Allen Dulles, in 1969, about his meeting with Allen Dulles after JFK had canned him in fall, 1961. “He [Allen] tried to make a pleasant evening of it, but I was rather sick of heart, and angry too, for it was the Kennedys that brought about the fiasco [Bay of Pigs]. And here they were making Allen to be the goat, which he wasn’t and did not deserve. I have never forgiven them.”
Note the last sentence of Prescott Bush. His son George Herbert Walker Bush says he can’t remember where he was on the day of the JFK assassination, despite his being a US Senate candidate staying in the Dallas, TX Sheraton the night of 11/21/63 and being in Dallas on 11/22/63. GHW Bush helped plan the Bay of Pigs invasion and I think he was involved in the JFK assassination. – from The LBJ-CIA Assassination of JFK
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, it wasn’t the Joint Chiefs alone who were trying to push for war, the “CIA also played a dangerous game during the crisis,” as Kennedy had ordered the CIA to halt all raids against Cuba during the crisis, “to make sure that no flying sparks from the agency’s secret operations set off a nuclear conflagration.” However, Bill Harvey, the CIA agent in charge of “Operation Mongoose,” the CIA plan which employed the Mafia to attempt to kill Castro, in brazen defiance of Kennedy’s orders, mobilized “every single team and asset that we could scrape together” and then dropped them into Cuba, “in anticipation of the U.S. invasion that the CIA hoped was soon to follow.”`
Robert Kennedy became the conduit through which the back-channel negotiations took place with the Soviets that ultimately ended the crisis without catastrophe. Nikita Khrushchev recounted the situation in his memoirs, in which he explained that Robert Kennedy “stressed how fragile his brother’s rule was becoming as the crisis dragged on,” which struck Khrushchev as “especially urgent.” Robert Kennedy warned the Soviets that, “If the situation continues much longer, the president is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American army could get out of control.” Khrushchev even later wrote that, “for some time we had felt there was a danger that the president would lose control of his military,” and that, “now he was admitting this to us himself.” Thus:
“Moscow’s fear that Kennedy might be toppled in a coup, Khrushchev suggested in his memoirs, led the Soviets to reach a settlement of the missile crisis with the president. “We could sense from the tone of the message that tension in the United States was indeed reaching a critical point.”
Thirteen days after the crisis began, the Soviets announced that they would remove the missiles from Cuba, with the US agreeing to remove missiles from US bases in Turkey and “pledging not to invade Cuba,” which Kennedy and future presidents would honour. At the announcement of the end to the crisis, General LeMay roared at Kennedy, “It’s the greatest defeat in our history,” and that, “We should invade today!” A defense analyst at the Pentagon, Daniel Ellsberg, who was consulting with Air Force generals and colonels on nuclear strategy at the end of the crisis, remarked that after the settlement was reached, “there was virtually a coup atmosphere in Pentagon circles,” explaining, “not that I had the fear there was about to be a coup – I just thought it was a mood of hatred and rage. The atmosphere was poisonous, poisonous.” - from lew rockwell, The National Security State and the Assassination of JFK
Zbigniew Brzezinski:
How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen
Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?
Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?
Brzezinski: It isn’t quite that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?
Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic [integrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
The above has been translated from the French by Bill Blum author of the indispensible, “Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II” and “Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower” Portions of the books can be read at: <http://members.aol.com/superogue/homepage.htm>
Mujahideen trained and funded by the US are among its deadliest foes
American officials estimate that, from 1985 to 1992, 12,500 foreigners were trained in bomb-making, sabotage and urban guerrilla warfare in Afghan camps the CIA helped to set up.
Since the fall of the Soviet puppet government in 1992, another 2,500 are believed to have passed through the camps. They are now run by an assortment of Islamic extremists, including Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted terrorist.- from the gaurdian, Frankenstein the CIA created
CONTROLLING THE ILLEGAL DRUG TRADE
The more one studies the dark history of the US national security state, the more transparent the CIA – Wall Street connections become. The links to the international drug trade are less obvious, but have existed from the beginning, that is, from the days of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Time and again, the same pattern has played out: US military interventions in Southeast Asia, Central America and, since 2001, Afghanistan and Iraq, have been accompanied by a sharp increase in narco-trafficking, with all of the attendant evils. These include the plague of drug addiction, drug-related crime, the devastation of the family and as I hope to show, the corrupting of democratic institutions at home and abroad.
The morally bankrupt policies that are responsible for all of the above have had another deleterious effect: They have crippled our nation’s capacity to play a positive role on the world stage. It is no wonder that foreigners no longer view the United States with admiration and respect, but increasingly with fear and loathing. But US elites are oblivious to such concerns. They do not care, and are quite candid about what they view as the CIA’s pragmatic “need” to associate with unsavory individuals and criminals in the interest of furthering US foreign policy goals. Their realpolitik can be read between the lines of the policy papers. Take, for instance, the 1996 intelligence report, already noted, prepared by Maurice “Hank” Greenberg for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and for which Greenberg was nominated to replace John Deutch as director of the CIA. In the paper Greenberg affirms that “the capability to undertake [covert operations]….constitutes an important national security tool.” Later, in the section titled “Intelligence and Law Enforcement” he insists that foreign policy ought to take precedence over law enforcement when it comes to overseas operations. The bulk of U.S. intelligence efforts overseas is devoted to traditional national security concerns; as a result, law enforcement must ordinarily be a secondary concern. FBI and Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agents operating abroad should not be allowed to act independently of either the ambassador or the CIA lest pursuit of evidence or individuals for prosecution cause major foreign policy problems or complicate ongoing intelligence and diplomatic activities.
This means, over and above diplomacy, that when criminals are judged to be intelligence assets, they are granted protection from prosecution (emphasis added) for narco-trafficking, money laundering, extortion, rape, even terrorism and murder. In 1982, the CIA and the US Department of Justice actually worked out a secret agreement to this effect. The deal exempted the CIA from having to report drug trafficking by CIA assets, which, notice, made a mockery of then presidential wife Nancy Reagan’s much ballyhooed “just say no” anti-drug campaign. At the time, most Americans trusted Ronald Reagan and believed that his administration was serious about the so-called war on drugs. But hindsight shows that the Reagan White House badly abused the public’s good faith.
The template for Iraq today is not Vietnam, with which it has often been compared, but El Salvador, where a right-wing government backed by the United States fought a leftist insurgency in a 12-year war beginning in 1980. The cost was high — more than 70,000 people were killed, most of them civilians, in a country with a population of just six million. Most of the killing and torturing was done by the army and the right-wing death squads affiliated with it. According to an Amnesty International report in 2001, violations committed by the army and associated groups included ‘‘extrajudicial executions, other unlawful killings, ‘disappearances’ and torture. . . . Whole villages were targeted by the armed forces and their inhabitants massacred.’’ As part of President Reagan’s policy of supporting anti-Communist forces, hundreds of millions of dollars in United States aid was funneled to the Salvadoran Army, and a team of Special Forces advisers, led for several years by Jim Steele, trained front-line battalions that were accused of significant human rights abuses. The United States lost more than 700 soldiers in the war.
The foreign policy advocated by Maurice Greenberg, above, is in large part responsible for the drug-related violence on the streets of our cities, and for the epidemic of narcotic addiction among our children, who have been sacrificed to the false god of national security. But the social carnage is not limited to the United States. Drug addiction in Muslim Iraq was almost unknown prior to the US invasion in 2003; but has since become a major problem. A similar recent explosion of heroin use has occurred in Iran, which, notice, is right next door to Afghanistan, where the poppies are grown with the blessing of the CIA. Such foreign policies are evil, a scourge upon the planet, yet, are intimately associated with US empire building. Quite simply, the US power elite has followed in the footsteps of the British and French who, in their day, also exploited the immensely profitable opium and heroin trade. The writer Chalmers Johnson has termed this descent into darkness the sorrow of empire.
The CIA’s secret collusion with the Department of Justice gave the CIA veto over law enforcement, effectively blunting the capacity of US drug enforcement agencies to interdict the flow of illegal drugs into the US. The timing was no accident. The deal coincided with the start of the CIA’s Contra war in Central America. This explains why, the next year, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), under pressure from the Pentagon, closed its office in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. The flow of drugs through Honduras had not diminished; in fact, just the opposite. For years, the country had been a transfer point for illegal drug smuggling into the US, a reality that Contra leaders readily exploited to finance their war against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas; and they did so with the full knowledge and approval of the CIA. For many years after, Langley’s veto blocked legitimate efforts by US law enforcement to curb the drug trade.
I must emphasize that, meanwhile, the American people were kept in the dark about the policy and its effects, at every point in the chain: from the formulation of the policy to its implementation to the phony packaging of the policy for mass consumption. In fact, we only know about it, today, thanks to a courageous journalist named Gary Webb, who published a groundbreaking series of articles in 1996 in the San Jose Mercury News, exposing Contra links and CIA complicity in the crack cocaine epidemic that ravaged the black communities of Los Angeles in the 1980s. The series, appropriately titled “Dark Alliance”, was one of the first big stories to be carried on the Internet; and later, Webb expanded it into an important book by the same name, in which he lays out the voluminous evidence in stark detail. But it was Webb’s series of articles in 1996 that initially focused media attention on the drug issue; and which compelled CIA director John Deutch to announce an internal investigation. Meanwhile, the agency simultaneously launched a disinformation campaign to discredit Webb, whom it viewed as a serious threat.
The campaign against Gary Webb has been called “one of the most venomous and factually inane assaults on a professional journalist’s competence in living memory.” The fawning mainstream press, always eager to do the CIA’s bidding, appeared to take pleasure in savaging the messenger, even while tacitly conceding that his facts were basically correct. One of the low points occurred on live TV, on November 15, 1996, when NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, wife of Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, referred to Webb’s exhaustively documented expose as “a conspiracy theory,” the kiss of death for any serious journalist. At this same time, as we know, Greenspan was busily engineering the deregulation of Wall Street, setting the stage for the 2008 financial meltdown of the global economy. – from foreign policy journal, Black 9/11: A Walk on the Dark Side Part 3: AIG and the Linkage to the Drug Trade
when assets go bad
Phillip (alternately, “Philip”) Marshall, 54, a career airline pilot who claimed to have once served as a contract pilot for the CIA and DEA during the Iran-Contra affair, shot and killed his two teenage children, and the family dog, then killed himself.
Michael Ruppert. Mike is a former LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) narcotics officer who in the late 1970′s, trained in narcotics by the U.S. Justice Department. The CIA tried to recruit Mike to traffic drugs with them. When Mike tried to expose the corruption that he saw (the moral thing to do), he was fired without cause. As Governor Jesse Ventura says, “Don’t just go along to get along.”
Mike Ruppert has spent the last 25 years fighting the system, trying to expose the lies and tyranny of the CIA (and many other offices of our government). This is no conspiracy theory, Mike Ruppert has presented over 6,000 documents indicting the U.S. government’s involvement in decades of heroin and cocaine drug-trafficking into the cities and towns of the United States. You can subscribe to Mike’s newsletter at www.copvcia.com or go to www.fromthewilderness.com
Sleeping With the Devil: How U.S. and Saudi Backing of Al Qaeda Led to 9/11
Front row, from left: Major Gen. Hamid Gul, director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Director of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Willian Webster; Deputy Director for Operations Clair George; an ISI colonel; and senior CIA official, Milt Bearden at a Mujahideen training camp in North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan in 1987. (source RAWA)
The CIA, concerned about the factionalism of Afghanistan … found that Arab zealots who flocked to aid the Afghans were easier to “read” than the rivalry-ridden natives. While the Arab volunteers might well prove troublesome later, the agency reasoned, they at least were one-dimensionally anti-Soviet for now. So bin Laden, along with a small group of Islamic militants from Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestinian refugee camps all over the Middle East, became the “reliable” partners of the CIA in its war against Moscow.
To this day, those involved in the decision to give the Afghan rebels access to a fortune in covert funding and top-level combat weaponry continue to defend that move in the context of the Cold War. Sen. Orrin Hatch, a senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee making those decisions, told my colleague Robert Windrem that he would make the same call again today even knowing what bin Laden would do subsequently. “It was worth it,” he said.
“Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union,” he said.
The United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings ….
The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books ….
John Adams once called the vice presidency, “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived.” FDR’s VP, John Nance Garner, said the job wasn’t “worth a pitcher of warm piss.”
It’s quotes like these that make Dick Cheney—who pretty much ran his own separate government from the VP’s office—all the more impressive, not to mention terrifying. For not only was Cheney out of control, he was out of control in a job that had no controls attached to it. No one had ever thought them necessary before.
Give the man credit for creativity. Cheney found even more ways to overturn the Constitution, undermine the separation of powers, and possibly make the U.S. government an accessory to murder many times over.
The New York Times broke half the story in Sunday’s paper as Scott Shane explained that “the Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney.” Congress finally found out eight years after Cheney gave the order, when CIA Director Leon E. Panetta informed the House and Senate intelligence committees upon learning of the program himself.
According to current law, when a U.S. intelligence agency is involved in a covert action, at least eight members of Congress—the Republican and Democratic leaders of both houses of Congress and of their intelligence committees—must be informed in order for the program to be legal.
CIA defenders insist compliance with the law is actually a gray area because “this program never went fully operational” as one official put it. And Panetta terminated the program as soon as he learned of it. But given the history of both Cheney and many in the CIA’s contempt for both Congress and the Constitution, it’s entirely possible that we still don’t know the full story. - from the daily beast
there are some flaws to this video, but it’s a treasury of good information.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the use of contractors reached a level unprecedented in U.S. military operations. As of March 31, 2010, the United States deployed 175,000 troops and 207,000 contractors in the war zones. Contractors represented 50 percent of the Department of Defense (DOD) workforce in Iraq and 59 percent in Afghanistan.
This increase is the logical outcome of a series of decisions going back decades. Force structure reductions ranging from the post-Vietnam decisions that moved most Army logistics support elements to the Army Reserve and Guard4 to the post–Cold War reduction that cut the Army from 18 to 10 divisions with corresponding cuts in support forces greatly reduced the Services’ ability to support long-term operations. Next, a series of decisions in the 1990s led to the employment of contractors in the Balkans for tasks from traditional camp-building to the new concept of “force development” that saw MPRI training the Croatian army. Finally, the decision to invade Iraq with minimum forces left the United States with too few troops in-theater to deal with the disorder that resulted from the removal of Saddam. Thus, it is understandable that the immediate, unanticipated need for large numbers of logistics and security personnel, the shortage of such troops on Active duty, and the precedent for using contractors in the Balkans caused the Pentagon to turn to contractors to fill the immediate operational needs. However, the subsequent failure to conduct a careful analysis of the wisdom of using contractors is less understandable. The executive branch has conducted numerous investigations into fraud, waste, and corruption in the contracting process. Congress has held hearings and established the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet the U.S. Government has not systematically explored the essential question: Does using contractors in a conflict zone make strategic sense?
By the end of 2009, contractors reported almost 1,800 dead and 40,000 wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the fighting in Afghanistan gets worse, contractors are now suffering more deaths than U.S. forces: “In the first two quarters of 2010 alone, contractor deaths represented more than half—53 percent—of all fatalities. This point bears emphasis: since January 2010, more contractors have died in Iraq and Afghanistan than U.S. military soldiers.” For practical purposes, these casualties were “off the books” in that they had no real impact on the political discussions about the war. As Peter Singer noted:
there was no outcry whenever contractors were called up and deployed, or even killed. If the gradual death toll among American troops threatened to slowly wear down public support, contractor casualties were not counted in official death tolls and had no impact on these ratings. . . . These figures mean that the private military industry has suffered more losses in Iraq than the rest of the coalition of allied nations combined. The losses are also far more than any single U.S. Army division has experienced.
Contractor casualties are not reported via the Pentagon, but only through the U.S. Department of Labor. Labor’s Web site notes that these are not comprehensive statistics but only represent those injuries and deaths that resulted in insurance claims. Thus, it is difficult if not impossible to determine how many additional casualties were suffered by other nations’ contractors in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
In reality, it is virtually impossible to determine the actual effectiveness of any contractors—armed or unarmed—until they begin to operate in theater (and only then if a member of the U.S. Government can observe the contractors as they operate).
Compounding the problems created by lack of quality control, the government does not control the contractor’s daily contact with abuse, intimidation, and even killing of local civilians such as the DynCorp employee who ran a child sex ring in the Balkans or the September 2007 Blackwater shootings in Nisour Square, Baghdad.
This lack of quality and tactical control greatly increases the impact of the third major problem: the United States is held responsible for everything the contractors do or fail to do. Despite the fact the United States has no effective quality or operational control over the contractors, the local population rightly holds it responsible for all contractor failures.
In addition to undercutting government legitimacy, the use of contractors may actually undercut local government power. In Afghanistan, security and reconstruction contracts have resulted in significant shifts in relative power between competing Afghan qawmsas well as allegations of corruption. Dexter Filkins, writing in the New York Times, notes that the power structure in Orugzan Province, Afghanistan, has changed completely due to the U.S. Government’s selecting Matiullah Khan to provide security for convoys from Kandahar to Tirin Kot:
With his NATO millions, and the American backing, Mr. Matiullah has grown into the strongest political and economic force in the region. He estimates that his salaries support 15,000 people in this impoverished prov ince. . . . This has irritated some local leaders, who say that the line between Mr. Matiullah’s business interest and the government has disappeared. . . . Both General [Nick] Carter [commander of ISAF South] and Hanif Atmar, the Afghan interior minister, said they hoped to disband Mr. Matiullah’s militia soon—or at least to bring it under formal government control. . . . General Carter said that while he had no direct proof in Mr. Matiullah’s case, he harbored more general worries that the legions of unregulated Afghan security companies had a financial interest in prolonging chaos.
Thus, an unacknowledged but serious strategic impact of using contractors is to directly undercut both the legitimacy and the authority of the host nation government. - this article was originally published as Institute for National Strategic Studies Strategic Forum 260 (NDU Press, November 2010)
Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that QinetiQ, a high tech defense contractor specializing in secret satellites drones and software used by U.S. special forces, was the victim of a sustained cybersecurity breach for several years starting in 2007.
According to Bloomberg, documents released in the Anonymous Stratfor hack reveal QinetiQ was compromised as part of a cyber-espionage attack originating in China — and notes the breach was part of a much broader campaign targetting U.S. contractors:
“QinetiQ’s espionage expertise didn’t keep Chinese cyber- spies from outwitting the company. In a three-year operation, hackers linked to China’s military infiltrated QinetiQ’s computers and compromised most if not all of the company’s research. At one point, they logged into the company’s network by taking advantage of a security flaw identified months earlier and never fixed [...]
QinetiQ was only one target in a broader cyberpillage. Beginning at least as early as 2007, Chinese computer spies raided the databanks of almost every major U.S. defense contractor and made off with some of the country’s most closely guarded technological secrets, according to two former Pentagon officials who asked not to be named because damage assessments of the incidents remain classified.“
U.S. intelligence reports ranked cyber threats as the top danger facing the country for the first time in April, but tensions have been running high about the government’s ability to protect digital assets and intelligence for years. A 2011 Department of Justice report noted that only 64 percent of FBI agents assigned to national security-related cyber investigations had the appropriate skills and expertise to handle those types of cases.
Government cybersecurity contracting exploded during the Bush Administration, with many roles traditionally filled by government employees or resources outsourced to external companies over whom the government has less oversight. The Obama Administration has made efforts to curb that trend, but that expansion, combined with a lack of cybersecurity expertise in the military and federal agencies, resulted in many cybersecurity defense operations being outsourced or completed under the heavy supervision of outside contractors. – from think progress, The U.S. Outsources Cybersecurity & Defense To Contractors That Keep Getting Hacked
The Syrian government has called on the United Nations to classify a leading rebel group as a terrorist organisation after its leader pledged allegiance to the head of Al Qaeda.
Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani heads the radical Nusra Front rebel group.
In a message posted online on Wednesday he pledged allegiance to the head of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and supported calls for an Islamic state to be created in Syria.
It is now beyond reasonable doubt that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by his own National Security State in what was a violent coup d’état that is, an overthrowing of the legitimate elected government of the United States by force through the use of the clandestine black-ops services of the CIA, elements of the Secret Service, the US military, the FBI and organized crime.
Unless and until the United States publicly discloses to the citizenry that its duly elected government was overthrown in 1963 and that since then the replacement/imposter government has been at least technically/legally speaking illegitimate[12] it will likely be impossible to reverse the increasingly rapid disintegration of America. The reality is that since the murder of President John F. Kennedy, there has been an extra-constitutional imposter “government” in place which prior to that time existed only in the shadows. It has been given many different names including the “war party” the MIMIC (media, intelligence, military, industrial complex) the secret government, the shadow government etc. That entity or “Regime” as a result of the JFK assassination appears to have profoundly altered the trajectory of the United States by placing the country on a constant war footing and building and sustaining an enormous foreign military base presence throughout the world which serves to project American power and enlarge the “empire.” – from jericho rendezvous, After the JFK Assassination–a True Coup d’état: Is the Current US Government Legitimate?
A handful of polls conducted in the days after the Boston Marathon bombings show that US citizens are responding much differently than in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that killed roughly 3,000 people. Not only are Americans more opposed now to giving up personal freedoms for the sake of security than they were after 9/11, but other statistics show that distrust against the federal government continues to climb.
Just one day after the April 15 Boston Marathon bombing, pollsters with Fox News asked a sample of Americans, “Would you be willing to give up some of your personal freedom in order to reduce thethreat of terrorism?” Forty-three percent of the respondents said they would, while 45 percent said no. Comparatively, 71 percent of Americans asked a similar question in October 2001 said they’d be willing to give up personal freedoms, while only 20 percent opposed at the time.
A separate poll conducted by the Washington Post just three days after the Boston Marathon bombing reveals that nearly half of those surveyed say that the government will go too far in trying to prevent future acts of terrorism. The Post asked a random national sample of 588 adults, “Which worries you more: that the government (will not go far enough to investigate terrorism because of concerns about constitutional rights), or that it (will go too far in compromising constitutional rights in order to investigate terrorism)?” Days after the Boston bombing, 41 percent of respondents said the government will not go far enough, compared to 48 percent saying they’ll go too far. When similar questions were asked in 2006 and 2010, 44 percent and 27 percent said the government will go too far, respectively, signaling that for the first time in years Americans are overly concerned about a misuse of power on the part of Washington.
That isn’t to say that the Boston attack is necessarily inspiring Americans to question authority, though. Two months before Tsarnaev brothers allegedly detonated a pair of explosives near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, 53 percent of Americans polled by the Pew Research Center said the federal government is threatening their personal rights and freedoms. In November 2011, that statistic was only 30 percent. - from russia today, Americans troubled more by governmental abuse than terrorism
Police and private security personel monitor security cameras at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative on April 23, 2013 in New York City. (AFP Photo / John Moore)Police and private security personel monitor security cameras at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative on April 23, 2013 in New York City. (AFP Photo / John Moore)Police and private security personel monitor security cameras at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative on April 23, 2013 in New York City. (AFP Photo / John Moore)Police and private security personel monitor security cameras at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative on April 23, 2013 in New York City. (AFP Photo / John Moore)
The Syrian government has called on the United Nations to classify a leading rebel group as a terrorist organisation after its leader pledged allegiance to the head of Al Qaeda.
The call came as the opposition accused forces loyal to president Bashar al-Assad of “savage” killings in the country’s south.
Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani heads the radical Nusra Front rebel group.
In a message posted online on Wednesday he pledged allegiance to the head of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and supported calls for an Islamic state to be created in Syria.
The Syrian regime is demanding the UN “fulfil its role and preserve global security” by classing Nursa Front as an Al Qaeda linked entity.
KABUL, Afghanistan — For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.
All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the C.I.A. to the office of President Hamid Karzai, according to current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.
“We called it ‘ghost money,’ ” said Khalil Roman, who served as Mr. Karzai’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005. “It came in secret, and it left in secret.”
The C.I.A., which declined to comment for this article, has long been known to support some relatives and close aides of Mr. Karzai. But the new accounts of off-the-books cash delivered directly to his office show payments on a vaster scale, and with a far greater impact on everyday governing.
Moreover, there is little evidence that the payments bought the influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.
“The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan,” one American official said, “was the United States.”
The United States was not alone in delivering cash to the president. Mr. Karzai acknowledged a few years ago that Iran regularly gave bags of cash to one of his top aides.
At the time, in 2010, American officials jumped on the payments as evidence of an aggressive Iranian campaign to buy influence and poison Afghanistan’s relations with the United States. What they did not say was that the C.I.A. was also plying the presidential palace with cash — and unlike the Iranians, it still is.
American and Afghan officials familiar with the payments said the agency’s main goal in providing the cash has been to maintain access to Mr. Karzai and his inner circle and to guarantee the agency’s influence at the presidential palace, which wields tremendous power in Afghanistan’s highly centralized government. The officials spoke about the money only on the condition of anonymity.
It is not clear that the United States is getting what it pays for. Mr. Karzai’s willingness to defy the United States — and the Iranians, for that matter — on an array of issues seems to have only grown as the cash has piled up. Instead of securing his good graces, the payments may well illustrate the opposite: Mr. Karzai is seemingly unable to be bought.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, center, makes a statement before meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, left, and Pakistani Army Chief Gen. Asfhaq Parvez Kayani on Wednesday, April 24, 2013, in Brussels, Belgium. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, Pool) INTERESTING ARRANGEMENT…
Like the Iranian cash, much of the C.I.A.’s money goes to paying off warlords and politicians, many of whom have ties to the drug trade and, in some cases, the Taliban. The result, American and Afghan officials said, is that the agency has greased the wheels of the same patronage networks that American diplomats and law enforcement agents have struggled unsuccessfully to dismantle, leaving the government in the grips of what are basically organized crime syndicates.
Over Iran’s objections, he signed a strategic partnership deal with the United States last year, directly leading the Iranians to halt their payments, two senior Afghan officials said. Now, Mr. Karzai is seeking control over the Afghan militias raised by the C.I.A. to target operatives of Al Qaeda and insurgent commanders, potentially upending a critical part of the Obama administration’s plans for fighting militants as conventional military forces pull back this year.
But the C.I.A. has continued to pay, believing it needs Mr. Karzai’s ear to run its clandestine war against Al Qaeda and its allies, according to American and Afghan officials.
The New York Times, Apr. 28, 2013: Much of it also still goes to keeping old warlords in line. One is Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek whose militia served as a C.I.A. proxy force in 2001. He receives nearly $100,000 a month from the palace, two Afghan officials said.
Like the Iranian cash, much of the C.I.A.’s money goes to paying off warlords and politicians, many of whom have ties to the drug trade and, in some cases, the Taliban. The result, American and Afghan officials said, is that the agency has greased the wheels of the same patronage networks that American diplomats and law enforcement agents have struggled unsuccessfully to dismantle, leaving the government in the grips of what are basically organized crime syndicates.
The cash does not appear to be subject to the oversight and restrictions placed on official American aid to the country or even the C.I.A.’s formal assistance programs, like financing Afghan intelligence agencies. And while there is no evidence that Mr. Karzai has personally taken any of the money — Afghan officials say the cash is handled by his National Security Council — the payments do in some cases work directly at odds with the aims of other parts of the American government in Afghanistan, even if they do not appear to violate American law.
Handing out cash has been standard procedure for the C.I.A. in Afghanistan since the start of the war. During the 2001 invasion, agency cash bought the services of numerous warlords, including Muhammad Qasim Fahim, the current first vice president.
“We paid them to overthrow the Taliban,” the American official said.
The C.I.A. then kept paying the Afghans to keep fighting. For instance, Mr. Karzai’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, was paid by the C.I.A. to run the Kandahar Strike Force, a militia used by the agency to combat militants, until his assassination in 2011.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has released its Opium Risk Assessment 2013 report on Afghanistan. Poppy production has been on record high in third consecutive year. The report says increase has been significant in Southern provinces.
More than a third of Afghanistan’s total opium production now takes place in Helmand and Kandahar. The rise in production has been due to high prices for last few years and harvest has now spread to areas which were previously poppy-free. It further says poppy cultivation is not only expected to expand in areas where it already existed in 2012 but also in new areas or in areas where poppy cultivation was stopped. Villages with a low level of security and those which had not received agricultural assistance in the previous year were significantly more likely to grow poppy in 2013.
It has been clear that the US and its NATO allies are concerned with drug trafficking, not poppy growing. They have largely ignored the poppy eradication campaigns.
The percentage of increase shows an alarming situation, particularly at a time when the country is in transition. The UN report says Afghan efforts to stamp out opium poppy cultivation are failing. More help is needed to provide alternatives to farmers, in law enforcement support and in cooperation from other countries in the region. - from outlook afghanistan
THIS IS OLD NEWS – Afghanistan’s Poppy Harvest Soars
Afghanistan will produce another record poppy harvest this year that cements its status as the world’s near-sole supplier of the heroin source, yet a furious debate over how to reverse the trend is stalling proposals to cut the crop, U.S. officials say.
As President Bush prepares for weekend talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, divisions within the U.S. administration and among NATO allies have delayed release of a $475 million counternarcotics program for Afghanistan, where intelligence officials see growing links between drugs and the Taliban, the officials said.
U.N. figures to be released in September are expected to show that Afghanistan’s poppy production has risen up to 15 percent since 2006 and that the country now accounts for 95 percent of the world’s crop, 3 percentage points more than last year, officials familiar with preliminary statistics told The Associated Press.
But counterdrug proposals by some U.S. officials have met fierce resistance, including boosting the amount of forcible poppy field destruction in provinces that grow the most, officials said. The approach also would link millions of dollars in development aid to benchmarks on eradication; arrests and prosecutions of narcotraders, corrupt officials; and on alternative crop production.
Those ideas represent what proponents call an “enhanced carrot-and-stick approach” to supplement existing anti-drug efforts. They are the focus of the new $475 million program outlined in a 995-page report, the release of which has been postponed twice and may be again delayed due to disagreements, officials said.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because parts of the report remain classified.
Counternarcotics agents at the State Department had wanted to release a 123-page summary of the strategy last month and then again last week, but were forced to hold off because of concerns it may not be feasible, the officials said. - from liveLeak
Helicopter flight over the poppy fields of Afghanistan.
how did afghanistan become the world’s opium supplier? and WHY?
Kris Millegan, the world’s leading authority on Skull & Bones, describes how the Yale secret society was built on the profits of opium smuggling, which dramatically increased after opium was made illegal around the world. This talk was given at the 16th High Times Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam, also known as The Conspiracy Cup.
Kris Millegan is a writer, researcher and publisher whose father was in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Military Intelligence (G2), and later was in the CIA, rising to Branch Chief, Head of Intelligence Analysis for East Asia. His father told Kris some things that he didn’t understand in the late 60′s. These revelations led to over thirty years of research into the subjects of CIA-drugs, clandestine operations, conspiracy theory and secret societies.
EITHER Tamerlan Tsarnaev WAS THE GREATEST TERRORIST OF ALL TIME, OR HE WAS AN ACTIVE AGENT OF AN INTELLIGENCE AGENCY IN THE U.S.
despite constant surveillance by the FBI, warnings by russian intelligence, his name appearing on numerous american intelligence agencies’ “watchlists,” and attending college at a public AMERICAN university, RIGHT UNDER THE NOSES of HUNDREDS of police and law enforcement personnel – with their face recognition technology, wireless surveillance, and bomb-sniffing dogs – this ONE KID was able to outsmart the entire, multi-billion dollar american security complex and bomb the boston marathon. Single-handedly. and this is the story they WANT us to believe.
while most news outlets are treating the story of last week’s bombing of the boston marathon as…well…last week’s news, the official story continues to come unravelled.
it seems as if the goal is to justify starting a war against syria and then iran. and, until we get with the program, we can expect more attacks like sandy hook and boston.
it also seems clear that the u.s. government cannot achieve the desired results from their domestic terror incidents while the internet here is unfiltered. it must be locked down BEFORE they can impose some official bullshit story upon the american public. so, they have…
The Shock Doctrine (trailer)
At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves…. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater…. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts…. New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened…. These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters — to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets. – see more about the book and film Shock Doctrine, by naomi klein. there are also several good youtube videos of her speaking about this topic.
The last two weeks have seen a series of victories for the Syrian Army across Syria. It appears that 2 full companies of so-called “Free Syrian Army” fighters have been annihilated near Damascus, while government forces have restored order in parts of Homs and along the previously porous Lebanese-Syrian border.
Time has run out for the West, and it appears that they are desperately seeking any excuse to rescue their failing proxy war. When urgent, but otherwise unjustified military intervention is needed, a “humanitarian” pretext is usually invented – as it was in Libya. Failing that, as the West has already clearly done in Syria, an even more tenuous narrative has been resurrected from its well-earned grave. CNN has reported in their article, “Hagel: Evidence of chemical weapons use in Syria,” that:
U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced Thursday that the United States has evidence that chemical weapons have been used in Syria.
This comes a couple of days after an Israeli intelligence official said Damascus was using weapons banned under international law against its own people in the country’s civil war. Syria has said rebels have used chemical weapons.
U.S. President Barack Obama has said the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons against its own people in the country would be a “game changer.”
Hagel said the intelligence agencies’ assessment was reached with “varying degrees of confidence,” meaning that they lacked proof or overwhelming evidence. He said the conclusion was “reached within the last 24 hours” and that the White House delivered a letter outlining the findings to Congress Thursday morning.
Syrian army seizes strategic town near capital: “The disaster has struck, the army entered Otaiba. The regime has managed to turn off the weapons tap,” a fighter from the town told Reuters via Skype. “The price of a bullet will go from 50 Syrian pounds to 1,000 Syrian pounds (6.5 pounds) now, but we must pay and retake it. It’s the main if not the only route.”
Hundreds of Europeans fighting in Syria, says EU expert: Intelligence agencies are concerned some could join groups linked to al-Qaeda and later return to Europe to launch terrorist attacks. The UK, Ireland and France are among the EU countries estimated to have the highest numbers of fighters in Syria.
Hague warns of new Syrian terror threat: William Hague said there was now “uncontested space” in Syria where Islamist groups were free to establish training camps that would equip and train foreign fighters, including British extremists.
Syria says backing rebels risks new attacks on America: – U.S. support for Syrian rebels may lead to more attacks on American soil like those of September 11, said a senior Syrian official who warned that Islamist fighters would spread “the fire of terrorism” around the world.
‘Confusion and inconsistencies’: How US plans to distract public from real truth about Boston
The initial questions about the Boston bombing are behind us, but former FBI employee Sibel Edmonds believes the pursuit of truth will eventually lead to a far more secret agenda by the US, which she reveals to RT.
RT:We’ve learned in the last hour that Russia warned the FBI about the older Tsarnaev brother and his potential links with radical Islamists, but the FBI found nothing suspicious. How is that possible?
Sibel Edmonds: Actually, we predicted that the unnamed foreign country [Western media didn’t name the source immediately] was in fact Russia, two days ago. We have too little facts, too much false information and speculations. But just look at the period they are talking about. When you listen to the suspect’s mother, she’s talking about a period of three to five years. According to FBI officials, they received this information, this warning, in 2011. So we have that inconsistency right there. The other important inconsistency that we should pay attention to is the mother’s description of FBI mannerisms and conversation with the suspects and the family when they were visiting them for the last three to five years. That fits exactly the recruitment style of the intelligence community. When you go to the suspects, and one moment you’re saying “We know you’re decent, we know you’re doing nothing wrong, we know you’re good”, and the next minute they’re saying “You can be dangerous”, right after receiving that information from the Russian government, to threaten them with that information for what purpose – to recruit them as informants or for other agendas. – see more, including video interview with sibel edmonds, from russia today
Members of a SWAT team search for 19-year-old bombing suspect Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev on April 19, 2013 in Watertown, Massachusetts. (AFP Photo / Mario Tama)
The Shadow Government Of Vice President Dick Cheney Is Only Now Becoming Clear
On Sept. 12, 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that ”what we are seeing is the definition of a new battlefield in the world, a twenty-first century battlefield.”
On Sept. 16, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney said that America would have to “spend time in the shadows” and work on the “dark side.”
Since then the U.S. has been engaged in a global war on terror, but Americans haven’t known how exactly it is being fought.
As The World Trade Center towers crumbled to the ground, so too did the system of oversight and review of lethal covert ops that had been carefully constructed over the course of the previous decade.
In place of that system, Scahill writes, a “War Council” led by Cheney advisor and fellow neoconservative David Addington developed legal justifications for capturing, torturing, and/or killing any al Qaeda suspect anywhere in the world.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev: experts puzzled as hunt for terror links gleans little
Lack of connections to terrorist groups means experts are increasingly seeing the elder Tsarnaev as a self-radicalised lone wolf – underlining the daunting task of piecing together a motive.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev has become the focal point of a global FBI investigation into whether any organised group or wider conspiracy lay behind last week’s Boston Marathon bombings. The 26-year-old, who has been identified through fingerprinting as the man killed in the shootout with police in the Watertown suburb of Boston, is widely assumed to have been the mastermind of the marathon outrage, with his younger brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev allegedly playing the role of junior partner.
Yet so far the hunt for clues as to the motivation of the Tsarnaev brothers has failed to throw up concrete evidence that they were inspired to militancy by any particular extremist cleric or politician. Nor is there any known link to any nationalist or Islamist group in the Caucasus region that they regarded as their homeland, a link which would suggest they were recruited as foot soldiers and given operational instructions to strike the Boston Marathon.
Federal investigators and counter-terrorism experts are increasingly of the view that the brothers were acting alone. They surmise is that the elder Tsarnaev largely provided his own motivation and training, through the internet. – from the guardian, u.k.
CISPA: The House passed it a week ago, but most don’t know what it is
The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, more commonly called, CISPA, is a proposed law that would allow the sharing of Internet traffic information between the U.S. government and technology and manufacturing companies. The Bill, known as H.R. 624, was first introduced in 2012; and then reintroduced to Congress in its current form by US Representative Mike Rogers, on February 13, 2013. It was passed by the House of Representatives on April 18th.
Proponents of CISPA say that it is a needed amendment to the National Security Act of 1947, which does not cover cybercrime, and a powerful weapon that the government can use against the growing threat of cyber-terrorism from countries such as China and Iran. The bill’s purpose, they claim, is to allow federal security agencies to notify tech and manufacturing companies of any detected cyber-attack that may do them harm, and in turn, allow those companies to inform those agencies in kind.
Critics of CISPA, however, don’t buy it. They say that CISPA is an affront to American civil liberties, and the privacy of its citizens. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an international non-profit digital rights group based in the U.S., “the bill grants broad new powers, allowing companies to identify and obtain “threat information” by looking at your private information.”
EFF also says that “it (the bill) is written so broadly that it allows companies to hand over large swaths of personal information to the government with no judicial oversight—effectively creating a “cybersecurity” loophole in all existing privacy laws.” – from the washington times
“Look, we live in a very dangerous world. We know there are people who want to take away our freedoms.”
did the canadian government invent “al qaeda in iran?” are the ruling elites just playing games with us? and the mayor of new york thinks the fact that the boston marathon bombing was pulled off by two kids – who the FBI had been tracking for years – with thousands of security personnel from local, state, national and international law enforcement agencies present, this means we must SURRENDER MORE OF OUR BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS AND DIGNITY if we don’t want to see more of this in the future. that sounds like a threat to me. one of those “we can do this the easy way, or…” type scenarios.
our government already believes it has the right to kill u.s. citizens without disclosing any rationalization for doing so. how much more do we have to give up?
and no wonder obomber doesn’t want to talk about why he kills americans abroad in drone strikes. two out of three americans killed by drone strikes in yemen (so far) were not individuals who were targeted. so, let’s not discuss this…it’s…embarrassing…
this is a card from Illuminati, a card game that i have played and own. more about spooky games below, or in every post on this blog, or both – take your pick.
Police in Canada said Monday that two men suspected of plotting to derail a passenger train were guided by Al Qaeda elements in Iran, but the statement surprised many experts who study terrorism in the Middle East and Iran.
“It frankly doesn’t compute for me,” said Barbara Slavin, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “If there is any link, I would think it was extremely tangential.”
Iran and Al Qaeda have frequently had chilly relations, according to Slavin and other experts. Iran is majority Shiite, while Al Qaeda is firmly Sunni. In Syria, Al Qaeda has jumped into the fray alongside opposition fighters while Iran has backed President Bashar Assad. Iran has also held Al Qaeda members in the country under house arrest, monitoring their activities. Documents confiscated from Osama bin Laden’s hide-out in Pakistan and released last year suggested discord between the two. – from the l.a. times, Analysts surprised by alleged Al Qaeda in Iran tie in Canada plot
Al-Qaeda releases video accusing Iran of siding with the US over Afghanistan. (Last Modified: 08 Sep 2008)
Al-Qaeda has released a new video accusing Iran of giving way to the US in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The new footage, released three days before the seventh anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, also attacked Lebanese, Pakistani and Afghan leaders.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s deputy leader, and other senior al-Qaeda commanders, focussed on what they called the “Iranian-Crusade alliance” saying the Muslim Umma [nation] was being targetted.
In the one-hand-half-hour video, al-Zawahiri said that the Muslim Umma was facing a military, ideological and media crusade by the Iranian “coalition”, which had given way to the US, by letting them invade Afghanistan and Iraq.
Al-Qaeda’s deputy also said Hezbollah and its leaders did not gain victory in the war against Israel in 2006, saying that outcome had been beneficial to Israel. – from al jazeera, Al-Qaeda video rounds on Iran
“Look, we live in a very dangerous world. We know there are people who want to take away our freedoms.”
In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Monday the country’s interpretation of the Constitution will “have to change” to allow for greater security to stave off future attacks.
“The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry,” Mr. Bloomberg said during a press conference in Midtown. “But we live in a complex world where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.”
Sitting on the couch watching TV, you hear the news that your country is about to invade another. Horror and amazement mixes with frustration as you realize how absolutely powerless you are to stop it. ‘Hang on a minute,’ said Andy Sheerin to Andy Tomkins as they watched the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. ‘Let’s make a game of it.’ And so War on Terror – The Boardgame was born.
Holding a mirror to the Middle East, the game is all about empire. You start with an empire, build it up through development, fight other empires; and liberate countries from the clutches of empire. Just as in the boardroom, the more oil you have on the board-game, the more money you make. The more money you make, the more countries you can develop and control. And if you don’t like the rate your empire is expanding, then you can always buy terrorists, or turn terrorists yourself. – from the new internationalist, The War on Terror Boardgame
this game is chilling…ruthlessness is always the winning strategy.
MORE GAMES:
Al-Qaeda gaining experience in Syria, eyes ‘Islamic state to fight Israel and Iran’
An Iraqi Al-Qaeda operative has admitted that his organization is taking part in the Syrian uprising against President Assad. The revelation comes amidst increasing evidence that Al-Qaeda is gaining a foothold in Syria.
Abu Thuha, a 56-year-old Al-Qaeda operative living near Kirkuk in northern Iraq, described the Islamist organization’s grand plans to an Iraqi reporter for The New York Times.
“We have experience now fighting the Americans, and more experience now with the Syrian revolution,” he noted. “Our big hope is to form a Syrian-Iraqi Islamic state for all Muslims, and then announce our war against Iran and Israel, and free Palestine.”
Similar revelations that “around 90 terror attacks that can be attributed to organizations that are close to Al-Qaeda or jihadist groups were carried out in Syria between the end of December and the beginning of July” have been made by the German foreign intelligence service, the BND.
The information was revealed by the German government in a response to a parliamentary question. The German government admitted that it had received several reports from the German foreign intelligence service, but noted that the content of these reports was to remain classified “by reason of national interest,” in light of Germany’s support for the rebellion and its political arm, the Syrian National Council (SNC).
At least three major German newspapers – Die Welt, the FAZ (Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), and the tabloid Bild – have published reports attributing responsibility for the May 25 massacre in the Syrian town of Houla to anti-government rebel forces or treating this as the most likely scenario.
Writing in Bild, longtime German war correspondent Jurgen Todenhofer accused the rebels of “deliberately killing civilians and then presenting them as victims of the government”. He described this “massacre-marketing strategy” as being “among the most disgusting things that I have ever experienced in an armed conflict.” - see more, including video, from russia today
FBI Arrests Teen Who Tried to Join U.S.-funded Free Syrian Army
A U.S. teenager has been arrested on terrorism-related charges and accused of seeking to join an al-Qaeda-affiliated group in war-torn Syria, the FBI said Saturday.
Abdella Ahmad Tounisi, 18, was arrested Friday night as he attempted to board a flight from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport to Turkey, which borders Syria, the FBI said. – from the times of israel, FBI: US teen tried to join Syrian al-Qaeda-linked group
DEMOCRACY NOW HITS ONE OUT OF THE PARK! GRAND SLAM!
Jeremy Scahill: The Secret Story Behind Obama’s Assassination of Two Americans in Yemen
The Obama administration’s assassination of two U.S. citizens in 2011, Anwar Al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old Denver-born son Abdulrahman, is a central part of Jeremy Scahill’s new book, “Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield.” The book is based on years of reporting on U.S. secret operations in Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan. While the Obama administration has defended the killing of Anwar, it has never publicly explained why Abdulrahman was targeted in a separate drone strike two weeks later. Scahill reveals CIA director John Brennan, Obama’s former senior adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security, suspected that the teenager had been killed “intentionally.” “The idea that you can simply have one branch of government unilaterally and in secret declare that an American citizen should be executed or assassinated without having to present any evidence whatsoever — we should view that with great sobriety about the implications for our country,” says Scahill, national security correspondent for The Nation magazine. Today the U.S. Senate is preparing to hold its first-ever hearing on the Obama administration’s drone and targeted killing program. However the Obama administration is refusing to send a witness to answer questions about the program’s legality. “Dirty Wars” is also the name of a new award-winning documentary by Scahill and Rick Rowley, which will open in theaters in June. We air the film’s new trailer.
President Bashar al-Assad accused the West on Wednesday of supporting al Qaeda militants in Syria’s civil war and warned they would turn against their backers and strike “in the heart of Europe and the United States”.
Assad also launched his strongest criticism yet of neighbouring Jordan for allowing thousands of fighters to cross the border to join a conflict he insisted his forces would win and save Syria from destruction.
John Kerry: “look, the only way to stop incidents like sandy hook and the marathon bombings is to start world war three in the middle east. our overlords command us – long may they reign.” Photograph: Pool/Reuters
“We have no choice but victory. If we don’t win, Syria will be finished and I don’t think this is a choice for any citizen in Syria,” the defiant president said in a television interview.
Assad’s forces have been fighting back across the country against rebels who have taken control of much of rural Syria and seized a provincial capital in March for the first time in two years of fighting.
The conflict started with mainly peaceful demonstrations but descended into a civil war in which the United Nations says at least 70,000 people have been killed. Islamist militants have emerged as the most potent of the anti-Assad rebels.
Drawing parallels with Western support for anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s, some of whom later formed the al Qaeda organisation which attacked the United States in Sept. 2011, Assad said Washington and Europe would regret supporting rebels in Syria.
“The West paid heavily for funding al Qaeda in its early stages in Afghanistan. Today it is supporting it in Syria, Libya and other places, and will pay a heavy price later in the heart of Europe and the United States,” he told al-Ikhbariya channel. – from france24, Assad warns West against supporting ‘al Qaeda rebels’
jihadists being exported to syria, mali, from france
In a report published on the 11th of April French daily Le Monde admits that rebels fighting the government of the Syrian Arab Republic are dominated by Japhat Al Nosra, a terrorist group linked to Al Qaida. The admission comes after two years of non-stop disinformation trumpeted from all French mainstream media outlets from the official right to the official left, disinformation that has attempted to convince the French public that democratic revolutionaries are fighting a war for human rights and freedom against a brutal, tyrannical dictator, who is ‘’ killing his own people’’.
This puerile and deeply dishonest narrative has now been utterly discredited, as the facts about the terrorist nature of the Syrian rebels have become too obvious to ignore. In an article entitled ‘The New Visage of French Jihadism’ it is reported that French jihadists are leaving France in their hundreds to join the ‘holy war’ against the Syrian Arab Republic, with many more joining jihadist groups in Mali. – from global research, France’s Media Admits that the Syrian “Opposition” is Al Qaida. Then Justifies French Government Support to the Terrorists
US DOUBLES AID TO AL QEADA IN SYRIA
The US readied a package Saturday of up to $130m in non-lethal military aid to Syrian opposition forces while European countries consider easing an arms embargo, moves that could further pressure the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
US secretary of state John Kerry was expected to announce the plans about the defensive military supplies at a meeting Saturday that was bringing together the Syrian opposition leadership and their main international allies.
The supplies possibly could include body armor, armored vehicles, night vision goggles and advanced communications equipment.
US officials said the details and costs were to be determined at the meeting. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss Kerry’s announcement.
Secretary of Defense Hagel summoned by dark overlords
US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel headed to Israel on Sunday in a weeklong trip to the Middle East that will be dominated by worries over Iran‘s nuclear program and Syria‘s raging civil war.
In his first trip to the region since taking over as Pentagon chief nearly two months ago, Hagel planned to discuss with his counterparts the final details of an elaborate $10 billion arms deal that will provide US military aircraft and missiles to Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
In a two-day visit to Israel, Hagel will seek to counter criticism from some US lawmakers and pro-Israel groups that he is too soft on Iran and too hostile to the Jewish state — a charge he has vehemently rejected.
Hagel will likely tout the arms deal as a demonstration of Washington’s commitment to Israel’s security and as a way of countering Iran’s military power and nuclear ambitions.
The United States and Israel have disagreed over the urgency of the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program, with Washington maintaining there is still time to see if tough sanctions and diplomacy persuade Tehran to change course. – from afp, Pentagon chief heads to Israel
al qeada in syria demands air support from u.s., allies
The Syrian opposition urged the U.S. and allies to use drones against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, provide weapons to opposition fighters, and create a protected “no-fly zone” airspace within Syria at a meeting of allies in Istanbul yesterday.
The demands reflected opposition frustration with the failure of the U.S. and its allies to provide the intelligence and equipment they say is necessary to defend themselves from the regime’s continued attacks.
“The technical ability to take specific action to prevent the human tragedy and suffering of innocent civilians, mostly women and children, is available in the form of specific intelligence and equipment,” the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces said in a statement. “Syrians understand that such ability is within the reach of a number of members of the Friends of Syria Group, yet nothing serious has been done to put an end to such terror and criminality.” - from bloomberg, Syrian Opposition Pushes for Drones, Weapons as Allies Meet
US, UK and France training Syrian rebels in Jordan
In the past three months some 200 men have already received training in two camps in the east and the south of Jordan, Der Spiegel reports. The military training focuses on the use of anti-tank weaponry, the news magazine reported, citing what it said were participants and organizers. It adds that there are plans to provide training for a total of 1,200 fighters from the Free Syrian Army – the opposition force battling the regime of President Bashar Assad.
The report said that some of the Americans wore army uniforms, but it did not specify whether they worked for private firms or represented the US military.
Last October the Pentagon confirmed that a small group of US special forces and military advisers had spent the summer in Jordan training the country’s military to act in case Syria used its chemical weapons. Reportedly, select groups of Syrian rebels were trained, too.
As Britain’s The Guardian reported on Friday, the US is not alone in their efforts. UK and French instructors are also in Jordan training the Syria rebels.
Though the American, British and French Defense Ministries have not commented so far on the information about the FSA being trained in Jordan, this move does not contradict either the US plans for non-lethal directaid to Syrian opposition or British understanding of the EU arms embargo enforced on Syria. - from russia today
Syria says Jordan ‘playing with fire’ over assistance to rebels
Jordan tightens security along Syrian border as tensions soar amid reports of arms shipments to anti-Assad forces – from the guardian, uk
After much speculation around the mysterious “military contractor” types with black backpacks in the bomb zone of the Boston Marathon before and after the explosions took place, it has been revealed that they were part of an elite government WMD response team. Originally thought to be Navy SEALs in civilian field gear, or private mercenaries from The Craft due to one member wearing a hat with their logo, the Weapons of Mass Destruction-Civil Support Team (WMD-CST) that was on duty in Boston during the attack is run by the National Guard.
“There are two CSTs that are engaged out there (in Boston) in the response… In fact, one of the first images that I saw was the Massachusetts CST was actually right there,” said Wisconsin CST commander Lt. Col. David W. May on April 16th.
Steve Watson of Infowars reports, “CSTs are The National Guard’s full-time response force for emergencies or terrorist events involving weapons of mass destruction, toxic chemicals, or natural disasters. CSTs are routinely pre-staged at large public events to help mitigate risks and assist civilian authorities.”
(don’t you feel safer now, knowing that terror attacks can happen, literally right in front of the eyes of counter-terrorism units?)
Once events reach this point, an overwhelming number of people believe the authorities. They accept what is happening. The FBI must have it right. Reject all other possibilities.
That’s always a dangerous assumption.
Yesterday, at a heralded press conference, seen by millions around the world, Richard DesLauriers, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston division, produced photos and video of two suspects in the Marathon bombing.
He stated: “…these images should be the only ones, I emphasize, the only ones that the public should view to assist us. Other photos should not be deemed credible, and they unnecessarily divert the public’s attention in the wrong direction, and create undo work for vital law-enforcement resources.”
Translation: Ignore all the images uncovered by independent researchers, citizen reporters, bloggers. Forget, for example, about photos of those men who appear to work for Craft International, a private security contractor, who were standing at the finish line of the Marathon. We, the FBI, are running this show. We’re the pros, we deal, you behave. - from infowars.com, FBI tells America: believe us and no one else
The Boston Marathon bombing has provoked shock, grief and outrage from around the world. After decades of conditioning, the public automatically equates such terrorism with Muslim radicals. But the evidence shows that every major terror plot on American soil in the past 10 years has been fostered, funded and equipped by one organization: the FBI.
As even mainstream sources concede the FBI had some sort of relationship with the Boston bombing suspects before the attack, there will be two arguments made. One, that the FBI simply doesn’t have enough authority or resources to prevent “domestic terror” attacks, and needs more still.
The other argument is that the FBI and other federal agencies have been behind every domestic terror attack or “foiled plot” for years, and constitutes the single greatest danger to the American people, both literally in terms of life and limb, and in terms of subverting and stripping away their liberty and dignity amidst a growing police state.
In turn, this would require local law enforcement to cease all cooperation with the FBI, particularly with its Joint Terror Task Force (JTTF), raid local offices and make arrests where appropriate, and fold any agents who are willing and capable, into local and state agencies. In essence, the FBI should be dismantled from top to bottom, and an alternative put in its place.
What is clear is that the Boston bombing suspects were contacted by the FBI at least as early as 2011. Between then and the attack, there is a gap where the FBI may or may not have been involved. While the FBI may have in fact been cultivating these suspects prior to the Boston bombing, they are now the very ones “investigating” the case, opening the door to the destruction of evidence, and ultimately a coverup.
What’s more, there’s most likely several more of these operations being engineered right now by the FBI. If America is serious about stopping “the next Boston bombing,” the key is not issuing the FBI and its federal affiliates more authority and funding, but issuing local law enforcement warrants to raid FBI offices. – from activist post, FBI Casting Set Stage for Boston Marathon Bombing, Shootout, Charade
FBI faces questions over previous contact with Boston bombing suspect
The FBI‘s previous contacts with one of the alleged Boston bombers have come under intense scrutiny as questions were raised about whether it missed vital clues that could have prevented the attack, which killed three people and injured more than 170.
The bureau admitted that it had interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011 “at the request of a foreign government”, presumed to be Russia, which was concerned that he was a “follower of radical Islam”. The FBI said that it did not find any “terrorism activity” and appears not to have had any further contact with him since. - from the guardian, uk, FBI faces questions over previous contact with Boston bombing suspect
CBS reveals in their report, “CBS News: FBI Interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev 2 Years Ago,” that the FBI initially attempted to deny any contact prior to the Boston bombings with slain suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev. It was only after Russia’s RT publicly pursued the story that the FBI finally admitted officially it had. The implications are that the FBI knows Russia both possesses information on the case and is prepared to go public with it. For those involved in America’s terror racket, now would be a good time to divest. For those involved specifically in the Boston Marathon bombing, now would be a good time to come forward with information. Any and all involved, in whatever capacity, wittingly or unwittingly, stand to become scapegoats in order to save the FBI, DHS, TSA, and other federal agencies clearly engaged in a massive coverup. – from activist post, FBI Casting Set Stage for Boston Marathon Bombing, Shootout, Charade
Alternative media outlets have identified two men wearing black caps with the Punisher skull icon adopted by Craft International (CI); as well as tell-tale khaki pants and boots.
CI is the creation of former Navy Seal Chris Kyle who was killed earlier this year at the North Texas firing range by former Marine Corporal Eddie Ray Routh, according to authorities.
Kyle was the author of “American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in US Military History”. This book “recorded the most career sniper kills in United States military history. The Pentagon has officially confirmed more than 150 of Kyles kills (the previous American record was 109), but it has declined to verify the astonishing total number” claimed in the book.
Kyle specialized in being able to shoot his target with deadly accuracy from rooftops and steal positions which earned him the respect of his peers in the Marines, US Army and Navy SEALs.
CI offers training in tactical operations and surveillance for:
• Military
• Law enforcement
• Tacflow combatives
• School/university security
• Civilian/corporate security
Neighbors say three have been arrested in New Bedford in connection with the Boston Bombing suspect.
Police apprehended suspects from the Hidden Brook Apartments on Carriage Drive in New Bedford. Neighbors say they think that the girlfriend of 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev may have lived in the complex and they have seen him in the area as recently as yesterday.
Mike Adams of Natural News made an interesting discovery that one of the members of this team was carrying a radiation detector:
First off, let’s get the attacks of the moron trolls out of the way — people who will say these photos are a “conspiracy theory.”
How are photos of actual people at the event a conspiracy theory?
They aren’t. In real police work, they’re called “evidence,” and the people in these photos should be persons of interest.
But they aren’t. The entire mainstream media and law enforcement apparatus is now pretending these men don’t exist. (Now that’s their conspiracy theory!)
We all know, however, that The Craft operatives don’t work for free. They aren’t a band of volunteers. And that means somebody paid them to be at the event.
Who paid The Craft to be there? And what was their mission?
Why is their existence at the Boston marathon being memory-holed? Why are they not “persons of interest” in the investigation?
Why do they carry radiation detectors? What’s in their backpacks? (A ham sandwich?)
The fact that the media refuses to even acknowledge the existence of these private military operatives is quite telling all by itself.
let’s make sure this is always the first thought in our minds while we read or speak about the bombings monday: this was a failure by our government to protect us from attack by terrorists. we are told we have to tolerate TSA molestation, intrusion into our private communications, and a growing “security state” apparatus because it’s the only way to catch the bad guys. and who are the bad guys?
military contractors had people involved with security for the boston marathon, and as details of the investigation slowly began to emerge into the blogoshpere, the WTF? factor passed 11, when israeli police were dispatched to help sanitize the crime scene.
why do we need the help of israeli police? on u.s. soil? who’s running this show?
PRE-RACE SECURITY
Organizers and law enforcement officials have promised a safe day for runners and spectators at the April 15 Boston Marathon.
Along with 1,500 police officers, 415 National Guardsmen, 1,500 other security personnel and three state police helicopters, organizers have arranged for bomb-sniffing dogs, hazardous materials teams and radiation detectors to be used before and during the race.
“We’re ready for anything that we might experience,” Boston Police Commissioner Paul Evans told the media at a security briefing last week. - from securitySolutions.com
Boston Marathon security stayed at high level
The city’s detailed security plan for the 117th running of the Boston Marathon shows the same all-out mobilization of officers, bomb-sniffing dogs and explosives specialists as was in place for last year’s race, an indication that the intensity of security preparedness has remained at a high pitch.
Interviews with law enforcement officials and a Globe review of Boston’s plan to police the race show that state and local authorities this year took extensive measures to protect hundreds of thousands of participants and spectators — including the deployment of air patrols, K-9 units, and more than 1,000 uniformed officers and soldiers along the 26-mile course and the finish line.
In Boston alone, there were 824 officers and civilians scheduled to work on Marathon day. That’s a 6 percent increase from 2012, according to copies of the Boston Police Department’s operational plans obtained by the Globe.
“We’ve done as much as we can. Our aim is not to turn this into a police state,’” said Police Commissioner Edward Davis. “We have to allow commerce to occur. When you sweep an area to make sure there are no explosives, you have to control access to the area. Trying to do that along a 26-mile route is very difficult.’’
Dogs swept the area for explosives twice before the first runners crossed the finish line, Davis said. Eleven were assigned — four from the Boston police (the same number as last year) and seven from the MBTA. Boston police have a total of 11 bomb-sniffing dogs, which are deployed in shifts.
“Dogs are not infallible,” Davis said. “With such a crowd, the dog can’t check every individual and package. The bomb was comprised of what’s called a pressure cooker, which seals the top of the device. If there is gunpowder in a sealed unit which isn’t emitting any odors, it may be difficult for a dog to detect.’’
Meanwhile, some other state and local agencies also insisted they had even stronger measures in place this year than they had in past years as they have learned from previous races and refined their plans since the Sept. 11 attacks.
The Massachusetts National Guard said it had 464 soldiers along the course, similar to last year and up from around 400 in 2002.
“Our operational plans have never been as thorough and sophisticated as they are today,” said David Procopio, a spokesman for the Massachusetts State Police. - from the boston globe
FBI PLEADS FOR HELP
the fbi posted this – and other – photos of these two individuals in connection with the bombing investigation. source: fbi
Here’s what investigators have said they know, so far, about the Boston Marathon bombings that killed three and injured 183 people on Monday: The explosive devices used were built out of conventional pressure cookers placed in nylon backpacks. What they don’t know: anything else. The “range of suspects and motives remains wide open [...] Someone knows who did this,” Special Agent Richard DesLauriers, the lead investigator, told reporters. “[T]he person who did this is someone’s friend, neighbor, coworker or relative.” The Bureau is actively soliciting photographs, tips and information; examining the bombs; and using face-recognition software in an attempt to generate leads. - from gawker.com
Yesterday, Infowars.com posted images of what they referred to as Navy SEALs in civilian field gear lurking at the finish line of the Boston Marathon where two bombs killed 3 and injured hundreds.
It turns out these men were Blackwater-like private military contractors from Craft International, according to investigative journalist Anthony Gucciardi of StoryLeak.com.
The two mercenaries were wearing typical field gear of khaki tactical pants, combat boots, black coats, and carrying suspicious backpacks. But what really gives them away as Craft International mercs is the hat with the Punisher-like symbol on it. – from activist post
(infowars.com posted numerous photos of other people in the crowd who appeared to be wearing similar caps. see links above, to info wars and activist post, for more.)
Israeli police head to US to aid in (cover-up – rlr) Boston Marathon bombing investigation
The investigation into Monday’s deadly bombing at the Boston Marathon has officially gone international: law enforcement officials from Israel have been sent to the United States to assist in the probe.
Israel Police Chief Yohanan Danino says he has dispatched officials to Boston, Massachusetts, where they will meet with Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and other authorities, the Times of Israel Reports.
Citing an earlier report published by the newspaper Maariv, Times of Israel writes that Danino has dispatched police officers to participate in discussions that “will center on the Boston Marathon bombings and deepening professional cooperation between the law enforcement agencies of both countries.”
The paper reports that Israeli law enforcement planned the trip before the deadly pair of bombings on Monday that has so far claimed three lives, but the discussions will now shift focus in order to see how help from abroad can expand the investigation. - from russia today
Mossad chief: Obama’s perceived military “softness” weakens Israel
June 2, 2010
In a rare public expression of concern, Meir Dagan, head of Israel’s Mossad external security service, warned Tuesday, June 1, that the progressive decline of American strength over the past decade and the perception of the Obama administration as “soft on military options for solving disputes” have cut deep into Israel’s military and diplomatic maneuverability and made it fair game for its enemies. This is reported by debkafile’s intelligence and political sources.
Dagan presented the Knesset foreign affairs and security committee with this evaluation 24 hours after Israeli Navy boarding parties prevented vessels sailing the Mediterranean from achieving their object of breaking the Gaza blockade. As the UN Security Council’s condemned the loss of life in that raid, the Mossad chief said Barack Obama’s first year as president was a period of “devaluation” for “Israeli and American strategic assets.” – reposted from impeachObama.com
Editor of American Jewish Magazine Calls For Israel’s Mossad To Kill Obama
Published 1, January 23, 2012
Andrew Adler, the owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, has apologized after running a column that lists three options for Israel to deal with its current threats that included killing Barack Obama. The column went out of its way to make sure that readers “read ‘three’ correctly” — “U.S. based Mossad agents” should kill the president. The column is just one more example of how religious writers and politicians use faith as a vehicle for hate and violent speech. Given our discussion of Santorum’s honorary campaign chairman (who denounced gays as making God want to vomit), one has to wonder about the intestinal fortitude of the Almighty during periods of sectarian extremism.
Adler listed three options for Israel to counter Iran’s nuclear weapons in his weekly newspaper last Friday. The first is to launch a pre-emptive strike against Hamas and Hezbollah. The second is to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. Then there is the third option:
Three, give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place, and forcefully dictate that the United States’ policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.
Yes, you read “three” correctly. Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel’s existence. Think about it. If I have thought of this Tom Clancy-type scenario, don’t you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel’s most inner circles?
Another way of putting “three” in perspective goes something like this: How far would you go to save a nation comprised of seven million lives…Jews, Christians and Arabs alike?
You have got to believe, like I do, that all options are on the table.
A bit hard to peddle back from that. The readers of the Atlanta Jewish Times will hopefully use this disgraceful column as a vehicle to reexamine the rhetoric and extremism displayed by Adler and others in today’s political discourse. An apology for such a hateful and extremist column falls a bit short of convincing. It comes off as an “I should not have put it in print” apology.
after the massive intelligence failure in boston, mayhem seems to be widespread, as the war on terror crosses the ocean and the war on drugs spills across the border from mexico – a bioterror attack detected in washington, a bomb mailed to an arizona sheriff, israel arrests an american teen…interesting times…
With Al Qaeda shattered, U.S. counter-terrorism’s future unclear
Opinions differ over how much threat Al Qaeda’s factions pose and how U.S. policy and spending should change.
By Ken Dilanian, Los Angeles Times
Skilled in tracking foreign terrorists, Jarret Brachman once was a sought-after expert on Al Qaeda, advising several federal agencies and speaking regularly around the country.
Now the former research director of the Combating Terrorism Center, a think tank at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, has turned his focus away from Islamic militants. He spends most of his time consulting with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies about threats from domestic extremists and antigovernment militias.
“I have totally re-branded my career,” Brachman said. “I still do the Al Qaeda stuff, but there’s no interest, no demand…. We’ve broken Al Qaeda’s back, strategically.”
at the very least, the boston marathon bombing proves that our intelligence agencies are incompetent..at worst, it proves that our government is either run by murderous psychopaths, or is helpless against them.
Thanks to drone missile strikes and other counter-terrorism operations, the network founded by Osama bin Laden has been so eviscerated that U.S. intelligence agencies no longer fully understand the organizational structure below its nominal leader, Ayman Zawahiri, according to defense officials. The CIA has killed Zawahiri’s top lieutenants almost as quickly as they are identified.
Obama administration officials say the global network is in transition. They say it has decentralized from a top-down group based in Pakistan into smaller, far-flung and largely autonomous factions.
Package addressed to sheriff could have caused ‘major explosion’
An Arizona lawman said the suspicious package addressed to controversial Sheriff Joe Arpaio “would have caused a major explosion” if someone had opened it.
Jerry Sheridan, chief deputy of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department, told reporters Friday the package was noticed by an alert postal employee in Flagstaff who thought he spotted gunpowder residue. Arpaio was at Sheridan’s side as he spoke.
Police in Flagstaff X-rayed the package, noticed what appeared to be an explosive device, and rendered it safe by blowing it up with a water cannon.
Sheridan said the package was mailed Thursday, a day after the department received a death threat from a major drug cartel.
An envelope that tested positive for the deadly poison ricin was intercepted Tuesday afternoon at the U.S. Capitol’s off-site mail facility in Washington, congressional and law enforcement sources tell CNN.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he was told the letter was addressed to the office of Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Mississippi. After the envelope tested positive in a first routine test, it was retested two more times, each time coming up positive, the law enforcement source said. The package was then sent to a Maryland lab for further testing.
Senators were briefed on the matter Tuesday evening and told the congressional post offices would be temporarily shut down.
“It was caught in the screening facility. That’s why we have an off-site screening facility for mail,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri.
On April 11, in one of the trailer caravans that house the Israeli military courtrooms at Ofer prison, three boys sat in the brown Israeli Prison Service shabas uniform. Their feet shackled, their eyes darting between the judge, their lawyers, and their families.
The youngest was 14-year-old Mohammad Khaleq, a short, skinny boy with a light brown birthmark under his right eye and a heart murmur since birth. Mohammad was arrested from his home in the village of Silwad, near Ramallah, in a 2:00am raid on Friday April 5. Eight heavily armed soldiers burst in to the modest home, waking the Khaleq family - the two parents and six children, the youngest just six years old – and gathered them in one room.
“The soldiers thought they had come to arrest me,” Mohammad’s father, 46-year-old Abdelwahab, told Al Jazeera. “When they saw that Mohammad was just a kid they felt embarrassed, but they still took him away.”
Mohammad, who was born in New Orleans and holds US citizenship, was reportedly beaten up inside the Israeli military jeep and taken to an illegal Israeli settlement named Ofra, where he says he spent twelve hours blindfolded, handcuffed, and shackled at the legs. Israeli soldiers would roughly move him from one area to the next, and in one instance he says, pushed him so hard he fell on a rock and broke his dental braces.
At 2:00pm, he was taken to the Benyamin police detention centre, where he was interrogated for a further two hours without the presence of a lawyer or his parents. By that time, Abdelwahab had arrived at the detention centre and was demanding to see his son. Mohammad heard his father’s voice, and told Al Jazeera that Israeli interrogators “tricked him” into confessing to throwing rocks in exchange for being able to see his father. Mohammad says he confessed, but was not allowed to see his father.
A Israeli military spokesman said no abuse complaints had been filed at the time of his detention, according to the Associated Press news agency.
Legal aid?
It wasn’t until two days later that a lawyer had access to Mohammad, who was moved to Ofer prison in Betunia, northwest of Ramallah. Four days after his arrest, a representative from the United States consulate saw Mohammad. The US official later called Mohammed’s father. “There is not much we can do,” Abdelwahab was told.
The deadly blasts at the Boston Marathon opened no-so-old wounds for the siblings of last year’s Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre victims. Their family members had VIP seats near the site where the first of the twin explosions occurred.
A statement posted on the group’s Facebook page informed that the members of the Newtown Strong team which ran in the marathon were safe, because “all runners completed the race before the explosions happened.”
The team featured the mother of a girl who survived the Sandy Hook shooting.
The 26 mile (42km) course was meant to be honoring the victims of the school shooting with a special mile marker, the city seal with 26 stars – one for each victim.
“I just couldn’t believe someone would do that to the Boston Marathon, where you have so many different nationalities of people, so much camaraderie,” Newtown resident Ed Lucas, who ran in the race and finished before the explosions, told USA Today.
The Boston Marathon is run each year on Patriots’ Day. In the light of the 117th edition of the race, Boston Athletic Association President Joanne Flamino said it was of “special significance” that Mile 26 was dedicated to signify 26 miles in the marathon, as well as the 26 people who lost their lives in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012.
There was a 26-second moment of silence to pay tribute to the Sandy Hook victims, and a group of Newtown parents were among the nine community members taking part in the race.
“In the first 20 miles we’re honoring the 20 Sandy Hook first graders,” Laura Nowaci, a spokeswoman for the Newtown Strong Fund, which raises funds for those affected by the shooting, told WBUR in Boston. “When we crest Heartbreak Hill, and we’re coming back towards Boston, we run the final six for our six fallen educators, including their lives, to protect our children.
“It’s just running, but we want our steps to count,” she added.
When the twin blasts occurred – about 10 seconds and 90 meters apart – many witnesses initially thought it was an end-of-the-event celebration with fireworks. Only after they saw plumes of smoke, blood staining the pavement and people falling down limbs torn off, did they realize an explosion had taken place.
Federal investigators said no one had claimed responsibility for the fatal explosions, while President Barack Obama promised to find out “who did this.”
“We’ll find out why they did this. Any responsible individuals, any responsible groups, will feel the full weight of justice,” he added.
MORE ODD THINGS ABOUT YESTERDAY”S TERRORIST ATTACK IN BOSTON
A screengrab showing one of the two blasts near the finish line. (Boston.com)
as can be seen in this screenshot, the first explosion detonated in a block decorated with flags from around the world. this could cause speculation that a wingnut, anti-NWO, anti-government group is behind it.
simple IEDs are easy to make and are thought to be the primary threat posed by rightwing extremists in the u.s. al queda has published a recipe for the type of explosive devices authorities are claiming the attackers deployed
NO ONE IS CALLING THIS A TREMENDOUS FAILURE OF OUR INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES!
For three years Blog de Narco has chronicled Mexico‘s drug war with graphic images and shocking stories that few others dare show, drawing millions of readers, acclaim, denunciations – and speculation about its author’s identity.
Blog del Narco, an internet sensation dubbed a “front-row seat” to Mexico’s agony over drugs, has become a must-read for authorities, drug gangs and ordinary people because it lays bare, day after day, the horrific violence censored by the mainstream media.
The anonymous author has been a source of mystery, with Mexico wondering who he is and his motivation for such risky reporting.
Now in their first major interview since launching the blog, the author has spoken to the Guardian and the Texas Observer – and has revealed that she is, in fact, a young woman.
“I don’t think people ever imagined it was a woman doing this,” said the blogger, who asked to use pseudonym Lucy to protect her real identity.
“Who am I? I’m in my mid-20s, I live in northern Mexico, I’m a journalist. I’m a woman, I’m single, I have no children. And I love Mexico.”
This is the first time Lucy has spoken directly about the motivations for running a blog which could cost her her life. In the early days, her male colleague who manages the technical side engaged in a few short, anonymous email exchanges with reporters, but neither has spoken out since.
The telephone interview was arranged through an anonymous intermediary. The Guardian then took steps to verify that Lucy was in control of the blog.
‘They stole our dreams’: blogger reveals cost of reporting Mexico’s drug wars
She said she wanted to show the truth of what was happening to help turn the page. “I’m in love with my culture, with my country, despite all that’s going on. Because we’re not all bad. We’re not all narcos. We’re not all corrupt. We’re not all murderers. We are well educated, even if many (foreign) people think otherwise.”
She and her colleague live in daily fear of retribution, either from the cartels or government forces. She revealed that a young man and woman tortured, disembowelled and hung from a bridge in September 2011 – murders which shocked even atrocity-hardened Mexicans – were collaborators on the blog. “They used to send us photographs. That was very hard, very painful.” The threats, she said, have recently become more serious.
Despite those fears, however, Lucy has written a book that gives an inside account of the blog and provides the most gruesome, explicit account yet of the mayhem that the cartel wars have brought to Mexico. Dying for the Truth: Undercover Inside Mexico’s Violent Drug War, is now on sale in English and Spanish, and documents a full year of killings from 2010, a pivotal year.
TRILLIONS FOR BANKSTER CRIMINALS, PRISON AND SUFFERING FOR EVERYONE NOT IN ON THE SCHEME
you know we live a time of lawless pillaging when the thieves who stole so much money that they crashed the world’s economy are being given MORE MONEY, as fast as the federal reserve can print it.
as for the people losing their livelihoods, their mobility, their homes, their families – the people who have had everything stolen from them – they will suffer greatly. the ones who go to prison might well be the fortunate ones.
NOTE: this does not include county or municipal jails, nor juvenile detention facilities, nor mental institutions, nor drug rehab centers.
the more we incarcerate, the richer they get (they being the Corrections Corporation of America).
With the exception of the government’s borrowing and spending activities, there are hardly any segments of the US economy that appear to have been inoculated against the recession which began in December 2007. There is one aspect of society however, that has continued to expand despite the difficult economic circumstances: the prison population. Additionally, and contrary to what many believe, the construction and management of jails and prisons are not functions exclusive to the government. In fact, the fourth largest correctional system in the nation is owned and operated by the Corrections Corporation of America (CXW) – only the federal government and two states operate prison systems containing more bed space than CCA.
number of jobs created monthly, from 2008 into 2012
The Gini index is an international measure of income inequality and going up in value is bad, unless of course you’re a super rich and enjoy stepping on the down trodden. According to the CIA ranking:
First, it is absurd to think stopping illegal financial activity would harm the global economy. What does Holder believe the financial crisis was, a help to the global economy?
We’ve known since TARP our government is in bed with the banks and wouldn’t do anything to stop them, including even demanding some executives lose their jobs. Now it’s official. The Obama administration’s policy is to not prosecute financial crime when a financial institution is large claiming it could disrupt the global economy. This policy gives too big to fail financial institutions Carte blanche to do what ever they want to. It’s the wild west in financial land and the sheriff is hiding in the weeds.
Chuck Grassley along with Senator Sherrod Brown have been trying to stop TBTF and have asked Holder in a letter why there are no criminal prosecutions of those who caused the financial crisis of 2008 as well as the money laundering activities of large financial institutions.
Grassley’s opening statement from the hearing says it all We have a leadership problem at the Department of Justice in not going after financial crime, fraud and putting those responsible in jail.
Failure to Prosecute Banks Deemed “Too Big to Fail”:
The Department continues to follow through with an unfortunate policy of continually entering into civil or criminal settlements with large financial institutions that include large fines, but no jail time for the individuals who perpetrate these frauds and wreak havoc on the financial sector and individual lives. As a result, these companies settle for pennies on the dollar and the cost of these fines simply becomes the cost of doing business for these institutions. It has led many to believe that financial institutions deemed “too big to fail” by the Treasury Department are also “too big to jail”.
What is even more disturbing is that while this distinction was mostly reserved for financial crimes—a position I find flawed in its own regard—this policy appears to have seeped into other misconduct enforced by the Department. For example, in December 2012, the Department entered into a Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA) with HSBC, a global bank that admitted to violating federal laws designed to prevent drug lords and terrorists from laundering money in the United States. Let me repeat that, a deferred prosecution agreement for a company involved in money laundering for DRUG LORDS AND TERRORISTS.
What’s worse is that the Department publicly proclaimed a “record” settlement in this case where HSBC paid $1.92 billion to the federal government, improved its internal anti-money laundering controls, and submitted to the oversight of an outside monitor for five years. Despite the fact that this is a “record” settlement, for a bank as gigantic as HSBC, this amounts to less than 11% of HBSC’s profits last year alone, and is a bare fraction of the sums left unmonitored. Many believe that HSBC may have made a profit from the DPA because it actually made more than $1.92 billion by providing services to drug kingpins and terrorists.
I sent a letter to Attorney General Holder expressing my outrage at this DPA on December 13 asking why no employees—not even the ones who turned off the anti-money laundering filters—were prosecuted. Further, Senator Brown and I sent a letter in January seeking the rationale for why no individuals at these large financial institutions are prosecuted. The response was woeful and failed to answer our questions, leading us to question whether the Department has something to hide.
Simply put, this is a leadership problem and one that needs to be fixed quickly and will be a big part of any effort to confirm a new Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division.
the original post includes a video replay of holder’s testimony…sickening. you can almost see a circle of goldman-sachs current and former brokers shitting all over him and hear their fiendish cackling as holder speaks. his toadying is sickening.
what else can be said – better learn to do more with less – pronto!
As the violence spread, billions of dollars of cartel cash began to seep into the global financial system. But a special investigation by the Observer reveals how the increasingly frantic warnings of one London whistleblower were ignored
“The rule of law isn’t really the rule of law if it doesn’t apply equally to everybody,” Taibbi tells Moyers.
Journalist Matt Taibbi assesses the Obama Administration’s approach to holding banks accountable for their behavior, and early indications are not promising. Taibbi tells Bill that fearing another economic calamity is no excuse for turning a blind eye to shockingly unethical decisions and management.
BILL MOYERS: You’re working on a story right now that’ll come out in a couple of weeks on the HSBC settlement. That’s the, tell me about that, why it interests you.
MATT TAIBBI: Well, the HSBC settlement was a really shocking kind of new low in the history of the too big to fail issue. HSBC was a serial offender on the money laundering score. They had been twice given formal cease and desist orders by the government. One dating back as far as 2003, another one in 2010 for inadequately policing the accounts in their system. They laundered over $800 million for cartels in Colombia.
BILL MOYERS: Drug cartels?
MATT TAIBBI: Drug cartels in Colombia and Mexico. They laundered money for terrorist connected banks in the Middle East. Russian gangsters. Literally, you know, I talked to one prosecutor who’s, like, “They broke basically every law in the book and they did business with every kind of criminal you can possibly imagine. And they got a complete and total walk.” I mean, they had to pay a fine.
BILL MOYERS: $1.9 billion, a lot of money.
MATT TAIBBI: It’s a lot of money. But it’s five weeks of revenue for the bank, to put that in perspective. And no individual had to suffer any consequences at all. There were no criminal charges no individual fines, which was incredible. Incredible.
Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail
For at least half a decade, the storied British colonial banking power helped to wash hundreds of millions of dollars for drug mobs, including Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel, suspected in tens of thousands of murders just in the past 10 years – people so totally evil, jokes former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, that “they make the guys on Wall Street look good.” The bank also moved money for organizations linked to Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and for Russian gangsters; helped countries like Iran, the Sudan and North Korea evade sanctions; and, in between helping murderers and terrorists and rogue states, aided countless common tax cheats in hiding their cash.
“They violated every goddamn law in the book,” says Jack Blum, an attorney and former Senate investigator who headed a major bribery investigation against Lockheed in the 1970s that led to the passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. “They took every imaginable form of illegal and illicit business.”
That nobody from the bank went to jail or paid a dollar in individual fines is nothing new in this era of financial crisis. What is different about this settlement is that the Justice Department, for the first time, admitted why it decided to go soft on this particular kind of criminal. It was worried that anything more than a wrist slap for HSBC might undermine the world economy. “Had the U.S. authorities decided to press criminal charges,” said Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer at a press conference to announce the settlement, “HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the U.S., the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilized.”
Senator Lists the Death Toll From U.S. Drones at 4,700 People
By Spencer Ackerman 02.21.13
The government says you can’t know how many people U.S. drone strikes have killed, because that’s a state secret. But one of the most hawkish members of the U.S. Senate just said the strikes have killed 4,700 people. And his math raises questions.
Airmen assigned to the 432nd Aircraft Maintenance Squadron assemble an MQ-1 Predator after returning from Afghanistan May 19 at Creech Air Force Base, Nev. The six images on the side of the MQ-1 Predator symbolize the number of Hellfire missiles shot while in combat. (U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman Larry E. Reid Jr.)
“We’ve killed 4,700,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) approvingly told an Easley, South Carolina, Rotary Club on Tuesday afternoon, according to an Easley website. It’s the first public death toll provided by a U.S. government official for the signature method of killing in the U.S.’ sprawling, global counterterrorism campaign. “Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we’re at war, and we’ve taken out some very senior members of al-Qaida.” Graham did not evidently offer an estimate of how many innocent people the drones have killed.
Graham staffers did not return voicemails and e-mails seeking elaboration. (We’ll update if they do.) But that’s a very high figure — at least as it pertains to the CIA’s drone strikes, outside the declared battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, which is what the context of Graham’s remarks make it seem like he’s referring to. As Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations blogs, that’s on the highest end of the drone-death estimate compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism from publicly available news reports. Zenko’s compilation of the averages of non-governmental organizations’ guesstimates for drone casualties is about 1,700 people lower.
The CIA declined to comment about whether Graham revealed classified information. Counting the death toll from drones is a notoriously imprecise, murky business.
Graham’s death count would raise questions about the much-vaunted precision of the strikes. Using the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s count, the U.S. has launched between 416 and 439 drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia since the U.S. first successfully weaponized an MQ-1 Predator a decade ago. If Graham’s right, each strike would have to kill more than 10 people. It’s certainly possible — the 100-pound Hellfire missile carried by the drones is capable of it — but U.S. counterterrorism officials typically describe the drones as a tool geared for the targeting of a specific terrorist at a time, with minimal civilian casualties. (That isn’t necessarily the case: Sometimes the CIA kills people with drones without knowing who exactly they are.)
Yet Graham’s count is simultaneously low. Judging from the context of his remarks, he’s evidently not counting the U.S. military’s drone strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan. So the real number of deaths from the strikes between the covert CIA drone program and the U.S. military’s still rarely acknowledged efforts is likely even higher.
a version of this with loads of links can be found atwired.com
Americans push back against domestic drones
Kimberly Halkett, al jazeera
Drones are currently used in the US for everything from search and rescue missions, to snapping survey pictures for oil and gas companies. The tiny cameras found inside are capturing thousands of images of the US landscape every day.
But what concerns many Americans is that the remote controlled aircraft can also be armed with rubber bullets, electric shock weapons and even tear gas. They go by names like “Skysee,” “Dragon Flyer,” “Shadow Hawk” and even the “Hummingbird”. It’s a drone so small it can fit in the palm of your hand making its use almost undetectable.
The stealthy capability of drones is what Mayor Satyendra Singh Huja, of Charlotsville, Virginia, doesn’t like.
There are more than 340 drones already licensed in the US to the military, police departments and even universities. It’s just one reason Huja’s city council voted recently to ban the use of drones for domestic surveillance in its airspace for the next two years.
“The technology is not bad in itself, but our concern is on the individual’s privacy,” Huja told me.
But the mayor’s efforts are largely symbolic as federal law supersedes any regional legislation.
The US Congress has also already directed the Federal Aviation Administration to streamline approving applications for even more domestic drones. By 2020, it’s expected 30,000 drones will be operating over the US.
Constitutional lawyer and head of The Rutherford Institute John Whitehead helped the city of Charlottesville draft its law restricting the use drones. He said at least 13 US states are also considering legislation to prohibit drones for surveillance.
The 1960s and the 1970s saw the making of laws that called for the executive branch of government to be more responsive to basic principles of a division of power and accountability to citizens. Many of its owners were curtailed by the legislative. With Reagan, Clinton and especially Bush-Cheney, many of these laws were violated under the claim of a state of exception due to the “War on Terror”.
What we are facing is a profound degradation of the liberal state. Drone killings and unlawful imprisonment are at one end of that spectrum of degradation, and the rise of the power, economic destructions and unaccountability of the financial sector are at the other end.
The massive surveillance apparatus built up over the last 10 years is the domestic companion of the overseas drone killings. It is one outcome of this deep decay of the liberal state. While much is not known about either, we know enough to recognise its potential for enormous abuse. What is known is that there are at least 10,000 buildings across the US, with a massive concentration in Washington, DC, engaged in ongoing surveillance of all of us residing in the territory of the US. Surveillance and counter-terrorism activities employ about one million professionals with top level secret clearance. One estimate has it that every day over two billion emails are tracked. And on and on along these lines.
He goes on to say that our elected officials have been bought out by lobbyist. They want the politicians to pave the way for more prisons by passing more laws of enslavement to insure a steady flow of inmates to occupy the cells. America has entered into a hell like period where people are worth more in prison than free and working as all jobs are being shipped to China. America is being
![Prescott Bush, the father of GHW Bush, later wrote Clover Dulles, the widow of Allen Dulles, in 1969, about his meeting with Allen Dulles after JFK had canned him in fall, 1961. "He [Allen] tried to make a pleasant evening of it, but I was rather sick of heart, and angry too, for it was the Kennedys that brought about the fiasco [Bay of Pigs]. And here they were making Allen to be the goat, which he wasn't and did not deserve. I have never forgiven them." Note the last sentence of Prescott Bush. His son George Herbert Walker Bush says he can't remember where he was on the day of the JFK assassination, despite his being a US Senate candidate staying in the Dallas, TX Sheraton the night of 11/21/63 and being in Dallas on 11/22/63. GHW Bush helped plan the Bay of Pigs invasion and I think he was involved in the JFK assassination.](http://roblosricos.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/bushjfkbookdepo2.jpg?w=593&h=619)
This lack of quality and tactical control greatly increases the impact of the third major problem: the United States is held responsible for everything the contractors do or fail to do. Despite the fact the United States has no effective quality or operational control over the contractors, the local population rightly holds it responsible for all contractor failures.
“The soldiers thought they had come to arrest me,” Mohammad’s father, 46-year-old Abdelwahab, told Al Jazeera. “When they saw that Mohammad was just a kid they felt embarrassed, but they still took him away.”
The Boston Marathon is run each year on Patriots’ Day. In the light of the 117th edition of the race, Boston Athletic Association President Joanne Flamino said it was of “special significance” that Mile 26 was dedicated to signify 26 miles in the marathon, as well as the 26 people who lost their lives in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012.
For at least half a decade, the storied British colonial banking power helped to wash hundreds of millions of dollars for drug mobs, including Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel, suspected in tens of thousands of murders just in the past 10 years – people so totally evil, jokes former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, that “they make the guys on Wall Street look good.” The bank also moved money for organizations linked to Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and for Russian gangsters; helped countries like Iran, the Sudan and North Korea evade sanctions; and, in between helping murderers and terrorists and rogue states, aided countless common tax cheats in hiding their cash.
