A very similar battle is occurring between the Yinka Dene Alliance in British Columbia and Enbridge. There the Yinka Dene is accusing the British Columbia government of violating international law by issuing permits to Enbridge Inc. for drilling and tree removal in their territories along the proposed path for the Northern Gateway pipeline, despite their opposition and the lack of consultation on the proposed pipeline. They made the accusations in a 15-page submission to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Although the fight against Enbridge and the governments that collude with them have not made much progress, the Nez Perce in Idaho have won a significant victory. Last month a judge ordered the prohibition on the use of 100 miles of roadways through tribal lands to transport huge pieces of equipment, called Megaloads, made by General Electric that are used in extracting Canadian tar sands.
Tribal members filed a court case in August to prevent the Megaloads from crossing their land, something that is already illegal but wasn’t being enforced. They also blockaded the road in August to prevent passage of a Megaload. During the four-day blockade, eight of nine Nez Perce Tribal Council leaders were arrested.
The judge’s decision suspends the passage of Megaloads for now and may be lifted after an impact study is completed. However, another significant aspect of this decision is that the Nez Perce Tribal Council must be involved in future decisions to permit the Megaloads to use roads through their lands.
The first of two megaload shipments of oil refinery equipment is halted by a legion of protesters along U.S. Highway 12 just outside of Lewiston, Idaho on Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2013. Authorities said 20 protesters – including eight members of the Nez Perce Tribe – were arrested, jailed and charged with misdemeanors for disturbing the peace. The shipment and its hauler, Oregon-based Omega Morgan, ended the first leg of the trip Tuesday morning, about 25 miles short of its planned stopping point. (AP Photo/Lewiston Tribune, Steve Hanks)
Another active occupation to protect tribal land is in New Brunswick, where the Elsipogtog have been taking action for months to stop a Houston-based company, SWN Resources, from exploring their land to begin fracking. Tribal members blockaded SWN work trucks throughout the early summer to prevent them from testing the land for potential fracking. In addition to blockading, some of SWN’s equipment was destroyed.
There was a temporary peace beginning in late July, when SWN Resources agreed to leave for the summer. Negotiations at that time included dropping charges against 25 of the 35 people who had been arrested. SWN did say it expected to return in September.
When SWN Resources recently attempted to return, it was met with an eviction notice and another blockade, which included a sacred fire. The Elsipogtog First Nation and Mi’kmaq Warrior Society contend that the land being explored was supposed to be held in trust for them but that the Canadian government has done such a poor job of caring for the land that the tribes are concerned whether the land will be able to support them. Along with the eviction notice, they are claiming sovereignty over the land and their responsibility to care for it.
On October 7, in solidarity with the days of action to proclaim indigenous sovereignty, activists in Houston delivered an eviction notice from the Elsipogtog to the office of SWN Resources. Office staff members refused to accept the letter, so it was left on the receptionist’s desk and copies were faxed directly to the office. The letter requested a response within 48 hours.
At present, the blockade continues. Some of the chiefs met with David Alward, premier of New Brunswick, but the talks have not been satisfactory. Alward would not allow members of the Mi’kmaq Warrior Society to attend the meetings. The Mi’kmaq Warrior Society is calling for solidarity actions October 18, when they expect SWN to serve a court injunction. The blockade has brought together tremendous support from the surrounding community and tribes across Canada.
Moving Toward Peace and a Healthy Planet for Future Generations
Also on October 7, members of Veterans for Peace and their allies held a ceremony in the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in New York City to mark the 12th anniversary of the US invasion of Afghanistan and to oppose all wars. As they did last year, the veterans read the names of those who were killed in wars and laid flowers at the base of the memorial. However, this year, the organizer, Tarak Kauff, began the ceremony by recognizing the 500-year war against First Nations and read the names of Native Indian warriors who were killed.
A shift seems to be happening in public awareness of the ongoing effects of colonialism on indigenous peoples and the importance of indigenous leadership in the struggle to heal and protect the Earth. During the past year, the indigenous-led movement in collaboration with non-indigenous allies has grown, and the tactics being employed to protect the land from extreme energy extraction have escalated.
On Monday, October 7, 2013, indigenous nations and their allies held 70 actions throughout the world proclaiming their sovereignty. The call to action was issued by Idle No more and Defenders of the Land to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the British Royal Proclamation of 1763, which was the first document in which an imperial nation recognized indigenous sovereignty and their right to self-determination. As we wrote last week, treaties with First Nations are not being honored, and even the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples does not adequately recognize the sovereignty of indigenous peoples.
In Canada, where the Idle No More movement was founded, an attack is being waged by the Harper government on the rights of the First Nations. A bill referred to as C-45 weakens laws that protect the land and allows transnational corporations to extract resources from First Nations’ lands without their consent. Idle No More was founded on December 10, 2012 (the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), when Chief Theresa Spence began a hunger strike to protest C-45 on an island across from the Canadian Parliament.
The Idle No More (INM) movement has grown exponentially during the past year to become a worldwide movement. At its core, the INM taps into issues that are essential to all people. INM is a struggle against transnational corporations that collude with governments to allow the exploitation of people and the planet for profit, and it is a struggle for a new economic paradigm. INM is also about facing up to the horrific history of the way that colonizers have abused and disrespected indigenous peoples so that there can be reconciliation and justice and so that the peoples of the world can coexist peacefully. And INM is about the recognition that indigenous peoples are stewards of the Earth and must lead the way to protect the Earth and teach others to do the same.
Throughout the year, there have been teach-ins, round dances, flash mobs and rallies to raise awareness of the ongoing racist and exploitative treatment of indigenous nations as well as the continued decimation of their land to extract resources. There have been long walks, rides and canoe trips to call for healing of the Earth and for the recognition of indigenous sovereignty. And there have been blockades and other nonviolent direct actions to stop further degradation of the planet. INM has already achieved some successes.
Idle No More is an indigenous-led movement, but it is not a movement exclusive to indigenous people. As Clayton Thomas-Muller, an organizer with Defenders of the Land and Idle No More, states, “We understand that the rise of the native rights-based strategic framework as an effective legal strategy supported by a social movement strategic framework is the last best effort not just for Indigenous People but for all Canadians and Americans to protect the commons … from the for-profit agenda of the neoliberal free market strategists that have taken over our governments … and indigenous peoples have been thrust into the forefront of global social movements not just because of our connection to the sacredness of Mother Earth and our traditional ecological knowledge and understanding of how to take care of the Earth as part of that sacred circle of life but also because our ancestors … made sure we had the legal instruments to be able to confront the enemies of today and that is what Idle No More is doing in the US and Canada and across the world where Indigenous People continue to live under occupation and oppression.”
Sovereignty is Fundamental in the Struggle for Global Justice
The United States and Canada are two of the wealthiest nations in the world. Much of this wealth comes from the extraction of resources on land that belongs by treaty to Native Indians. Rather than honoring these treaties, the governments of the US and Canada have a long history, which continues today, of using laws and even manipulating the process of creating the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to exterminate indigenous sovereignty.
As the extraction of resources becomes more extreme through processes such as hydro-fracking and tar sands excavation and the serious consequences this has on the health of people and the Earth become more apparent, indigenous nations have realized that their struggle for sovereignty must intensify. The INM movement is one manifestation of this effort.
Halifax Media Co-op reports that a piece of drilling equipment was set ablaze on the 24th, by person or persons unknown. This comes amidst escalating resistance to hydraulic fracturing by indigenous peoples in Elsipogtog, “New Brunswick”.
One of the six core demands of the INM movement is to “Honour the spirit and intent of the historic Treaties. Officially repudiate the racist Doctrine of Discovery and the Doctrine of Terra Nullius, and abandon their use to justify the seizure of Indigenous Nations lands and wealth.” This is a particularly appropriate time to reflect on these doctrines as some in the United States celebrate Columbus Day.
Columbus used the Doctrine of Conquest to legitimize seizure of land in the Americas. This doctrine “grants invaders legal title to the lands they conquer.” Additionally, the Doctrine of Discovery from the early 1800s allowed colonizers to occupy and claim title to any lands, and their resources, that were not part of the European Christian monarchy. And the Doctrine of Terra Nullius similarly permitted colonizers to occupy and claim land that was not settled according to European standards, such as having an established township.
These doctrines continue today. The Doctrine of Discovery was codified into law by the Supreme Court decision of Johnson v. McIntosh in 1823, which left Native Indians “with the mere ‘right’ to occupy their ancestral lands, subject to U.S. dominion.” And so it is that Native Indians are subjected to policies that continue to allow corporations to extract resources and poison the air, land and water without their consent.
Although the INM movement began in Canada, it has also taken off in the US. And solidarity between Indian Nations in the US and Canada is developing. This summer, the Dakota Nation Unity Ride from Manitoba met up with the Two Row Wampum Renewal Campaign canoe trip in Woodstock, New York, to travel together to the United Nations in New York City. Two Row Wampum is the oldest treaty in North America between an Indian nation, the Haudenosaunee, and a European nation. This summer marked the 400th anniversary, which they highlighted with an epic canoe trip down the Hudson River.
The Two Row Wampum treaty “outlines a mutual, three-part commitment to friendship, peace between peoples, and living in parallel forever (as long as the grass is green, as long as the rivers flow downhill and as long as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west).” The Two Row Wampum campaign seeks to uphold the treaty by creating friendship and peace between all peoples and by working together for a sustainable future, as outlined in their campaign goals. They seek recognition of their laws, the right to self-determination, including living in accordance with their culture and laws, and to be leaders in restoration and stewardship of the Earth.
The Dakota Unity Ride and the Two Row Wampum canoe trip landed in New York City on August 9, which is the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. They walked together to the United Nations building, where they met with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, representatives of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and other officials. The UN press statement describes the theme of the meeting as “Indigenous peoples building alliances: honouring treaties, agreements and other constructive arrangements.”
This is a positive step, but the fight for sovereignty continues. Sylvia Mcadam, a founder of Idle No More and a professor and author, teaches that sovereignty includes “land, language and culture.” It is not just land that has been taken from indigenous peoples but also their language and culture through the forced attendance at residential schools and barriers to access their traditional foods. Mcadam states that her involvement in Idle No More began when she returned to her traditional land with her parents to do research for her current book. She was shocked to see how the land had been developed without consent of the people.
Mcadam reminds us that the First Nations are not a lawless people but that the Creator’s Laws are “expressed in everything we do.” Colonizers have a lot to learn from Native Indians – not only about caring for the Earth and living in ways that preserve resources for future generations but also about governance. Native Indians are matriarchal societies that practice deep democracy.
While indigenous people describe themselves as people who follow laws, they have suffered injustice on their lands. Last week, a panel of judges at the International Peoples Tribunal on Leonard Peltier issued an executive summary and preliminary findings following three days of testimony from Native Indians who described abuse inflicted by the US government and FBI agents. The tribunal concluded that US laws must be changed in order for FBI agents to be charged for their crimes of assault and murder on Pine Ridge Indian land in South Dakota and elsewhere. Further, the tribunal said justice is dependent on the immediate release of Leonard Peltier.
Non-indigenous groups are working in solidarity with Idle No More and other indigenous groups. For example, the Two Row Wampum campaign, led by the Onondaga Nation, works with Neighbors of the Onondaga Nation. This collaboration is particularly evident in the environmental movement.
Stewardship of the Land, Air and Water
Central to the Idle No More movement is protection of the land, air and water from corporations that steal resources without any regard for the environmental effects. Indigenous Peoples believe that many harmful substances, such as uranium and oils and gases, were put in the ground because they were meant to stay there. They oppose the extreme methods of extraction being used today.
During the past year, often with leadership from indigenous nations, the environmental movements in the US and Canada (and elsewhere around the world) have escalated their tactics to protect the Earth. Their focus has primarily been on stopping the pipelines that carry bitumen from the Alberta Tar Sands and stopping fracking for oil and gas. Throughout the summer, there were numerous direct action campaigns, including Sovereignty Summer and Fearless Summer, which collaborated to blockade roads and equipment to prevent pipeline construction.
We highlight three active campaigns that are being led by indigenous nations: The Red Nation’s efforts against an Enbridge pipeline, the Nez Perce fight to stop Megaloads from carrying humongous pieces of equipment through their lands and the Mi’kmaq Warrior Society, which evicted a fracking company, SWN Resources, from its land.
On February 28, Marty Cobenais from the Indigenous Environmental Network led the beginning of an occupation, which included building a sacred fire on top of a pipeline that runs across Red Lake Tribal land in Leonard, Minnesota. The pipeline carries bitumen from the Alberta Tar Sands, which is being mined and poisoning the land of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation in Canada without their consent. The pipeline is owned by Enbridge, and the Red Lake tribal members say that it is illegal. They understood that there was a requirement that if there were a permanent structure over the pipeline it would have to be shut down. Unfortunately, that has not happened, and in fact the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission voted unanimously this summer to allow the pipeline to be expanded to carry more tar sands bitumen even though hundreds attended the hearing in opposition to it.
The occupation is ongoing and is being supported by indigenous and non-indigenous environmental organizations. In October 2013, Winona LaDuke and the Indigo Girls led a weeklong Honour the Earth horseback ride along the route of the pipeline to raise awareness. They are very concerned about spills from the pipeline, which are inevitable. Enbridge has a poor safety record.
Spills have occurred already. In 2002, 48,000 gallons spilled near Cass Lake, Minnesota, and continues to pollute the water table. In 2010, more than 800,000 gallons spilled into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan, and nearly 300,000 gallons remain today. And last year, 50,000 gallons spilled near Grand Marsh, Wisconsin. The pipeline runs through the Straits of Mackinac, which connect Lakes Huron and Michigan, and so it threatens to contaminate large supplies of fresh water.
Just as we must abolish imperialism abroad, we must also end it at home. To accomplish this, we must begin by understanding the ongoing 500-year war against Native Indians, and we must begin to speak about it. The Idle No More and other indigenous-led movements seek a peaceful solution that recognizes the sovereignty of indigenous peoples and their laws so that everyone can live in peace. And they understand that if we are to end the practices that are destroying the Earth, we must learn from those who are stewards of the Earth.
It is time for all of us to be Idle No More. We face common opponents – corporations that profit by exploiting people and the planet and the governments who collude with them. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, currently being negotiated, continues this global exploitation of the planet and people by transnational corporate interests. It is time to end imperialism and the neoliberal economic agenda that perpetuates this destructive behavior.
It is time for solidarity, cooperation, reconciliation and restoration of peaceful human relationships and the land, air and water. It is imperative that we act now so our children and future generations will have the opportunity for healthy lives. The future is literally in our hands.
The Holders of the Light held several Idle No More water-related messages in front of the 2013 Indian Summer Festival’s tipi, prominently located on the State Park Island in front of the Indian Summer grounds. (Photo: Light Brigading / Flickr)
how are the ruling powers to maintain their grip on power if people stop going along with their foul schemes?
the intertnet has allowed everyday people to share information far and wide, and the vile fucks in power are having a difficult time keeping the masses fooled, ruled, docile and obedient.
bloggers have been in the forefront of the free flow of information. what was once only a one-way info stream from the professional media is now an on-going discussion, with anyone on the internet able to contribute. and despite the preponderance of dreck like obamba-is-the-antichrist, important stories are only being discussed on blogs like this one.
twelve years after 9/11/2001, two more unwinnable wars (the war on drugs is the other one) white house war crimes, corporate-owned government, weather modification, electro-magnetic pollution…the false front of “democratic” mind-control has faded away and now we have to deal with what has transpired in this nation.
the military-industrial complex took over the american economy in the 1950s. however, when their boy “tricky dicky” nixon was out-swindled by lbj in order to put a kennedy into the oval office, the military-industrial complex did what it does best: military coup! killed the president, put one of their own in charge, then covered it up so as to keep us asleep and dreaming the american dream for as long as possible.
stop dreaming their dreams! we can dream of things more wonderful, more beautiful, more magical than a dystopian police state, presiding over a dying planet.
live YOUR dreams! share them! nourish them! BE the vision of a compassionate, empathetic world you want to see in this life!
Senate committee passes shield law
Journalists who clamored for a federal shield law to help them fight off legal battles to protect sources have reason to cheer. Last night (original article posted on friday the 13th), the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill that would shield reporters from people like Eric Holder and the Department of Justice — but that depends on the definition of the word “journalist.”
Journalists and bloggers who report news to the public will be protected from being forced to testify about their work under a media shield bill passed by a Senate committee Thursday.
But the new legal protections will not extend to the controversial online website Wikileaks and others whose principal work involves disclosing “primary-source documents … without authorization.” …
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) insisted on limiting the legal protection to “real reporters” and not, she said, a 17-year-old with his own website.
“I can’t support it if everyone who has a blog has a special privilege … or if Edward Snowden were to sit down and write this stuff, he would have a privilege. I’m not going to go there,” she said.
Feinstein introduced an amendment that defines a “covered journalist” as someone who gathers and reports news for “an entity or service that disseminates news and information.” The definition includes freelancers, part-timers and student journalists, and it permits a judge to go further and extend the protections to any “legitimate news-gathering activities.”
This at least goes farther than the Senate first indicated about classifying journalists, which initially required employment by a media outlet. However, this still leaves the definition of who gets the shield in the hands of the government that wants to get the source information, and that’s not just a risk for bloggers, free-lancers, and part-timers. Feinstein et al left a rather large loophole in that regard:
But the bill also makes it clear that the legal protection is not absolute. Federal officials still may “compel disclosure” from a journalist who has information that could stop or prevent crimes such as murder, kidnapping or child abduction or prevent “acts of terrorism” or significant harm to national security.
“Harm to national security” is a usefully ambiguous term. For instance, even though this bill is in part prompted by the DoJ’s pursuit of James Rosen — listing him as a co-conspirator to espionage in court documents in order to spy on him — the predicate for that abuse would still stand. If the DoJ made a representation to the court after this shield law passes that is similar to what Holder approved on Rosen, a court would still be able to approve the surveillance so that the DoJ could discover Rosen’s sources. The other hypotheticals in the exception list are all red herrings; the ambiguous national-security exception is what the DoJ and other government agencies really want.
And, of course, it still means that the government gets to define journalists in as narrow a sense as they like for the purposes of applying this shield. Reporters for newspapers and broadcast outlets would certainly be covered, but that certainty ebbs the farther one goes from that core. What about writers at online sites like Hot Air and Huffington Post? Probably covered. RedState and Firedoglake? Well … are they journalists or activists? If the government gets to define it, then probably the latter — and that’s going to be more true for less-commercial online sites. Will writers at those sites feel more or less free to run real reporting based on inside sources? Better yet, will the inside sources want to talk with writers whose shield is very questionable, or to reporters whose shield will be more substantial?
This is basically rent-seeking by the big players in the media market, a sham by the Senate, and an affront to the First Amendment. Any shield law should concern itself with process and not identification. The founders did not include the First Amendment in order to allow the government to decide who gets its protections. If the shield is an extension of the First Amendment, then it applies to everyone involved in journalistic efforts, or no one at all.
Update: Drudge is all over this today, and Twitchy has a good accounting of the Twitter traffic on it.
The majority of America now gets its news from online sources. This has opened the country up to a whole new variety of sources including blogs, vlogs, youtube and other alternative media sources. The term “Freedom of the Press” has certainly expanded to include multiple new-age venues of modern press. However, in a developing story, Senator Feinstein (D-CA) is seeking an amendment to restrict who gets protection under new media shield laws.
First, consider the problem with a media shield law. On the surface, it may seem great. Here, you will find one of government’s dirtiest tricks. Journalists and media already have a shield law. It’s called the first amendment:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
the mindless sheeple of the u.s. are quick to point out that they have “nothing to hide” from their government’s psychotic surveillance programs. as if all these programs are being staffed and operated by robots.
END TIMES NEWS has covered the misdeeds of the police and other phsychopaths in authority often enough that people should realize the police, the military, the intelligence agencies, the contractors, politicians, and judges conducting and oversee-ing these programs are human beings, flesh and blood people with their own feelings, goals, and ideologies. with the sort of access and power the growing police state has over our private lives and information, abuses are inevitable.
the “nothing to hide” argument is meant to quell the fears of sheeple who would rather not think about what their technology is doing to them. they want the new, shiny thing. they want to be one of the “cool” kids! they want to continue to live their lives free from thought, and particularly thoughts about the potential consequences of utilizing technology you cannot control, but that can be used to control YOU!
their faith-based idiocy shows clearly why they are sheeple to begin with, why they can be easily herded around by corporate propaganda, and why they are sheep under the care of wolves. i’d go on to claim that they also deserve everything coming to them, but their ignorance and apathy are destroying the fabric of society, basic human interactions – and before too much longer – the ability to resist or even identify real dangers to their own communities, neighborhoods, and families. not to mention the fact that these uninformed fools are also the ones who will be joining the ranks of the military and police in the future, or participating in their “crime prevention” and “neighborhood watch” programs. their ignorance is a danger to everyone who wants to resist the worldwide concentration camp our world is quickly becoming. not just to the resisters, either, but to everyone on earth, and all life on this planet.
so, here’s a post about how technology is abused already, our lack of freedom in 21st century merica, and why people with “nothing to hide” are putting their faith in a system that sees them both as a potential enemy and expendable: collateral ready for damage.
JOURNALIST FACING 100 YEARS IN PRISON FOR POSTING A LINK IN AN ARTICLE
In early 2010, journalist and satirist Barrett Brown was working on a book on political pundits, when the hacktivist collective Anonymous caught his attention. He soon began writing about its activities and potential. In a defense of the group’s anti-censorship operations in Australia published on February 10, Brown declared, “I am now certain that this phenomenon is among the most important and under-reported social developments to have occurred in decades, and that the development in question promises to threaten the institution of the nation-state and perhaps even someday replace it as the world’s most fundamental and relevant method of human organization.”
By then, Brown was already considered by his fans to be the Hunter S. Thompson of his generation. In point of fact he wasn’t like Hunter S. Thompson, but was more of a throwback—a sharp-witted, irreverent journalist and satirist in the mold of Ambrose Bierce or Dorothy Parker. His acid tongue was on display in his co-authored 2007 book, Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design and the Easter Bunny, in which he declared: “This will not be a polite book. Politeness is wasted on the dishonest, who will always take advantage of any well-intended concession.”
But it wasn’t Brown’s acid tongue so much as his love of minutiae (and ability to organize and explain minutiae) that would ultimately land him in trouble. Abandoning his book on pundits in favor of a book on Anonymous, he could not have known that delving into the territory of hackers and leaks would ultimately lead to his facing the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison. In light of the bombshell revelations published by Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman about government and corporate spying, Brown’s case is a good—and underreported—reminder of the considerable risk faced by reporters who report on leaks.
Miss Teen USA, Cassidy Wolf, was the victim of a “sextortion” plot in which someone slipped Remote Administration Tool (RAT) software onto her computer and used it to snap (apparently nude) pictures of Wolf in her room. “I wasn’t aware that somebody was watching me (on my webcam),” she told The Today Show. “The light (on the camera) didn’t even go on, so I had no idea.”
The story itself isn’t remarkable—indeed, earlier this year I documented an entire community of RAT users who gather to share tips and pictures of the “slaves” whose machines they have infected—but these kinds of sextortion plots have to date been covered largely in the tech press and in local papers. (Though GQ ran a fine story on sextortionist Luis Mijangos in early 2012 that’s well worth a read). Wolf has now taken the story onto the morning TV talk shows, and her interviewers appear to be amazed that such hacks are even possible.
In doing interviews this week for my new book, The Internet Police, many of the questions have focused on sextortion and the use of RAT software. These hacks are such a profound privacy violation—accessing webcams, microphones, and stored files provides the attacker with almost unfettered access to one’s private life, thoughts, documents, even conversations—that they routinely generate amazement in interlocutors. As one TV host put it after hearing Wolf’s story this week, “Just—wow, that is creepy… Can you believe that?” Or, as a Jezebel writer put it today, “webcam hacking—WHICH I CANNOT BELIEVE IS A REAL THING OH MY GOD.”
Wolf is even making sextortion and webcam hacking one of the centerpieces of her educational efforts as Miss Teen USA—certainly a first, and a good lesson for other teens to hear. RAT software has grown so powerful and so easy to use that it’s use has been surging; I heard this week by e-mail from someone who doesn’t know how to remove an ex-boyfriend’s RAT from her machine. Even national governments use such tools these days, since laptops now provide bugging capabilities almost unimaginable a generation ago.
ALL U.S. INTERNATIONAL BORDERS ARE NOW CONSTITUTION-FREE ZONES
In what should be front page news blasted out nationwide as a breaking news alert, the DHS has openly established extensive ‘Constitution free zones’ in which your Fourth Amendment does not exist.
It’s not ‘conspiracy’ and it’s not fraud, the DHS has literally created an imaginary ‘border’ within the United States that engulfs 100 miles from every single end of the nation. Within this fabricated ‘border’, the DHS can search your electronic belongings for no reason. We’re talking about no suspicion, no reasonable cause, nothing. No reason whatsoever is required under their own regulations. The DHS is now above the Constitution under their own rules, and even Wired magazine authors were amazed at the level of pure tyranny going on here.
This ‘border’ even includes where the US land meets oceans in addition to legitimate borders with Mexico and Canada. As a result, you have over 197 million citizens suffocated in these 100 mile ‘border zones’ that include major cities like New York City, Houston, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. Checkout the graphic below for a visual representation, with the orange area representing the Constitution free zone as designated by the DHS:
What’s even more amazing, is that this has been going on since 2008. That’s about 5 years of absolute unconstitutional abuse of power by the Department of Homeland Security that the media fails to even document. That’s 197 million citizens living without a Constitution as far as the DHS is concerned, and apparently the Department of Justice (DOJ) must be pretty content too. Amazingly, no one has challenged this besides the ACLU, which was contacted following the case of a man who was actually detained within the 100 mile ‘border’ area.
The DHS is literally gutting the Constitution and declaring itself higher than the law of the land by doing this, and it spells out major trouble for the entire Bill of Rights at large.
Because if the DHS can simply ‘overrule’ the Fourth Amendment for 197 million citizens, it can also ‘overrule’ the First and Second Amendments as well. What’s stopping them? It’s highly illegal under the Constitution, but it appears they truly don’t care. And to demonstrate just how little they truly care, they have even gone and ‘reviewed’ themselves for their own actions following outcry from some legal experts.
The plans to implement martial law in America have been taking shape for decades, hidden behind “Continuity of Government” contingency planning. Now, with public outcry over the banker bailout bill at fever pitch, all of the pieces are in place for the U.S. Army to start policing American citizens.
A city police officer was charged Thursday in a ghoulish plot to kidnap and torture women and then cook and eat their body parts.
Gilberto Valle sent numerous emails and other Internet communications about the torture and cannibalism scheme, according to a criminal complaint. He identified and catalogued at least 100 women on his computer, investigators said, but there was no information that anyone was harmed.
“I was thinking of tying her body onto some kind of apparatus … cook her over low heat, keep her alive as long as possible,” Valle allegedly wrote in one exchange in July, the complaint says. – see original post from end times news
after a series of spectacular jailbreaks in pakistan, lybia and iraq, the US has issued a travel advisory for the middle east and north africa for the rest of the month of august, and is shutting down operations in many embassies. this is usually seen as a preliminary move, prior to the outbreak of war.
with close to two thousand freshly liberated fighters to send into battles, the US could be weighing its options to either invade syria in support of its al qaeda puppet mercenaries there, invade egypt in support of its muslim brotherhood puppets there. or invade iran, as israel has been demanding for a while now. or do all three.
the nation of uruguay has decided to put a brake on drug cartel profits by legalizing marijuana.
as people around the world take heart in a nation working towards an end to the drug wars – mostly initiated by washington dc – that are killing tens of thousands of people in the americas and causing an incarceration crisis in the US, both the vatican and the united nations have demanded that nothing be done to lessen the profits of drug cartels.
in the US, war criminal president obomber has launched a federal invasion of the state of washington, which has legalized marijuana, to go after medical growers – which was legal prior to marijuana-for-the-hell-of-it being legalized through a voter initiative.
in addition to protecting cartel profits, the war-criminal-in-chief has alsosupplied drug cartels with thousands of weapons, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of mexican citizens and several US law enforcement and military personnel.
the UN is depending upon drug laws in order to send “peace-keeping” forces into areas of production and massacre the native peoples in the vicinity. genocide against native peoples is part of the UN agenda, and their hysteria over the potential loss of profits for drug cartels shows the shallowness of their concern for human beings. where is their concern for the native peoples being hunted down and slaughtered by oil industry mercenaries?
as for the child-molesting cartel run by the vatican, they depend upon drug cartel money flowing into their banks in order to pay for all the fines they pay around the world for the misdeeds of their rapist priesthood.
so, the UN and the vatican are quiet about genocide and child molesting – the vatican issued a decree against mentioning sexual predation by the rapist priesthood – but quite vocal over legalizing an herb that has long shown to have many more positive uses than, say…uranium. almost all the negative aspects to the use of ganja are the result of it being illegal.
and legalization WOULD have economic impacts. it would take hundreds of millions of dollars out of the hands of illegal growers and smuggling operations. and allow people to grow and learn for themselves how ganja can affect their health, as well as give everyone access to a cash crop that has industrial uses as a lubricant and in the manufacturing of compostable plastics, as well as being an excellent source of fiber for fabrics.
a decentralized economy that anyone can participate in, with nothing but a few seeds and a pot of soil, does not fit into the vision of a future constructed through economic crisis engineered by governments and bankster cartels.
where are the UN edicts demanding that the central banks be seized and their bankster overlords imprisoned?
why does the UN not declare the catholic church to be a child-molesting cartel, and have everyone in its rapist priesthood imprisoned?
because it’s all about the money. and in this case, it’s all about the illegal profits of drug cartels the elites depend upon to keep their financial shell-games afloat.
- rob los ricos
uruguay could be first nation in the world to fully legalize marijuana
On Wednesday, Uruguay’s House of Deputies voted 50 to 46 in favour of a bill to legalize the production, commercialization and distribution of pot.
The bill still has to move through the Senate, but with a government majority in the upper house it is expected to pass at some point in the fall.
The decision by Uruguay lawmakers to legalize the possession and sale of marijuana could signal the beginning of the end for the increasingly unpopular U.S.-led war on drugs, experts say.
“Uruguay being the first nation to engage in legalization and alternative drug policy could be kind of a tipping point,” says Nathan Jones, a post-doctoral fellow at Rice University’s James Baker Institute for Public Policy in Texas.
‘We know we are embarking on a cutting-edge experiment for the whole world.’— Uruguayan President Jose Mujica
He says that Uruguay’s move challenges “those international treaties that kind of hold the whole drug prohibition regime together.”
Pope Francis attacks drug legalisation in Latin America, demands legal age of consent be lowered to 6 months
(i made up the “age of consent thing” – gaian)
Pope Francis has criticised drug legalisation plans in Latin America during the inauguration of a clinic for drug addicts in Rio de Janeiro.
The roots of drug abuse should be tackled, he said on the third day of his visit to Brazil.
Uruguay is close to allowing the legal sale of marijuana, with other countries pondering similar liberalisation.
Earlier, the Argentine-born pontiff celebrated the first Mass of his trip, at the Shrine of Our Lady of Aparecida.
He warned tens of thousands of faithful against the “passing idols” of money, power and pleasure.
Pope Francis also warned against plans to legalise drugs in Latin America and condemned drug-traffickers.
“How many dealers of death there are that follow the logic of power and money at any cost! The scourge of drug-trafficking, that favours violence and sows the seeds of suffering and death, requires of society as a whole an act of courage,” he said.(this sounds like a threat to me – gaian)
Leaders in Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador and others have spoken for softer stances on drugs policy.
In Uruguay, a project decriminalising marijuana sale is set to be voted in Congress next week.
President Jose Mujica says its main goal is combating drug trafficking.
Jose Mujica: The world’s ‘poorest’ president • Donates 90% salary to poor • Shuns presidential mansion • Rides 1987 Volkswagen – click on image to see article about him
UN narcotics body warns Uruguay over marijuana bill
The International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) says it is concerned by the approval by Uruguayan MPs of a bill which would legalise marijuana.
The INCB says the law would “be in complete contravention to the provisions of the international drug treaties to which Uruguay is party”.
Under the new law, the state would assume control of growing and selling cannabis to registered users.
The bill still needs to be passed by Uruguay’s senate before becoming law.
‘Serious consequences’
In a statement released just hours after the bill was passed in Uruguay’s House of Representatives, the INCB said that such a law would be in “complete contravention” of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961, which bans the sale of cannabis for non-medical use.
It says that, if adopted, it “might have serious consequences for the health and welfare of he population and for the prevention of cannabis abuse among the youth”.
The Uruguayan government argues that by bringing the sale of cannabis under state control, it will remove profits from drug dealers and divert users from harder drugs.
Feds Raid Marijuana Dispensaries in WA, Where the Pot Is Legal
The drug is legal for recreational and medical use in Washington
Medical marijuana dispensaries in Washington state have been raided by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the agency confirmed today.
Washington law allows possession of up to 24 ounces of marijuana, or 15 plants, and provides for licensed dispensaries to sell the drug to people with medical marijuana prescriptions. Possession of up to one ounce of recreational marijuana is also legal in Washington (and in Colorado). But the drug is still illegal for medical use under federal law, hence the DEA raids.
One of the dispensaries raided was the Bayside Collective in Olympia, where armed agents seized around $2,500 worth of marijuana, according to dispensary worker Casey Lee, who spoke to an NBC affiliate.
by now it should be more than obvious, even to the most naive fool, that the president of the united states has one function and only one function – to keep money pouring into banks, particularly into the accounts of the corporate masters.
to do this, he must help other nations destroy their constitutions, impoverish their subjects in order to force unwanted, intrusive technology on them, poison their air, water, and food so that “healthcare” corporations can weed out the undesirables in the population and further impoverish the people by forcing them to pay for unnecessary medical treatment (much of which would never be needed if they weren’t being poisoned).
most insidiously, the chief executive of the united states of america is at the head of the most extensive surveillance networks ever established in human history. how vast are these networks? the president has already admitted that there is no way to track how much information is being stolen by the united states government each and every day, from their own citizens. just in the month of march, almost 3 BILLION emails were intercepted in the u.s. by the NSA. that’s close to 10 emails from every man, woman, and child in america, in just one month. AND – that’s just one intelligence agency’s take. there’s still the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, the U.S. Marshals, The various intelligence branches of the military services including their alleged overseer at the department of defense, the DIA. this also does not include the many private contractors the u.s. outsources its dirty work to – like blackwater/academi, raytheon, general dynamics, facebook, google, dyncorp…the list goes on, and is growing every day.
so, for all of you idiots out there thinking “i have nothing to hide,” just remember that every status update, every website you’ve ever visited, every off-hand comment you’ve ever made online – or ever will – is retrievable. ever take a stand against something in the corporate interest? like tuition hikes demanded by banks? like the bankster bailout?or gmo foods? or against governmnet shenanigans like the illegal wars in iraq and syria? or the illegal use of predatory assassination drones that have killed more untargeted u.s. citizens than the ONE admitted target? or maybe you had a heated dislike for someone who is now in charge of a data-mining operation somewhere. or maybe you’ve dated and had a messy break-up with someone in an intelligence agency. or maybe an intelligence agent thinks you’re hot and is stalking you.
have you ever downloaded copywritten material and not paid for it? ever lash out at someone in anger, online? are you starting to get the picture? somewhere, some day, you will slip up and offend the corporate masters, and they will sick the government on you. a court will be served with papers charging you with a crime. the government will call up all the information it has on you – even if it is totally unrelated to the charges against you. and the prosecutor and judge will discuss exactly what charges will or will not be pressed against you, you will be charged with some ridiculous amount of offences (typically somewhere between 30 and 300), fined thousands or even millions of dollars (if you’ve ever read the copyright warning on a dvd, then you’ll know that infractions could cost the violator up to $250,000 apiece), then locked away. or maybe in the future, you will be able to work off your debt.
they are watching and awaiting the day when their corporate masters unleash them and command “sic ‘em.”
what did people think when acting president reagan said he wanted to make the united sates into an “ownership” society?
rob los ricos
<<this is my 911th post on end times news – gaian>>
TODAY’S EPISODE OF DEMOCRACY NOW! HAS EXCELLENT COVERAGE OF THE NSA PRISM DISCLOSURE.
When you’re in positions of privileged access, like a systems administrator for these sort of the intelligence community agencies, you’re exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale than the average employee, and because of that, you see things that may be disturbing. But over the course of a normal person’s career, you’d only see one or two of these instances.
When you see everything, you see them on a more frequent basis, and you recognize that some of these things are actually abuses. And when you talk to people about them in a place like this, where this is the normal state of business, people tend not to take them very seriously and, you know, move on from them. But over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up, and you feel compelled to talk about it. And the more you talk about it, the more you’re ignored, the more you’re told it’s not a problem, until eventually you realize that these things need to be determined by the public, not by somebody who was simply hired by the government.
10 Jun 2013: Data protection chiefs and analysts in EU, Pakistan, South Africa and Canada express concerns at revelations in leaks
- from the guardian, u.k. MORE:
the NSA gathered 97 billion “pieces of intelligence” in march 2013
(the internet allegedly has 2 billion denizens, many with intermittent access – gaian)
The National Security Agency has developed a powerful tool for recording and analysing where its intelligence comes from, raising questions about its repeated assurances to Congress that it cannot keep track of all the surveillance it performs on American communications.
The Guardian has acquired top-secret documents about the NSA datamining tool, called Boundless Informant, that details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks.
The focus of the internal NSA tool is on counting and categorizing the records of communications, known as metadata, rather than the content of an email or instant message.
The Boundless Informant documents show the agency collecting almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks over a 30-day period ending in March 2013. One document says it is designed to give NSA officials answers to questions like, “What type of coverage do we have on country X” in “near real-time by asking the SIGINT [signals intelligence] infrastructure.”
An NSA factsheet about the program, acquired by the Guardian, says: “The tool allows users to select a country on a map and view the metadata volume and select details about the collections against that country.”
Under the heading “Sample use cases,” the factsheet also states the tool shows information including: “How many records (and what type) are collected against a particular country.”
Government slide shows that Microsoft was the first to cave into the government’s request in 2007, while Apple fought off the feds for five years before caving last year. Image: Courtesy of the Washington Post
GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK ARE COMPLETELY
INCOMPETENT AT SECURITY
Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Larry Page both denied today that they’ve given U.S spies access to their companies’ backend servers, deepening the core mystery around the NSA’s newly-disclosed PRISM program: how exactly is the NSA getting its data?
“Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the U.S. or any other government direct access to our servers” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post this afternoon. “We have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information or metadata in bulk … We hadn’t even heard of PRISM before yesterday.”
Google CEO Larry Page used similar language in a blog post earlier today.
“First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government — or any other government — direct access to our servers,” read a post on Google’s blog authored by Page and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond. “Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a ‘back door’ to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday.”
The Washington Post and the Guardian revealed the existence of the top secret program in separate reports yesterday. PRISM allows NSA analysts to pry into private user messages and other data from servers of nine different technology companies, the papers revealed: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. The program was reportedly begun in 2007 with a single company, and has grown steadily ever since. Both of the original news reports said that the NSA has direct access to the companies’ servers, and cast the companies as voluntary participants.
But all nine companies have now denied, to one degree or another, participating in PRISM.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, says the internet is facing a “major” threat from “people who want to control it on the sly.”
The inventor of the World Wide Web said the internet is facing a “major” threat from “people who want to control it on the sly” through “worrying laws” such as SOPA, the US anti-piracy act, and through the actions of internet giants.
“If you can control [the internet], if you can start tweaking what people say, or intercepting communications, it’s very, very powerful…it’s the sort of power that if you give it to a corrupt government, you give them the ability to stay in power forever.”
Sir Tim was speaking as it emerged that the US government has been collecting huge amounts of personal information from Google, Facebook, Apple and other internet companies.
There have also been reports that British spies have been gathering intelligence from the internet giants “through a covertly run operation set up by America’s top spy agency”
“Unwarranted government surveillance is an intrusion on basic human rights that threatens the very foundations of a democratic society,” Sir Tim said. “I call on all web users to demand better legal protection and due process safeguards for the privacy of their online communications, including their right to be informed when someone requests or stores their data.
EU ASKS LYING, MURDERING U.S. GOVERNMENT TO PROMISE TO RESPECT PRIVACY RIGHTS…HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Mina Andreeva, the commissioner’s spokeswoman, told The World at One on BBC Radio 4: “The European commission is concerned about the possible consequences on EU citizens’ privacy.
“The commission has raised this systematically in its dialogue with the US authorities, especially in the context of the negotiations of the EU-US data protection agreement in the field of police and judicial co-operation, where the draft text has been on the table now for two years.
“This was also raised, by the way, by Vice-President Reding at her last meeting with US attorney general Holder in Washington in April. The vice-president will again raise this with her American counterparts at the upcoming EU-US ministerial meeting on 13-14 June in Dublin.”
The intervention by the commission follows a warning by a senior member of the European parliament that the EU would redouble its efforts to strengthen the proposed EU-US agreement, in the light of the Guardian disclosures. Hannes Swoboda, leader of the socialist group in the parliament, told the FT: “With all the information we’ve found out in recent days about how easily the US spies on people’s private data I think it will be difficult for the Americans to oppose a strong data protection agreement.
“This issue is very critical for us in Europe … There will be growing resistance against an agreement with the US unless there are some clear guarantees from their side that our European principles of data protection are respected.”
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
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, as 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 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.
Last week Banksy declared that all profits from his current print sale would be gifted to Russian art anarchist group Voina. Known for drawing an enormous cock on a bridge opposite the ex-KGB offices, and instigating a sex party in a museum [see photo above]. We spoke to the group, half of which were replying from prison.
Voina (or “War” to give them their English name) are a radical art group concerned with challenging the Russian establishment on important political issues such as attitudes towards homophobia, race, and the totalitarian actions of the state, through creating outrageous and provocative art performances in Russia. Two of their members; Oleg Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolayev have been detained for more than a month at St Petersburg Prison on false allegations. Don’t Panic spoke to the group.
Oleg Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolayev, the artists from the Voina art-group, handled their answers from the St. Petersburg prison, awaiting trial on charges of hooliganism for one of their previous performances. Alex Plutser-Sarno and Natalia Sokol have sent their answers from the secret flat, where they are hiding from the police.
Could you introduce yourselves and tell us about the structure behind your group?
Alex Plutser-Sarno: At present in the center of the structure is a high impenetrable wall of the St. Petersburg prison, behind which two artists, Oleg Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolayev, are slowly fading away. You have to understand that Russian prison is hell. Being at large Natalia Sokol keeps coordinating the work of the group. I keep making media-art, writing conceptions and texts. The actions are published in my blog. There are some other activists in the group, who do important work, but their names remain unrevealed, otherwise the Russian insane right-wing authorities will arrest them as well.
Natalia Sokol: The basis of the group structure is in the complete equality of rights of activists and the openness of the group’s borders for new activists. Our group is an art-anarchy-punk gang.
What is the inherent philosophy of the group?
AP-S: Every activist of the group has his/her own philosophy. In the political aspect we, of course, sympathize with anarchists, socialists and in general with all left-wing radicals. But first of all we are artists – not politicians or philosophers. And using our artistic methods we destruct the outdated repressive-patriarchal symbols and ideologies.
Oleg Vorotnikov: In Russia we have created the left-wing art front. Our aim is to revive the vivid political protest art.
Leonid Nikolayev: Our art-group is struggling with the socio-political obscurantism and the right-wing reaction.
What does anarchy mean to you, and how can it make Russia a better place to live in?
N.S.: Anarchism with all the utopian character of its ideas is the only cohesive, honest and fearless power.
A.P-S: Exactly! Respect to anarchists. But Russia won’t be a place for living for as long as the oil and gas money is flowing in. Within the next few years it will be the place for the natural resource pillaging, committed by the group of two-faced dirty dealing bureaucrats and other werewolves wearing shoulder straps.
Where does Voina fit in the current tendencies of contemporary art as well as in the context of political science and human rights?
A.P-S: Art is, first of all, a mode of thought, the ability to look at this mad world from a completely new point of view. Not to speak of the human rights, that are right out raped and crucified all over the world, so we will pass them over in silence.
Dick captured by KGB - An enormous penis on a drawbridge in St Petersburg. It is opposite city headquarters of the FSB (ex-KGB)
O.V.: Today the innovative art-language is the only instrument to understand the xenophobic nonsense and chaos, which are around us. By our actions we depict the portrait of this crazy world. And make the world see it and get horrified. For example, our Fuck for the heir – Medved`s little Bear! - on the eve of Medvedev’s election - was a portrait of the pre-election Russia, where everyone metaphorically fucks each other.
L.N.: The language of our art is really able to resist the coming right-wing reaction. When our Dick on theLiteyniy bridge – 65 meters high, 26 meters wide, weighting 4 tonnes – rose menacingly into the windows of the FSB-KGB headquarters the authorities couldn’t find any other reply but to illegally put us away by a false accusation.
Could you outline the ideas behind a few of your conceptions?
In Memory of the Decemberists – A Present to Yuri Luzhkov, which presented the hanging of two gay men and three immigrant workers, as a direct attack against Moscow Mayor Luzhkov, whose policies have been denounced as racist and homophobic.
O.V.: Or, for example, on the Moscow City Day, as a protest, the Voina group came to the city’s biggest supermarket Auchan, where in the department of Light organized an execution by hanging of 3 illegal Central Asian migrant workers, 1 Jew and 1 homosexual. The lynching came as a present to the corrupted Moscow Mayor Luzhkov who pursued a policy of misanthropy and violation of human rights. We made this action as a commemoration of 5 Russian revolutionists, who were hanged in 1826. That’s why the action is called “Decembrists commemoration”. We wanted to make the Russians remember the libertarian ideals of the country’s first revolutionists.
L .N.: The main thing for the artists is to be honest and not to make compromises. In Russia they put people to torture and execution – the prisons are again full of dissenters. Xenophobia and homophobia reigns. A new slave society is build. Cops beat and kill people. And here we are – holding the action Palace revolution, turning the police cars over. That was our artistic reform of the Ministry of Home Affairs.
Palace Revolution, after which Oleg and Leonid were arrested
L .N.: The main thing for the artists is to be honest and not to make compromises. In Russia they put people to torture and execution – the prisons are again full of dissenters. Xenophobia and homophobia reigns. A new slave society is build. Cops beat and kill people. And here we are – holding the action Palace revolution, turning the police cars over. That was our artistic reform of the Ministry of Home Affairs.
A.P-S: When the prominent curator Andrei Yerofeyev was accused of fomenting ethnic and religious hatred and “insulting human dignity” for organizing an exhibition and was brought to the court, the Voina art collective interrupted the case hearing by performing a new song All Cops are Bastards from the album Fuck the Police Those Motherfucking Bosses right into the courtroom. The idea was simple, the implementation – honest and uncompromising.
N.S.: Contemporary art is, first of all, an art activism for us, and not the piles of the art-rubbish kept in the galleries. Today activism is the only form of the radical left-wing art, which we are trying to revive in Russia. It’s important to understand that there is no any other radical art in Russia, except for the one represented by a dozen of art-activists.
A.P-S: Anarch-art-activism is the only lively activity in Russia. Nowadays, when even hope for democracy in Russia is ruined, painting flowers and pussy cats or making any other “pure” art, lacking a socio-political content, is to support the right-wing authorities. The symbol of anarchy – a skull-and-bones - has to be painted right at the Russia’s parliament building. That’s what we did Our Jolly Roger laser projection was almost 50 meters high, covering almost the whole front of the White House in Moscow.
Tell us about the experience of being arrested by the Russian anti-extremist police?
O.V.: It can be said without hesitation, that the right-wing revanchist is in full swing.
L.N.: The Voina art group gave the authorities an acid test and the authorities went flop.
What is the charge against Oleg Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolayev?
N.S.: Oleg Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolayev were arrested illegally. People, who broke into the flat and left it in the terrible mess, didn’t have an arrest warrant. Everything was carried out in the Stalin style of the year 1937. Afterwards the artists, handcuffed and with plastic bags on their heads, were carried from Moscow to St. Petersburg for 10 hours on the floor of the minibus. The arrested were beaten with legs. Oleg Vorotnikov has hematomas in and around head and kidneys. This fact is recorded by the human rights advocates, who visited the arrested artists in the investigative isolation ward two weeks after the arrest. The bruises and scratches were so serious that they didn’t disappear in two weeks.
A.P-S: And now Oleg and Leonid are accused of “fomenting hatred and enmity to a social group,” namely, the police. I, as the main artist of the group, am accused of organizing and leading a criminal community — namely, the Voina art collective. This accusation implies a term of imprisonment of between 12 and 20 years. Both of my grandfathers were in the prison camps for 22 years during the Stalin regime. Dozens of my relatives died in the concentration camp of Auschwitz and the Warsaw ghetto. To do 20 years in prison for art activism under Putin is too much for my family.
What is Free Voina and what can people do to help in the release of your two members Oleg Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolayev?
N.S.: Free Voina is a group of independent and honest Russian artists, who started to make actions in support of Voina. They made a web site, where the money for the arrestedare collected. They carry out protest actions. Anyone can join us in this struggle for freedom.
Storm of the White House where-in a giant skull and crossbones was projected on the Russian White House
THE BOSTON MARATHON BOMBING WAS AN IMMENSE INTELLIGENCE FAILURE – OR WORSE?
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.
photo from boston globe
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
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.
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
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.
it’s still too early to assess the damage done by the bombs which have gone off in boston – obviously targeting the famous marathon race held there every year.
at least three bombs – police claim to have discovered more – have detonated so far, there are reports of two deaths, and witnesses have reported seeing survivors with body parts missing.
meanwhile – our intelligence agencies have to admit that with all their “security” precautions – cameras everywhere, our phones and internet devices monitored, spy drones in the air, and a thick network of scumbag, lying-ass snitches and informants, and with the security forces allowed to utilize torture on “terror” suspects, the intelligence community had NO CLUE that something – multiple bombs planted near the boston public library, near the finish line of the maratrhon – was amiss on this lovely spring day.
In this image from video provided by WBZ-TV, spectators and participants scramble away from what authorities described as two explosions at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.
we’ve been told repeatedly that we had to give up our constitutional rights because we are in a time of war. we were told that, if we didn’t want to experience another national tragedy like the 911 attacks, we would have to allow government intrusion into our personal lives, we would just have to get used to security cameras everywhere, that we would have to prepare for the day when drones fill the sky – even though there is no way an individual on the ground can ascertain whether or not the drone is “frioendly” or “hostile.”
just like this bombing.
who is behind this? it would not surprise me that terrorists planned and executed this plot. it would surprise me if the people behind the plot were not intelligence agents. either from the FBI, the Mossad, or one of the lesser-known entities that claim to have been created for our protection.
if this is found out to be an actual attack by foreign nationals, it will be the first terrorist plot in america for years that the FBI did not initiate. and if the bombers DO prove to be foreign terrorists, i – for one – will not be easily convinced that the FBI did not recruit, train, and arm the terrorists themselves.
no matter who is eventually blamed for this atrocity against people enjoying a spring day, there is one thing i know for certain – no anarchist or other revolutionary group is behind this attack. revolutionaries know who their enemies are, and our enemies are generally not hanging out at public libraries.
this post will be updated, immediately, with links to other articles.
just like international criminal banking cartels are too rich and powerful for the government to touch, so are giant corporations – especially those that provide the precious oil that allows international trade to be possible.
no crime against humanity or nature is so great as to be a punishable offence. not murdering indigenous people who refuse to allow oil exploration in their homelands in the amazon rainforest, the mountainous islands of indonesia, the niger river delta…anyplace the oil companies destroys through their incompetence and evil machinations – well, that’s the price of doing business. evil business.
if their wreckless disregard for life isn’t enough to convince you of oil companies’ inherent evil, the fact that WE DO NOT EVER NEED TO USE PETROCHEMICALS EVER, FOR ANYTHING, EVER should provide the proverbial icing on the evil cake for anyone with even rudimentary intelligence.
the creation of energy through burning things is pre-19th century technology. it was surpassed and made irrelevant by Nicolai Tesla over 100 years ago.
but, just as the banksters are allowed to launder drug cartel billions, while a teenager smoking a joint in his bedroom could be sent to prison for possessing the products the cartels provide, the rich are allowed to do anything – pollute the land and sea, and kill everything and everyone in the way; molest children by the thousands; steal everything that’s not nailed down – while people without huge piles of money to burn can have their lives ruined – either by being between a corporation and their potential profits, or by being incarcerated for having the exact same habits as the country club crowd has, but not having enough money to hire one of them as your lawyer.
we’ve entered a new age of corporate feudalism, with an uber-class of murderous scumbag psychopaths ruling over people too frightened, confused, misled, blinded, and/or crippled by the corporations and their minions to even know what’s happening around them and to them – much less figure out a way to cope with a ceaseless shit-train of epic atrocities ignored, or facilitated by a government led by a man who can kill with the stroke of his pen; anyone, anywhere.
i, for one, am not a serf, wasn’t born to provide scumbag psychopaths with luxury i cannot even fathom, and will not willingly consent to being treated like i owe the banksters, the government, or any profit-generating entity ANYTHING. i am perfectly willing to see all institutions of power crumble into ruins and pass from our collective memory.
and what about the economy? i’ll let you in on a little secret – until about 100 years ago, hardly ANYONE on earth needed money to survive in this world. we still don’t – we just let the media and government tell us we do.
as far as the banksters, their corporate uber-lords, their minions, mouthpieces, and loyal idiots – as we used to say in texas – i wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire.
below are examples of how the courts look after the interests of foreign corporations, even at the expense of lives and widespread economic damage as a result of their shenanigans.
Three years after the BP Macondo well disaster, the Gulf of Mexico is still covered in oil and barely sustaining visible life above or below the surface. Undisclosed white matter is appearing and leakages with other drill sites appears to be problematic. With such a massive dead zone, it makes you wonder how long oil rigs have negligently been spewing toxins and the rig disaster wasn’t part of a long term plan to expand the dead zone to include the entire Gulf of Mexico; all aimed at turning the entire region into a vast wasteland of oil rigs leaking oil, Corexit and other toxic chemicals into the core engine of the oceans converter belt.
To keep the sheen suppressed under surface water, spraying Corexit is still a daily routine on behalf of BP. So, below where it mentions the Macondo well looks good after one week, it took thousands of gallons of Corexit to break up the sheen and sink the toxic goo below the surface.
Published on Mar 16, 2013
20130316 – On Wings Of Care Gulf Flyover. This video was taken with our belly viewer (the front of the airplane is to the left in this video; that’s our nose wheel showing at the lower left, because the videocamera is tilted slightly forward to give the pilot a short lead time to center the plane over the target. Sorry it looks like we’re flying sideways, that’s how the videocamera fit best into the belly port!). This is the chronic Taylor Energy pollution site, about 12 nm southeast of the Louisiana coast. Lots of rainbow sheen here today, and even some brown weathered crude floating in it near its east end, which is just west of the Nykor Energy platform (unrelated to the sheen). For more photos and videos and discussion, see the article at OnWingsOfCare.org
It’s been labeled the worst environmental disaster in world history, and rightfully so, because the British Petroleum (BP) oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is like the nightmarish gift that keeps on giving. BP and the United States government would have the public believe that all is well in the Gulf. Nothing could be further from the truth. The crisis is not only ongoing; its effects are worsening
The April 20, 2010 the Deep Water Horizon Explosion will be back in the news again. The explosion of this oil rig represents the biggest false flag event in history; the devastation of this false flag event is still being felt and the worst is yet to come. You may have heard about the explosions near the New Madrid Fault and the thousands of generators being shipped to Louisiana by FEMA. Soon all readers of this series will connect the BP oil spill to these recent current events.
Over 34 months later, the oil spill has destroyed the welfare, livelihoods, health and futures of tens of millions of Gulf Coast residents, not to mention the destruction of the fragile ecology in the Gulf of Mexico.
Originally, BP was ordered to initiate $20 billion in restitution to the Gulf Coast victims. In retrospect, BP has never made full restitution to the victims. The overall physical health of the region has been decimated and the mainstream media and government officials reaching as high as President Obama have been complicit in covering up the geological and medical magnitude of the event. Even to this day, BP is still covertly carpet bombing Corexit in the Gulf and the much of the environmental catastrophe remains untouched by the BP cleanup crews.
BP Urges Government To Halt Gulf Oil Disaster Relief Payments For Future Losses
Oil giant BP is urging the federal government to stop making payments to Gulf Coast residents affected by last year’s Gulf of Mexico oil geyser. BP claims that the improving economic conditions among areas hit the hardest by the oil provide enough evidence to show that they no longer need to be compensated for future losses from the environmental disaster.
To date, roughly $4.5 billion worth of claims have been paid out of the $20 billion fund established by the government and funded by BP to pay victims of the oil catastrophe. Claims continue to be filed with the government seeking compensation for their losses.
BP is not attempting to halt payments to current claimants with recognizable losses – only those who are claiming that their future income will be impacted. The company released a letter to the government and to the press.
To determine if BP’s claims of economic recovery are true, all you have to do is look to the past. The Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred more than 20 years ago, yet oil still coats areas of Alaska today. And the difference between the two oil leaks is that with Exxon, we knew exactly how much oil was spilled into Prince William Sound. In that case, it was roughly 11 million gallons of oil.
However, there is no precise measurement of how much oil poured into the Gulf of Mexico, but the best estimates say that it was as much as 184 million gallons of oil. It is highly unlikely that all of this oil disappeared or washed up on beaches. When this oil eventually turns up, claims will continue to be filed by those affected.
But it isn’t just the economy that BP is saying has recovered; they also make the claim that the fishing industry is back to pre-spill health.
BP has sued to block what could be billions of dollars in settlement payouts to businesses over the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
The London-based oil giant accused the court-appointed administrator for the settlement, Patrick Juneau, of trying to rewrite the terms of the deal. BP said Juneau violated the settlement in the way he used a complex formula to determine the payments to businesses.
Last week, BP warned investors that the settlement’s price tag will be “significantly higher” than initially estimated.
“Although the ultimate exposure is at this time inestimable, it grows daily and could cost BP billions,” the company’s lawyers wrote Friday.
U.S District Judge Carl Barbier appointed Juneau and has upheld his decisions for calculating payments. Juneau’s spokesman declined to comment on BP’s lawsuit.
Attorneys who worked on the class-action settlement with BP said the payments to businesses were spelled out in the agreement.
“Simply put, BP undervalued the settlement and underestimated the number of people and businesses that qualify under the objective formulas that BP agreed to,” attorneys Steve Herman and Jim Roy said in a statement.
“At the same time BP lauds its efforts for restoring the Gulf in the media, it blames others in court for its own mistakes to avoid responsibility for its own conduct,” Strange said in statement Thursday.
Strange said that if BP underestimated how much it would owe under the terms of its agreement, that is BP’s problem, not the citizens’.
“BP cannot undo a settlement it wrote and signed, just to avoid its consequences. The courts should not allow it,” he said.
U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier in New Orleans has scheduled an April 5 hearing on BP’s request to prevent payments of what the oil company calls fictitious or inflated claims that are being made as part of the settlement.
Separately, BP filed a complaint against the settlement program and its administrator, Patrick Juneau, alleging breach of contract. The complaint doesn’t seek monetary damages, but it does ask that Juneau be ordered to change how he interprets the agreement so that he complies with what BP believes the agreement says.
And Strange said in his statement that “a legion of BP attorneys wrote and negotiated the terms” of the agreement.
“But now, BP is objecting to the terms of the agreement it signed. This challenge is not surprising; it is consistent with BP’s past behavior,” he said.
A proposal from France and the United Kingdom to supply arms to terrorists in Syria has split the European Union. If the pair decide to cast international law aside and enable terrorist groups in Syria to upgrade from car-bombings and see what they can do with some serious artillery and combat vehicles, it could ruin the EU’s chances of creating a unified foreign policy.
There’s also a chance that giving more arms to these murderous scumbags could ruin a few people’s days, to say the least.
This Friday (3/15/13) marked the two-year anniversary of the uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Which was eventually usurped by the CIA’s Islamic Terrorist Networks. In response to the Syrian conflict, European Union member states imposed sanctions, supported diplomatic solutions, pledged aid to refugees and participated in other humanitarian work, just as they did for Libya. Using Libya as an indicator of what the future holds for the conflict in Syria, one can only surmise that air support will be proposed soon, as Assad’s military has proven to be worthy of their reputation, and has retaken many vital rebel positions. If it would not provoke an international incident, Syria would have long ago retaken the Golan Heights, which Israel seized in the 1967 war.
For those not keeping score at home – Israel and Syria have been fighting a cold war in Lebanon since the 1970s.
1975
The spark that ignited the civil war in Lebanon occurred in Beirut on April 13, 1975, when gunmen killed four Phalangists during an attempt on Pierre Jumayyil’s life. Perhaps believing the assassins to have been Palestinian, the Phalangists retaliated later that day by attacking a bus carrying Palestinian passengers across a Christian neighborhood, killing about twenty-six of the occupants. The next day fighting erupted in earnest, with Phalangists pitted against Palestinian militiamen (thought by some observers to be from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine). The confessional layout of Beirut’s various quarters facilitated random killing. Most Beirutis stayed inside their homes during these early days of battle, and few imagined that the street fighting they were witnessing was the beginning of a war that was to devastate their city and divide the country. from global security.
1982
when the u.s. sent marines into lebanon, israel allegedly allowed a terrorist car-bombing of a hotel being used to house special VIPs and military personnel. president reagan promptly cut and ran.
The immediate trigger for Israel’s operation into Lebanon was the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London on June 3, 1982. The next day, Israeli jets attacked PLO targets in Lebanon and the PLO responded with rocket and artillery barrages into northern Israel. The Israeli cabinet met to approve sending ground troops into Lebanon. Defense minister Ariel Sharon briefed the cabinet on “Operation Peace for Galilee” a plan for a limited incursion of twenty-five miles into Lebanon to wipe out PLO positions in southern Lebanon and thus safeguard Israel’s population in northern Israel. The cabinet, including the opposition Labor Party, supported the plan for a limited operation.
Mr. Sharon and Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan, however, had a wider-reaching grand plan beyond that of destroying the PLO’s military power in southern Lebanon and the creation of a security zone there. They envisioned completely eradicating the PLO’s military, political and economic hold over Lebanon, evicting Syrian forces from Lebanon, and facilitating the creation of a Christian-dominated Lebanon which would sign a peace treaty with Israel. The Lebanese presidential election was scheduled for August 23, 1982. Sharon discussed the Israeli plan with Christian Phalangist leader Bashir Gemayel, who apparently supported it and agreed to help rout the PLO from Beirut. Counting on Phalangist assistance, Sharon and Eitan ordered Israeli troops to advance as far as Beirut. see the lebanon war, from the adl
By using NSA intelligence to set an invisible tripwire, the Bush administration is laying the condition for regional conflagration with untold consequences — from Pakistan to Afghanistan, from Iraq to Israel. Secretly devising a scheme that might thrust Israel into a ring of fire cannot be construed as a blunder. It is a deliberate, calculated and methodical plot. ”
But all that’s proving to not be enough, with France and the United Kingdom declaring that they are losing patience. French President Francois Hollande at the EU leaders’ conference Thursday called for an end to the arms embargo against Syria so European countries could provide weapons to fanatical Islamic terrorists.
Hollande justified the need to change policy course, “Because this drama has been going on for two years and the number of victims is growing every day.”
He was unclear as to how providing MORE weapons to terrorists will create FEWER victims.
Hollande and British Prime Minister David Cameron argued that the arms embargo was working in favor of Assad’s regime as Russia and Iran continue to supply government forces with arms used against the invaders from Iraq, Libya, and Egypt.
An analyst says if the EU arms embargo is lifted on Syria, an influx of weapons would fall into the hands of al-Qaeda and this is what Britain and France are pushing for.
In the background of this France has called on the EU to lift an arms embargo on Syria to assist armed foreign-backed insurgents attacking the government forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the infrastructure of Syria and even civilians in order to topple the government and turn the country into a failed state. Like France, Britain is also pushing for lifting the embargo; however several EU countries disagree saying more arms would escalate the conflict and it is already in dire condition. from pressTV, Al-Qaeda front desperately waiting for EU weapons : Michael Maloof
some of the above was directly copied, yet drasticly altered by rob los ricos from Deutsche Welle. their on-message wall of bullshit was too laughable too leave unaltered.
u.s. president barrack obama will be remembered as a mass murderer.
his campaign of raining death from the sky on innocent civilians around the islamic world through his authorization of drone strikes has lead to more civilian deaths than terrorist car bombings, or random shootings by lone gunmen.
some estimates claim that obama’s cowardly attacks have only been 2 percent effective, meaning that 98 percent of the people he has had murdered were passers-by and others who happened to be in the area of the strike. imagine if you will, that obama had knowledge of the shooter in the clackamas town center, and just happened to have a drone within striking distance. a hellfire missile strike on the crowded food court of a shopping mall would have killed dozens of innocent people, along with the shooter. AND – it would have been considered a success, the media bleating about how he is keeping us safe from terrorists.
others are not so kind in their assessment of the drone wars. some claim that few of the strikes have actually killed their intended target. with a kill rate of only 2 percent to begin with, obama’s drone war can only be called what it is – a randomized campaign of terror.
imagine what it must be like to live in a land where you can never consider yourself safe from random death. where you nervously keep a watch on the sky, and the sound of a prop-driven aircraft makes children squeal with fear.
and what will our future look like, now that the united states has established that it is perfectly acceptable to use unmanned drones to strike anywhere in the wolrd, so long as there is some sort of pretext used to justify it. drones are cheap and easy to make, easy to operate from a far-distant bunker or ship or another aircraft. sooner or later, there will be drones in our own skies. and not just domestic ones, but foreign as well. and terrorists will get them at some point, too.
let’s face it – the whole world has become the battleground against a word. terrorism. and who is this war directed against? everyone. anyone. anywhere.
The conversation about American-deployed drone aircraft often centers around one perception: Nobody talks about drones. And when they do, it rarely goes anywhere. When a lone question on the American use of the unmanned assassination aircrafts in counterterrorism popped up in a presidential debate this fall, both Romney and Obama agreed not to disagree about the program. Next question, please.
NYU grad student Josh Begley is behind two of the more successful attempts to insert the drone debate into media coverage: an app called Drone+, banned by Apple, which would alert users each time the U.S. carries out a drone strike, and include the death toll. This week, Begley fired up @dronestream, a Twitter timeline of every documented U.S. drone strike from 2002-2012.
NYU student Josh Begley is tweeting every reported U.S. drone strike since 2002, and the feed highlights a disturbing tactic employed by the U.S. that is widely considered a war crime.
Known as the “double tap,” the tactic involves bombing a target multiple times in relatively quick succession, meaning that the second strike often hits first responders.
A 2007 report by the Homeland Security Institute called double taps a “favorite tactic of Hamas” and the FBI considers it a tactic employed by terrorists.
UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings Christof Heyns said that if there are “secondary drone strikes on rescuers who are helping (the injured) after an initial drone attack, those further attacks are a war crime.”
The U.S. refuses to discuss the merits of its overtly covert drone program, but the reports featured on @dronestream clearly document that U.S. hellfire missiles have intentionally targeted funerals and civilian rescuers.
Jun 18, 2009: 2 drone missiles killed 1 person. When rescuers rushed to the scene, 2 more struck, killing 8 (Pakistan) nytimes.com/2009/06/19/wor…
And that’s only a 10-month window in Pakistan. It has happened in Afghanistan as well, and the first instance of “explicit intelligence posthumously proving” that an innocent civilian had been killed happened in Yemen.
In September the NYU and Stanford law schools released a report detailing how double taps by U.S. drones affect the Pakistani population, and noted that ”high-level” militants killed only accounted for two percent of U.S. drone strike casualties.
Dronestagram: Why Documenting The Horrors of Drone Attacks Is So Important
It’s hard to imagine the fear felt by families living in the North-West region of Pakistan, where unmanned drones hover 24 hours a day, but with Dronestagram, we can bring that grim reality a little bit closer to home…
In 2012, America has launched more than one drone strike per day against targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia: places as far away, in many respects, as it is possible to be from Newtown, Connecticut. They’re countries that rarely come up in conversation, and seldom make their way into our thoughts. Which is probably why we don’t feel the same sense of sadness, day-to-day, at the loss of innocent life that those drone strikes bring about.
Stanford International Human Rights & Conflict Resolution Clinic
Much of the public debate about drone strikes in Pakistan has focused narrowly on whether strikes are ‘doing their job’—i.e., whether the majority of those killed are “militants.”[1] That framing, however, fails to take account of the people on the ground who live with the daily presence of lethal drones in their skies and with the constant threat of drone strikes in their communities. Numerous other reports have highlighted the disastrous impacts of Taliban and other armed actor operations in Pakistan.[2] Those impacts must also factor into the formulation of governance and military policy in Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). This report, however, aims to draw attention to a critical gap in understanding, specifically about life under drones and the socio-economic impacts of drone strikes on civilians in North Waziristan. Available evidence suggests that these impacts are significant, and challenges the prevailing US government and media narrative that portrays drones as pinpoint precision weapons with limited collateral impact. It is crucial that broader civilian impacts and the voices of those affected be given due weight in US debates about drones.
The most direct impacts of strikes, in addition to injuries and killings, include property damage, and often severe economic hardship and emotional trauma for injured victims and surviving family members. Importantly, those interviewed for this report also described how the presence of drones and capacity of the US to strike anywhere at any time led to constant and severe fear, anxiety, and stress, especially when taken together with the inability of those on the ground to ensure their own safety. Further, those interviewed stated that the fear of strikes undermines people’s sense of safety to such an extent that it has at times affected their willingness to engage in a wide variety of activities, including social gatherings, educational and economic opportunities, funerals, and that fear has also undermined general community trust. In addition, the US practice of striking one area multiple times, and its record of killing first responders, makes both community members and humanitarian workers afraid to assist injured victims.
‘Every Person Is Afraid of the Drones’: The Strikes’ Effect on Life in Pakistan
Interviews with the civilians terrorized daily by American foreign policy
The scarce attention given to the Obama Administration’s drone war in tribal areas of Pakistan is mostly spent on the dead. News articles tally the number of “militants” killed. Occasionally dead innocents break into the headlines as statistics. “Drone Strike Kills 13 Civilians.” There are never names.
A new report published by the international law clinics at New York University and Stanford grapples with dead innocents. But it also highlights interviews with people living through the drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas. They are human reminders that America’s drone campaign affects not only those hit by missiles, whether rightly or wrongly, but also innocents all around them.
pakistan: Controversy has surrounded the drone strikes – which have amounted to over 30 this year – as local residens and ts and officials have blamed them for killing innocent civilians, motivating young men to join the Taliban. Details about the casualties are usually not provided. The latest strike in South Waziristan marks the sixth this month alone, while North Waziristan, which was heavily targeted in 2010, has had one drone strike this month.drone strike
Our drones are attacking the community where they live.
The American public is told by the Obama Administration that drone strikes are surgical. Precise. That they “limit collateral damage.” And that civilian casualties are rare. Is that the truth?
Does it adequately capture reality?
Ponder a few interviews from the report — decide for yourself.
All these stories take place in Northwest Pakistan’s tribal areas, a remote part of the country filled with poor people. Most are guilty of nothing at all. A minority are militants. Even among them, almost none poses an imminent threat to the American homeland. Just traveling to the nearest major city requires a journey of hours or even days spent traversing multiple military checkpoints. There are Taliban, some of whom pose a threat to U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and other bad guys fighting the dodgy Pakistani government. Some locals sympathize with the bad guys. Many others want no more to do with them than you want to do with the nearest street gang to your house. Why haven’t you eradicated it? That’s why they haven’t gotten rid of the militants.
An interview with a typical mother is as good a place to begin as any. She described what happens when her family hears an American drone hovering somewhere overhead. “Because of the terror, we shut our eyes, hide under our scarves, put our hands over our ears,” she told her interviewer. Asked why, she said, “Why would we not be scared?” Said a father of three from a different family unit, “drones are always on my mind. It makes it difficult to sleep. They are like a mosquito. Even when you don’t see them, you can hear them, you know they are there.”
Said a day laborer, “I can’t sleep at night because when the drones are there … I hear them making that sound, that noise. The drones are all over my brain, I can’t sleep. When I hear the drones making that drone sound, I just turn on the light and sit there looking at the light. Whenever the drones are hovering over us, it just makes me so scared.” Added a politician, people “often complain that they wake up in the middle of the night screaming because they are hallucinating about drones.”
Would you have nightmares if they flew over your house?
“When children hear the drones, they get really scared, and they can hear them all the time so they’re always fearful that the drone is going to attack them,” an unidentified man reported. “Because of the noise, we’re psychologically disturbed, women, men, and children. … Twenty-four hours, a person is in stress and there is pain in his head.” A journalists who photographs drone strike craters agreed that children are perpetually terrorized. “If you bang a door,” Noor Behram said, “they’ll scream and drop like something bad is going to happen.”
over the past year, the u.s. has been subjected to a number of attacks by lone gunmen.
and immediately thereafter, the panicked sheeple begin to bleat for protection. almost always, this takes the form of more gun control legislation.
the biggest argument against gun control is that laws against owning certain types of weapons will ensure that only the police and criminals will have them. and only a fool would trust the police in this country with their lives.
According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting statistics, between January 2010 and September 2010, 31 kops per 100,000 committed homicide and 73 committed sexual assault. In comparison to 100,000 of the general population (this includes blacks, whites, Mexicans, gang members etc) only 5 citizens committed homicide and 29 committed sexual assaults.
I’m still amazed at the number of Americans (mostly the older) who still trust persons wearing a uniform of authority. The older demographic was brainwashed so well they do whatever their preachers, police officers, politicians or judges tell them to do. It’s this “authority worshiping” and blind obedience that led America to its current police state that houses 25% of the world’s prisoners but contains only 5% of the world’s population.
and, of course, there is the little-mentioned fact that while taking away american’s rights to self-defense, the federal government has been arming mexican drug cartels for years. this has led to an escalation of over-the-top violence which is spilling over the u.s. border and into american cities. more than 60,000 people have died in the violence in mexico so far, and the obama administration’s biggest contribution to the war on drugs scam (other than the weapons – thousands of assault rifles, pistols, machine guns, sniper rifles, and ammunition too) has been to go after legal medical marijuana users and providers.
but while the media – as always – repeats the same old song-and-dance routine to prevent even the possibility of any meaningful discussions of just about anything of significance, there is the always over-looked but obvious point that these lone gunmen are CRAZY!
not just crazy in the sense that they are barking mad and dangerous, but crazy as in diagnosed and under the care of psychiactric doctors. which means that they are under the influence of prescription drugs.
School Shooters Under the Influence of Psychiatric Drugs
At least fourteen recent school shootings were committed by those taking or withdrawing from psychiatric drugs. There have been 109 wounded and 58 killed.
Of these 14, seven were seeing either a psychiatrist (5 of them) or psychologist (2 of them). It is not known whether or not the other half were seeing a psychiatrist, as it has not been published.
Huntsville, Alabama – February 5, 2012: 15-year-old Hammad Memon shot and killed another Discover Middle School student Todd Brown. Memon had a history for being treated for ADHD and depression. He was taking the antidepressant Zoloft and “other drugs for the conditions.” He had been seeing a psychiatrist and psychologist.
Kauhajoki, Finland – September 23, 2008: 22-year-old culinary student Matti Saari shot and killed 9 students and a teacher, and wounded another student, before killing himself. Saari was taking an SSRI and a benzodiazapine. He was also seeing a psychologist.
Dekalb, Illinois – February 14, 2008: 27-year-old Steven Kazmierczak shot and killed five people and wounded 21 others before killing himself in a Northern Illinois University auditorium. According to his girlfriend, he had recently been taking Prozac, Xanax and Ambien. Toxicology results showed that he still had trace amount of Xanax in his system. He had been seeing a psychiatrist.
Jokela, Finland – November 7, 2007: 18-year-old Finnish gunman Pekka-Eric Auvinen had been taking antidepressants before he killed eight people and wounded a dozen more at Jokela High School in southern Finland, then committed suicide.
Cleveland, Ohio – October 10, 2007: 14-year-old Asa Coon stormed through his school with a gun in each hand, shooting and wounding four before taking his own life. Court records show Coon had been placed on the antidepressant Trazodone.
Red Lake, Minnesota – March 2005: 16-year-old Jeff Weise, on Prozac, shot and killed his grandparents, then went to his school on the Red Lake Indian Reservation where he shot dead 7 students and a teacher, and wounded 7 before killing himself.
Greenbush, New York – February 2004: 16-year-old Jon Romano strolled into his high school in east Greenbush and opened fire with a shotgun. Special education teacher Michael Bennett was hit in the leg. Romano had been taking “medication for depression”. He had previously seen a psychiatrist.
Wahluke, Washington – April 10, 2001: Sixteen-year-old Cory Baadsgaard took a rifle to his high school and held 23 classmates and a teacher hostage. He had been taking the antidepressant Effexor.
El Cajon, California – March 22, 2001: 18-year-old Jason Hoffman, on the antidepressants Celexa and Effexor, opened fire on his classmates, wounding three students and two teachers at Granite Hills High School. He had been seeing a psychiatrist before the shooting.
Williamsport, Pennsylvania – March 7, 2001: 14-year-old Elizabeth Bush was taking the antidepressant Prozac when she shot at fellow students, wounding one.
Conyers, Georgia – May 20, 1999: 15-year-old T.J. Solomon was being treated with the stimulant Ritalin when he opened fire on and wounded six of his classmates.
Columbine, Colorado – April 20, 1999: 18-year-old Eric Harris and his accomplice, Dylan Klebold, killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded 26 others before killing themselves. Harris was on the antidepressant Luvox. Klebold’s medical records remain sealed. Both shooters had been in anger-management classes and had undergone counseling. Harris had been seeing a psychiatrist before the shooting.
Notus, Idaho – April 16, 1999: 15-year-old Shawn Cooper fired two shotgun rounds in his school, narrowly missing students. He was taking a prescribed SSRI antidepressant and Ritalin.
Springfield, Oregon – May 21, 1998: 15-year-old Kip Kinkel murdered his parents and then proceeded to school where he opened fire on students in the cafeteria, killing two and wounding 25. Kinkel had been taking the antidepressant Prozac. Kinkel had been attending “anger control classes” and was under the care of a psychologist.
The psychiatric/pharmaceutical industry spends billions of dollars a year in order to convince the public, legislators and the press that psychiatric disorders such as Bi-Polar Disorder, Depression, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD/ADHD), Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, etc., are medical diseases on par with verifiable medical conditions such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease. This is simply a way to maintain their hold on a $84 billion dollar-a-year psychiatric drug industry that is based on marketing and not science. Unlike real medical disease, there are no scientific tests to verify the medical existence of any psychiatric disorder. Despite decades of trying to prove mental disorders are biological brain conditions, due to chemical imbalances or genetic factors, psychiatry has failed to prove even one of their hundreds of so-called mental disorders is due to a faulty or “chemically imbalanced” brain. To counter this obvious flaw in their push to medicalize behaviors, the psychiatric industry will claim that there are certain medical conditions that do not have a verifiable test so this justifies the fact that there aren’t medical tests for mental illness. This is frankly a lame argument; Whereas there may be rare medical conditions that do not have a verifiable medical test, there are virtually no psychiatric disorders that can be verified medically as a physical abnormality/disease. This is not to say people don’t get depressed, sad, troubled, anxious, nervous or even sometimes act psychotic. The question then is simple—is this due to some mental “disease” that can be verified as one would verify cancer or a real medical condition? And the answer is no. To find out more about psychiatric diagnoses, click here
people frequently ask if CCHR is of the opinion that no one should ever take psychiatric drugs, but this website is not dedicated to opinion. It is dedicated to providing information that a multi-billion dollar psycho/pharmaceutical industry does not want people to have. For this reason CCHR created the psychiatric drug side effects search engine which consists solely of international drug regulatory warnings, published studies and adverse reactions to psychiatric drugs filed with the U.S. FDA. Regarding psychiatric diagnosis, it is not a matter of opinion about whether mental disorders are “real” but whether there are valid medical tests to prove mental disorders are medical conditions requiring the administration of mind-altering and potentially lethal psychiatric drugs—and the answer is no.
Obamacare architect leaves White House for pharmaceutical industry job
Few people embody the corporatist revolving door greasing Washington as purely as Elizabeth Fowler
It’s difficult to find someone who embodies the sleazy, anti-democratic, corporatist revolving door that greases Washington as shamelessly and purely as Liz Fowler.
The pharmaceutical giant that just hired Fowler actively supported the passage of Obamacare through its membership in the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) lobby. Indeed, PhRMA was one of the most aggressive supporters – and most lavish beneficiaries – of the health care bill drafted by Fowler. Mother Jones’ James Ridgeway proclaimed “Big Pharma” the “big winner” in the health care bill. And now, Fowler will receive ample rewards from that same industry as she peddles her influence in government and exploits her experience with its inner workings to work on that industry’s behalf, all of which has been made perfectly legal by the same insular, Versailles-like Washington culture that so lavishly benefits from all of this.
Let’s look at the bigger picture, mainly the connection between suicidial shooters and suicidal soldiers.
So what is the connection between gun laws, mass shootings and soldier suicides? Big Pharma. A look at the big picture is simply the PROGRAM of mind control at work with in our society. Engineered, orchestrated, implemented decades ago, and we are now seeing the results. Mass shootings weekly.
Mind control experimentation in lab settings have been proven and admittedly engaged in by our government. Stuff that makes the Nazi look tame. Clinton apologized for it publicly even, just watch the clip below.
They have taken this experimentation from the lab to the real world.
Essentially the trick to create psychotic breaks is a combination of drugs, video flicker rates and senseless violence. Violent video games, and war combat provide the violence, Big Pharma provides the overly prescribed SRRI hallucinogenic drugs and – Bam! – you have a psychotic break.
Drug, Kill, Suicide is the program.
People that subject themselves to this combination, whether a solider or a video gamer, carry out the program of getting on prescribed drugs, killing virtual and real innocents, then turning the gun to kill themselves.
A good programed victim executes himself every time. Sometimes they don’t and you end up with bizarre court cases like the Batman Killer. Bizzarro world of psychiatric malpractice if not outright manipulation of the patient.
Absorb this information, and when you turn on the news and hear the debate being manipulated by the media and political establishment around the gun issue without noting the brand name drugs said suspect was on, you are being mislead and brainwashed yourself.
You will never hear about the drugs because the advert right after the news blitz is none other than a Big Pharma anti-psychotic drug
Drugging our Troops—The Creation of Psychopharmaceutical’s Multi-Billion Dollar Market – CCHR releases latest article in its Military Mental Health investigation
As has been well documented in the first two parts of this investigative series, the military is at a mental health crossroad. Soldiers are dying by suicide and other sudden unexplained deaths at record—even epidemic—levels; an epidemic that seems to have been spawned by the nearly $2 billion Department of Defense (DoD) and Veterans Affairs (VA) have spent on antipsychotics and anti-anxiety drugs over the past decade, despite international drug regulatory warnings of mania, psychosis, suicide and death. Even according to DoD’s own policy, ‘Guidance for Deployment-Limiting Psychiatric Conditions and Medications,’ antipsychotics like Seroquel are disqualifiers for deployment.
Given that under the advice of mental health professionals suicides and other unexplained deaths still are increasing, why does command continue to listen to what, for all practical purposes, appears to have miserably failed? Despite the fact that since 2009, mental health staffing has doubled in Afghanistan and a mental health survey of deployed troops found that stress levels among Service members in Afghanistan nearly tripled between 2005 and 2010.
To understand why command appears to be content with the nation’s troops being diagnosed as mentally ill and then, like freshmen at a frat keg party, plied with multiples of psychiatric drugs, one first must understand the psychiatric community’s ever-increasing interest in, and role, among the military ranks.”
In the third installment of a four-part series, O’Meara details the history behind posttraumatic stress disorder and examines the statistics relating to the diagnosing of PTSD that is at epidemic numbers.
see the rest of the article and the others in this series, from truth alliance
THIS IS A TYPICAL MASS MEDIA DISINFORMATION STORY ABOUT LONE GUNMEN:
Studies of “rampage violence” have only been around for about a decade, but researchers are still working hard to understand and prevent it. Here’s the current state of the field.
It’s only been about a decade since psychological research has begun looking at what’s increasingly being called “rampage violence,” of the type that led to this morning’s elementary school shooting in Connecticut as well as this year’s shooting in Aurora, CO, and so many more. They are all separate events, but the psychological community has begun to attempt to analyze them as a whole to see if we can better understand why these “rampages” happen–and if there’s a way to prevent them.
Journalist’s Resource rounds up a whole bunch of these studies, which attempt to nail down such specifics as the motivation, the aesthetics, the specific classification, and the attitudes of the shooters in these events. “The ‘Pseudocommando’ Mass Murderer: Part I, The Psychology of Revenge and Obliteration,” for example, identifies a type of murderer “who kills in public during the daytime, plans his offense well in advance, and comes prepared with a powerful arsenal of weapons. He has no escape planned and expects to be killed during the incident.”
A few other studies try to predict the dangerousness of various people perceived to be at risk of displaying this kind of behavior, a few look at the post-traumatic effects on those who have survived or known victims in shootings, and there are also a couple oddballs. One compares support for gun rights with support for gay marriage, and one takes an aggregated look at studies comparing violence with videogames.
And of course you have to take these with a grain of salt; it’s a new area of study, and one which requires a lot of guesswork and shaky connections. But examining these events from a psychological perspective could hopefully give us clues in the future that could help stop them from occurring.
as expected, the u.s. has already begun to denounce the terrorists organizations it has embedded into the syrian conflict. by beginning to shift the focus of the conflict away from regime change and towards developing the latest stage for the “war on terror” spectacle, the u.s. will be able to take charge of the operation from behind the scenes, by claiming “state secrets” for the unwinnable “war” against terrorism.
one has to wonder at this point how long israel will tolerate a growing u.s. presence along their frontier, and allow NATO to establish bases there. expect some surprizes in this conflict. if there are chemical weapons attacks, they might well come from israel. if there is a nuclear strike, it will definitely come from israel – either there in syria or in iran. but it will be blamed on ‘terrorists.”
this picture shows a gathering of al qeada forces, standing behind a syrian flag, with two al qeada flags behind them.
most likely, the reason this operation is happening now is to provide the israeli air force a fly-over zone for future attacks against iran, and on into central asia in the future, as the israeli state continues to ethnically cleanse their lands and the bordering areas. israel has pursued a program of ethnic cleansing since it’s inception, in order to overwhelm their neighbors with refugees. this destablizes the neighboring country, causing internal conflict which the israelis then take advantage of by invading their neighbors and expanding its own borders – which the state of israel still refuses to define. after the NATO/US invasion of syria, do not expect there to be any relief for the syrian people. their future will become just like it is for present-day palestinians, the lebanese, the iraqis and the people of aghanistan. if the u.s. is unable to successfully squash the egyptian people’s ongoing uprising and install an islamic dictatorship there, very likely they will be subject to becoming just another theatre of operations for the “war on terror.”
in keeping with the bush crime family’s and u.s. foreign policy objectives since the reagan era, once a terrorist group that the u.s. has funded, armed, and trained is no longer needed, they are then either given the bum’s rush out the door, or they are exterminated – or both. like they did with chaing kai-shek in china, manuel noriega in panama, and the mujahideen in afghanistan, saddam hussein in iraq, and gaddafi in libya. just because most americans are not aware of how their government and economy functions, that doesn’t mean people around the world don’t notice.
with NATO primed and ready to support a u.s. invasion of syria, both the u.k. and france have already recognized their terrorist networks there as the “legitimate” government of syria. however, there is a sore point to this that may hold up the invasion for a minute – the day prior to the official status given the murdering thugs NATO has imported into syria – mostly from iraq – and armed with weapons smuggled out of libya, the u.s. blacklisted one of the primary factions of the “rebels,” the al-nusra front in syria.
of course, it impossible for us to know from this distance what is actually happening in syria, especially with the state-run media controlling information, and with their internet shut down. still, the al-nusra front in syria is seen to be so vital to the terrorists and their plans for syria’s future that they are demanding the group be removed from the list of terrorist groups by the u.s.
no matter what happens from this point on, the goal has already been accomplished. syria has slipped into a violent, chaotic quagmire that it will not recover from for generations to come. just as planned. if i were living in jordan, i’d be making plans to immigrate soon – they are likely next on the list for regime change, after iran. can’t be helped, as they border the borderless israel.
THE DETAILS:
U.S. blacklists al-Nusra Front fighters in Syria
By Saad Abedine and Laura Smith-Spark, CNN
The U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions Tuesday on leaders of the jihadist al-Nusra Front in Syria, hours after the State Department moved to blacklist the rebel group as a foreign terror organization linked to al Qaeda in Iraq.The Treasury also sanctioned two armed militia groups that operate under the control of the Syrian government, Jaysh al-Sha’bi and Shabiha, it said.
Syrian opposition groups have voiced their opposition to the U.S. move against the rebel fighters, suggesting that they are being targeted because they oppose a new anti-government coalition.
this pic from the alexander higgins website, which has mysteriously disappeared…
The move came the same day President Barack Obama recognized the leading Syrian opposition coalition as the legitimate representative of the country’s people.
“We’ve made a decision that the Syrian Opposition Coalition is now inclusive enough, is reflective and representative enough of the Syrian population that we consider them the legitimate representative of the Syrian people in opposition to the Assad regime,” he told ABC’s Barbara Walters.
In recent months, the radical Islamist al-Nusra Front has emerged as one of the most effective groups in the Syrian resistance, drawing on foreign fighters with combat experience in Iraq and elsewhere. (i just want to point out that the “foreign fighters with combat experience” are terrorists who have been killing american and NATO soldiers in afghanistan and iraq.)
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland confirmed Tuesday that the al-Nusra Front had been added to the list of aliases for al Qaeda in Iraq, already designated a foreign terrorist organization.
She said the group had claimed nearly 600 attacks in several cities in the past year, including suicide bombings, and was responsible for the deaths of “numerous innocent Syrians.”
Al-Nusra “has sought to portray itself as part of the legitimate Syrian opposition while it is, in fact, an attempt by AQI to hijack the struggles of the Syrian people for its own malign purposes,” she said.
Syrian terrorists defy US and pledge allegiance to jihadi group
Rebel groups across Syria are defying the United States by pledging their allegiance to a group that Washington will designate today a terrorist organization for its alleged links to al-Qaeda.
A total of 29 opposition groups, including fighting “brigades” and civilian committees, have signed a petition calling for mass demonstrations in support of Jabhat al-Nusra, an Islamist group which the White House believes is an offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The petition is promoting the slogan “No to American intervention, for we are all Jabhat al-Nusra” and urges supporters to “raise the Jabhat al-Nusra flag” as a “thank you”.
“These are the men for the people of Syria, these are the heroes who belong to us in religion, in blood and in revolution,” read a statement widely circulated on Syrian opposition Facebook pages.
Jabhat al-Nusra made its mark early this year with a string of suicide bombings, a tactic it continues to use. Aided by fighters from abroad and Syrians who have returned from other wars in the Middle East, it has also led battles for a number of military bases and has secured a string of recent victories. Along with allied jihadist groups, it captured the Sheikh Suleiman base west of Aleppo yesterday morning, and has also dented the infrastructure of the regime in the Syrian capital, Damascus.
Although Jabhat al-Nusra remains separate from the Free Syrian Army, many FSA leaders now recognise its strength and order their forces to cooperate with it.
NATO and US puppet regimes recognize Syrian opposition as legit government
Western powers and Arab nations have recognized Syria’s new opposition coalition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people at talks in Morocco, according to a draft declaration. But feelings about arming the rebels are mixed.
“For now we have decided not to move on this,” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said. “We shall see in the coming months.”
Many Western powers are reticent about sending weapons because they believe that some rebel groups, notably the al-Nusra Front, have links to al Qaeda and will seek to impose Islamic law if they succeed in toppling Assad.
Fabius, whose government was the first to recognize the Syrian opposition, welcomed the creation of a military council aimed at helping to coordinate rebel factions’ military operations.
But suspicions regarding al-Nusra Front were a “problem” which meant that France and Britain had no intention immediately of reviewing a three-month extension of an arms embargo on Syria, he said.
“For now we are not moving,” he said. “There is no question of putting jihadis into this mechanism and this will be discussed more and more now that Nusra has been added to the list.”
Fabius said the meeting had exposed differences of opinion on how the al-Nusra Front should be treated, with Arab states asking why a group which has proved its effectiveness against Assad’s forces had been sidelined.
The leader of Syria’s opposition coalition urged the United States to review its designation of the group, saying that religion was a legitimate motivation for rebel fighters.
Britain’s military chiefs have drawn up contingency plans to provide Syrian rebels with maritime, and possibly air, power in response to a request from David Cameron, senior defence sources said on Monday night.
However, they said the UK would act only if the US did so and made it clear that British chiefs of staffs are seriously worried about the consequences of intervening in the Syrian crisis.
Military sources have privately been expressing growing concern about pressure from Downing Street.
Officials compared it to the pressure applied by Cameron before Britain and France took the lead in the campaign of air strikes on Libya early last year.
Options have been sent by defence chiefs to No 10, sources told the Guardian on Monday night. However, one source added: “We are a long way from doing anything.” An official said: “The US is leading the way. We are not there yet.”
At Cameron’s request, General Sir David Richards, chief of the defence staff, chaired a meeting in London a month ago, sources said. In attendance were senior military figures from France, the US, Turkey, Jordan and the Gulf states of Qatar and the UAE who, with Saudi Arabia, have been in the vanguard of those supporting the Syrian rebels.
Barack Obama says US will recognise opposition coalition as the de facto administration of Syrian regions under rebel control
Russia and US in Geneva talks over future of Syria
But foreign minister says ‘brainstorming session’ with UN envoy does not signal Moscow’s support for Assad is waning
Israel considering military attack on Syria
The pretext is being used to justify a possible military assault on Syria even if it means triggering a broader conflict across the region.
Israel is apparently laying the groundwork for a possible military attack on Syria by alleging that Damascus could be using chemical weapons against the Syrian people.
1000s of Jordanian protesters hold demo, call for reforms
Jordanians have been holding demonstrations since January 2011, demanding political reforms, including the election of the prime minister by popular vote and an end to corruption.
Since the demonstrations began, Jordanian ruler King Abdullah II has sacked three prime ministers to appease the protesters.
you’d think that the obama administration’s continuation and escalation of his predecessor’s most insane policies – secret detentions at secret prisons, selling weapons to mexican drug cartels, mass murder through drone attacks in africa and asia, trillions of dollars printed just to be dumped into the accounts of banksters – would have convinced even the most deluded ninny that there is no clear difference between the major parties.
just to drive the point home, now – less than a week after obomber’s re-selection as chief gangster of the red, white, and blue gulag america – his administration is feverishly working to keep the public’s attention firmly pointed away from the fact that the cia has just been caught running cocaine to fund its covert operations. though the operation in question was not directly implicated in the benghazi gun-running affair, one has to wonder about the source of all the money the cia was using to buy up libyan weapons to ship to its proxy, terrorist armies in syria and lebanon.
if an operation by the cia to sell cocaine to fund terrorist groups rings any bells in your old, gray head, it’s because this has happened before, when demigod ex-president, ronald wilson reagan used funds raised by selling cocaine smuggled into the u.s. to fund various terrorist groups around the world – from the mujahideen in afghanistan (who we are now fighting in order to protect the opium fields), to jonas savimbi’s unita in angola, the khmer rouge in cambodia, and the contras in central america.
in reagan’s iran-contra fiasco, the cia flew cocaine out of south america, through secret airbases in central america, and on into the u.s., either through border crossings in california and texas, or secret airfields in arkansas. at least two of ex-president g.h.w. bush’s sons are rumored to have been pilots involved in the operation. covering their asses was the motivation to invade panama and kidnap president manuel noriega, once a trusted partner in the smuggling ring. in order to market the cocaine to people in impoverished communities, the cia initiated the 1980′s crack cocaine epidemic.
more on iran-contra:
The Contras, Cocaine, and Covert Operations
An August, 1996, series in the San Jose Mercury News by reporter Gary Webb linked the origins of crack cocaine in California to the contras, a guerrilla force backed by the Reagan administration that attacked Nicaragua’s Sandinista government during the 1980s. Webb’s series, “The Dark Alliance,” has been the subject of intense media debate, and has focused attention on a foreign policy drug scandal that leaves many questions unanswered.This electronic briefing book is compiled from declassified documents obtained by the National Security Archive, including the notebooks kept by NSC aide and Iran-contra figure Oliver North, electronic mail messages written by high-ranking Reagan administration officials, memos detailing the contra war effort, and FBI and DEA reports. The documents demonstrate official knowledge of drug operations, and collaboration with and protection of known drug traffickers. Court and hearing transcripts are also included.
The skullduggery began to unravel in the fall of 1986. On October 5, 1986, a C-123 aircraft ferrying supplies to the contras was shot down by the Sandinistas, and an American named Eugene Hasenfus was captured. He told the Nicaraguans that his flight was part of a CIA-approved operation. Days later, Reagan said of the Hasenfus operation, “There was no government connection with that at all.” He was not telling the truth. Shortly after that, Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams testified in Congress that the administration had arranged for no foreign donations–”not a dime”–to the contras–even though he had arranged for a $10 million contribution to the rebels from the Sultan of Brunei. -
oddly enough, the namby-pamby coward-ass liberals at the NATION have chosen to ignore the drug-running operation, as it appears to implicate at least three presidents of the u.s., two of whom are related. much of reagan’s secret war on dissenters within the u.s. remains under-reported. nonetheless, the article from the NATION gives a good look into some of the major international players in u.s. foreign policy, including thinktanks. many of them continue to resurface now and then, despite their criminal background during the reagan bush regime. also – at least one investigative journalist who wrote about this in the 90′s was blacklisted by the u.s. media and died under very sad circumstances.
Gary Webb was an award-winning San Jose Mercury News journalist that was run out of his job and blacklisted from the industry for daring to report what he found out. After losing his career and his family, he was found dead in a welfare hotel room.
the benghazi gun-running operation
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?
Petraeus mistress reveals real motive behind Benghazi attack (VIDEO)
Two months after the storming of an US consulate in Benghazi, questions remain largely unanswered about both how and why insurgents entered the facility on September 11 and executed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. The discussion became a heated issue on the campaign trail leading up to Election Day, and conflicting accounts from the White House, State Department and Congress all led to a mess of confusion that has only further spun out of control following the unexpected stepping down of Petraeus on Friday.
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.
secret prisons have cost the u.s. some support from abroad, as some of the people involved in governments co-operating with america’s black-ops prisons have been removed from power and some may even be prosecuted.
just as the iran-contra scandal included drug-running operations, so does the cia’s latest covert campaign of international regime change. the u.s. has decided that it is high time that it exert – through the executive branch – the right to pick who rules what country, under what kind of regime. sometimes this is done in the name of “national interests,” or it can be undertaken for the flimsiest of reasons, like the bush family’s vanity wars in southwest asia.
however, the american media is spinning the story as a sex scandal to cover up gun-running operations which transferred weapons between syrian and libyan factions of various arab and persian terrorist groups, including our opponent in afghanistan and yemen, al queda.
since when is a gun-running operation seen as a “scandal?” that’s one of the things the cia does. as noted above, there have been many gun-running operations in recent history, particularly in the cold war era. no one in the u.s. has been run out of office because of running weapons to african, south american, asian, and even european terrorists and dictatorships.
Petraeus resigns as CIA director after Ecuadoran
President Correa cites “credible” evidence that the CIA is
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa said denunciations about US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) interference to destabilize his government and hinder his reelection are credible. During a television-broadcast interview with journalist Jorge Gestoso, Correa referred to the denunciations presented by UK ex-Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray and the Chilean journalist Patricio Mery Bell and said they acre credible because there are precedents.
Replying to denigration of those denunciations by the ambassador in this capital, he said: “I trust in Obama’s government. I trust in Hillary Clinton and Ambassador Adam Namm. I believe the government does not know, but it does not mean it is not happening.”
He also said that if a government is carrying out destabilizing operations, it does not mean that country’s ambassador is going to say: yes, we admit what we are doing. He would say those are rumors.
Correa also referred to the denunciation by Chilean journalist Patricio Mary Bell about apparent CIA and DEA operations to bring 300 kilograms of drugs monthly in Chile and financing destabilization of the Ecuadorian government with the excess.
He stated that it was a similar case to the Iran-Contras scandal, by means of which resources from illegal weapon sale to Iran were embezzled to finance the counter-revolution in Nicaragua, to evade the US Congress control.
strange what you can find on the internet…this is from 2003, when i was incarcerated in the oregon state penetentiary…from autonomedia interactivist exchange
This year started on an interesting note. On January 2nd, Oregon Department of Corrections Security Threat Group manager came by to visit. He threatened to send me into exile in Eastern Oregon — far from my daughter in Portland — if I didn’t move out of the cell I shared with Brian McCarvill. Brian is currently suing ODOC over their mailroom policies, which result in the rejection of anarchist literature sent to him. This has been something that has bothered me the past 3 years — I have over 200 mail violations notices concerning letters and publications sent to me here in prison. Their favorite reasons for such “violations” are because the publications are “anarchist-related” or because of “STG symbol” — in this case, a circled “a”, a symbol used internationally for “anarchy”.I support Brian’s lawsuit. Plus he is a valued and trusted friend. We chose not to split up. On January 7th, we received write-ups about “unauthorized activity” and “disobedience of an order”. This had to do with a card writing campaign I’d initiated a month earlier. I’d asked people to send postcards to us with a circled “a” symbol on them, along with the caption — “This is not a gang symbol”.
Two days after receiving the write-up, we were called to a disciplinary hearing. After discussing the issue with me, the hearings officer told me, “I find you guilty of continuing to be involved in the anarchist movement”. Pretty illuminating, as this was not what I was charged with. But it does actually sum up ODOC’s attitude towards me. It has not been easy, but I have attempted to stay involved with events on the outside of these walls. I’ve been incarcerated since the international Reclaim the Streets day of solidarity to oppose the G-8 summit in Cologne, Germany, June 18th 1999. I’ve missed out on the Battle of Seattle, the anti-IMF/WB protests, the protests against both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions and GW Bush’s bloodless coup.
The summary of my hearing contained a few lies and half-truths, designed to make me appear to be a threat to the safety and the security of ODOC facilities, if not the world at large.
The hearings officer noted that I threatened to use my 30 years of organizing skills to “cause trouble” for ODOC. What I actually said was that I’d assured Benny Ward as well as the STG managers here at OSP that I would not use my extensive organizing skills to create trouble for them (i just wanted to do my time and get out intact). And I asked if it would be too much to expect that I be allowed to have my mail? Apparently it is.
The most alarming aspect of this, though, is the fact that ODOC has come to the conclusion that I am a member of the Earth Liberation Front. This despite the fact that I?ve never been arrested for an action by the ELF, nor have I ever been questioned about any actions by the ELF. Indeed, there is no evidence or rumor of evidence that can connect me to the ELF in any way what so ever.
The ELF is a clandestine group whose sole purpose is to carry out acts of sabotage against corporations and research facilities that the ELF considers responsible for despoiling the earth.
As such, it has been listed as a terrorist organization, and is one of the targeted focal points for several Joint Task Force(s) on Terrorism in cities, and stated across the US.
I am a writer and an activist. It has been a deliberate decision on my part not to undertake acts of sabotage, since I lack the skill and knowledge to do so effectively and safely. So far, no one has been hurt or killed by an ELF action.
Despite losing my job in the prison infirmary, being sent to the hole for 120 days and being labeled a “terrorist”, I will continue to write for anarchist and “alternative” publications. I am an enemy of the New World Order. We, the people, shall overthrow the rule of corporate power.
Sì Se Puede!
Rob
(ps – may, 2012; i miss my comrade brian – feel free to write letters of support to him. envelopes must contain a full name and return address):
Brian McCarvill #11037967
Oregon State Penitentiary
2605 State Street
Salem, OR 97310
inviting heads of state to country being decimated by drugwar violence
the next g20 summit - officially billed as a conference of the world’s largest economies, plus the european union – will be held in the los cabos municipality, in the lower tip of baja california, mexico – one of the g20′s members.
how can this happen? this is almost like having the summit in somalia or syria.
mexico; where from coast-to-coast, in every major city, piles of dismembered bodies, sometimes even those of police and military personnel, are only shocking due to the number of corpses – the largest count so far has been 35, in veracruz. in near durango, mass graves with more than 450 human remains were discovered a year ago, and there is currently (may 12, 2012) an on-going battle between cartels - and sometimes the police and military - with losses at iraq-like numbers.
mexico: where the sinaloa cartel has more influence in the daily activity in the capital than the authorities, because they pay better.
however, in this one, little corner of mexico, the only place of its type, peace reigns. not because the authorities are in control of the mountainous area, the tip of the southern baja peninsula. nope: this area is home to the world’s most wanted man, the head el jefe of the sinaloa cartel, Joaquin “el Chapo” Guzmán Loera, who also is listed as a billionaire by forbes magazine, as well as somewhere between the 40th to 55th most powerful man in the world.
he’s eluded capture from his mansions in the punta ballena development (an exclusive, gated community outside of cabo san lucas, on the coast) on three separate occasions since escaping from a mexican maximum-security prison in 2001. the first time was a few months after his escape, then again two years later. his most recent narrow escape was earlier this year. the day after the g20′s mini-summit in february, when the finance ministers and other “sherpas” from the member nations convened there.
so, one has to wonder why the FUCK world leaders want to gather in an area under control of a narcotrafficker? my first guess would be because they need him to bail out a few economies in europe, and maybe pump some life into the american one as well. perhaps it’s also because there is some sort of safe-haven agreement between el chapo and the governments of mexico and the u.s. they keep the violence at a certain distance from one another’s leaders, the governments allow the drug trade to continue at a certain level, and the profits are shared through bribery. everyone wins, except for the minions dying on all sides, innocent people swept up in the violence, journalists and all the people imprisoned for illicit drug use. still, think of all the money being made by arms dealers, law enforcement agencies, prison systems, courts – not to mention the drug trafficking profits.
mexico is both very impoverished and awash in drug money. so much money – particularly in a country where very little of the money form the abundance of natural resources there makes its way into the hands of the population, and instead ends up in the pockets of corrupt politicians, attorneys, police, judges, military and narcotraffickers. former mayors of tijuana and ciudad juarez have been arrested on corruption charges, but released under vague circumstances.
when bribes don’t work, assassination is used to both eliminate troublesome enemies, and to intimidate those who replace them.
just across the sea of cortez, on the mexican mailand, a war is waging as this report is being prepared, which is a sidenote in a longer, several-part series about the drug war raging in mexico and the u.s. government’s role in worsening the crisis by aligning itself with the sinaloa cartel. this is the area where the current drug war era of psychotic violence began in earnest after the killing of el chapo guzman’s son, edgar. starting from his stronghold in culiacán, el chapo pacified the area through a wave of killing that has only intensified and spread since.
in that year alone – 2008 – cartel-related violence was responsible for over 5,300 deaths in mexico. by 2012, the government blamed the cartels for over 12,000 killings.
el chapo’s old rivals, it would seem, were not eliminated, and have recently begun to re-assert themselves in the mountains of durango and sinaloa.
fighting is so intense across the sea from los cabos that a military convoy sent to quell inter-cartel warfare was ambushed and had to withdraw, after allegedly suffering heavy casualties and the loss of a helicopter. they managed to inflict some damage to the cartel’s forces as well, and captured numerous weapons and vehicles in the process – many of them decorated to resemble police and military.
so, once again the question arises – why is this one place, in all of mexico, exempt from the crazy violence of the rest of the country. the only answer that makes any sense is because el chapo wants a safe haven, and has the authorities in los cabos firmly under his control. this place is littered with swank resorts and luxury hotels, and is a favorite party spot for hollywood celebrities, among other wealthy, well-connected people who love to party it up.
how can anyone possibly think that the heads of the g20 – the wealthiest nations on earth – can have a convention there, without inviting attacks from one of many cartels in the area fully capable of engaging the mexican military in battle, unless there was an arrangement of some sort?
the day after the secretary of state of the united states flew out of the newly-expanded cabo san lucas airport (the airport and a new hilton luxury resort and convention center are being created for the summit), el chapo – once again - narrowly escaped arrest there. american spokespeople have claimed to have alerted their mexican counterparts that el chapo was at one of his homes in the gated community of punta ballena. maybe they told el chapo first, so he could clear out.
maybe the clinton team is negotiating with el chapo. according to recent statements by former mexican president vicente fox, the u.s. has been actively negotiating el chapo’s surrender, now that several of his lieutenants are being held for trial in the u.s.
that seems unlikely. what’s more likely is that el chapo is negotiating the release of his henchmen. after all, the u.s. has been arming the sinaloa cartel since at least 2006, and possibly since 2004. the result has been a bloody conflaguration that has spread from mexico southward into central america. the rivalry between the main coalitions in the illegal drug trade (the sinaloa federation and the zetas) may be the only thing preventing this bloody mess from spilling over the northern border and into every major city in the america.
if the sinaloas go down, what will stop the zetas from consolidating their power in the u.s., where all their wealth comes from?
when drug wars collide with u.s. foreign policy, no one is safe
part one: A TALE OF TWO CARTELS
if i were a little more callous or jaded, i’d publish some horrific images with this post, but they are trauma-inducing. the violence of the mexican-cartel dominated phase of the drugwar is on a level of brutality that can only be characterized as psychotic and insane – sadistic is an understatement, considering the torture for days, often with propane torches, the beheadings, the bodies hacked to pieces and left in piles, the bloody torsos…just do an image search for “cartel violence” if you’re interested, but it’s difficult to take. and there’s so much of it. so much pain, so much suffering, so many bodies, so much money, so many crimes, so many levels…
one of the consequences of active cooperation between a drug cartel and intelligence agencies of the u.s. has been an increase in over-the-top, insanely bloody violence. to be sure, once it is known that a certain group of people cooperate with the authorities to incarcerate or otherwise eliminate cartel members, the cartels seek to set an example of what people who cooperate with the authorities can expect when the cartels catch up with them. it doesn’t matter to the cartels that some people might be responsible for doing away with a rival gangster. what’s important to them is that some people have cooperated with the law.
sadly enough, the law can’t always protect people from cartels: not their informants, not the bystanders in the streets, not even the police are safe from the violence of the cartels. the one thing an informant cannot expect from the cartels? mercy.
This is the story of two drug cartels. one is comprised of a long-standing mexican cartel based out of sinaloa mexico. it is currently headed by El Chapo (“Shorty’) Guzman, who has been in a leadership position with the sinaloa federation for a long, long time. long enough to have ties to elements within the u.s. government. how cozy is the united states government with the sinaloa federation? enough to sell them weapons – tens of thousands of small arms since 2006. if you can call it selling. many of the weapons were acquired by undercover intelligence assets, with money provided by the taxpayers of the u.s.a.
the u.s./sinaoloa coalition:
from the l.a. times:
When the ATF made alleged gun trafficker Manuel Fabian Celis-Acosta its primary target in the ill-fated Fast and Furious investigation, it hoped he would lead the agency to two associates who were Mexican drug cartel members. The ATF even questioned and released him knowing that he was wanted by the Drug Enforcement Administration.
But those two drug lords were secretly serving as informants for the FBI along the Southwest border, newly obtained internal emails show.
More proof that drug kingpins were paid FBI informants
According to the LA Times today, Congressman Darrell Issa, R-CA, and Senator Charles Grassley, R-IA, stated in a memo to the their respective committees in the House and Senate that the ATF should have known that the drug kingpins in question were FBI informants and shut down the operation immediately.
But regardless of whether or not the ATF agents on the ground knew that the kingpins were informants, top level Administration officials knew as indicated by hundreds of documents previously released by the Department of Justice.
Further, an internal Congressional memo made public in February shows that most if not all of the Mexican drug cartel suspects supposedly targeted by the ATF were paid FBI informants.
How, then, could a scheme such as Fast and Furious be described as a ‘sting operation’ when the very suspects it was designed to ‘catch’ were working for our own government?
The problem with the House investigation of Fast and Furious as it moves forward is that it is too narrowly focused. It has become obvious that multiple levels of the federal government were involved in the scandal, including the FBI, the State Department, and Homeland Security.
in exchange for protection from arrest, the sinaloas have provided the u.s. with information on rival cartels, thus enabling spectacular busts, while keeping the cocaine, heroin and pot flowing into the u.s., courtesy their partners.
this arrangement could go back quite a while, seeing as how elusive “el chapo” guzman has been over the years.
while still an up-and-coming lieutenant for the guadalajara cartel, el chapo was captured in guatemala, after narrowly escaping an attempted assassination that instead killed a roman catholic cardinal. he was extradited back to mexico and held at a maximum security prison in guadalajara until 2001, when he escaped in a laundry truck – allegedly with the aid of prison officials and guards.
since then, his sinaloa-based operations have thrived, with el chapo taking over smuggling routes along the mexico/u.s. border in both tijuana and ciudad juarez. despite his notoriety – there is an entire genre of nacrocorridors, inspired by his status in sinaloa as a modern-day robin hood, forbes magazine lists him as one of the world’s most powerful billionaires, ahead of former president sarkozy of france and current ruler of venezuela, hugo chavez – he continues to expand his operations. his wife even crossed the border into l.a. to have twin girls.
co-incidently enough, since his jaibreak, many of his rivals have suffered defeat after defeat at the hands of mexican president felipe calderon’s aggressive war on drugs. calderon was elected on a promise to utilize the military to destroy the cartels, after former president vincente fox’s top narco-cop was found to have taken almost $500,000 from one of el chapo’s allies.
both the united states of mexico and america state publicly that capturing el chapo is their number-one priority, but the evidence points to the contrary conclusion – in short, that el chapo is in collusion with powerful people in the u.s.a. and mexico.
in 2001, just months after his escape from prison, some rival druglords in colombia attempted to give the u.s. DEA information on el chapo, in return for lenient treatment. shortly thereafter, el chapo eluded capture in los cabos, baja california. that first year out was quite eventful for him, as he was constantly on the move, the mexican police hot on his trail. in the ensuing chaos, his brother was captured.
el chapo is purported to have helped mexican authorities imprison one of his former rivals and sometime partner alfredo beltran, then launched an attack upon the remainders of the beltran leyva gang.
the current, real, horrific drugwar began in earnest bloodiness on may 8th, 2008, when the beltran leyva gang killed el chapo’s son, edgar. in retaliation, el chapo began a bloody war of attrition that spread slowly from his homebase until it has engulfed people from texas to colombia. in the first three months of fighting, 500 people died, including dozens of police.
THE RIVALS: the main rivals to the u.s./sinaloa coalition are the zetas – an insanely violent cartel that specializes in committing atrocities against their opponents, be they journalists, recalcitrant addicts, informers, police, judges, or gangstas not under their control.
there are a couple of minor players in this tale – like the juarez, michoacan, and gulf coalitions – who had been involved in the drug trade for longer. the zetas were a gang of military deserters who became hitmen for the gulf coalition, though the two are currently in a bloody dispute – along with the u.s./sinaloa coalition – over control of drug traffic along the u.s./mexico border, particularly along the texas border.
the gulf coalition has been around long enough that they are firmly entrenched in some places, like veracruz, matamoros, and reynosa. yet, the zetas are attacking their rivals in 23 mexican states. they are such a feared enemy, the former leader of the juarez cartel moved to colorado, turned himself in, and demanded protection in return for information. he likely sold out his former employees in exchange for protection from them.
click on image to see more maps, from compiled by borderland beat
in central america, meanwhile, 15 members of the michoacan/la familia cartel have been busted – including the leader Gabriel Maldonado Soler, a former federal police agent – and the cartel effectively shut down. courts in nicaragua and costa rica have been busy prosecuting cartels, as has mexican president calderon.
with each bust or death, a power vacuum is created for the survivors to fight to fill. though the zetas have been quick to snatch up the spoils, the sinaloa federation has been busy building alliances with other old-school cartels, including the remnants of la familia, the gulf cartel, leftovers of the juarez cartel. the tijuana cartel has also been alarmed about the appearance of zetas in their domain and are alleged to be in alliance with the u.s./sinaloa coalition.
as i write this – over a period of two weeks – the zetas are waging an offensive campaign in the heart of their enemies’ territory.
there have been days-long gunbattles in rural sinaloa, journalists slaughtered in veracrua, and reynosa is a free-fire zone. the media there stopped mentioning narco-violence long ago. there was an attack on a colombia-themed nightclub in mexico city. people have been hacked to pieces in nuevo laredo, and others hung from a bridge that connects to the u.s.
as the various presidents of american nations met in colombia earlier this spring, it would seem like only the FARC was able to display a meek “show of force,” setting off four bombs as a message to their rivals in the international arms-and-drugs trade – the u.s./sinaloa coalition. if they’d been paying more attention to the round-the-clock partying of obama’s security and u.s. military leaders in colombia (which included some of the secret service’s “lead team”), they may have been able to get rid of a pesky, insanely violent rival.
it looks like the u.s. has been wooing the sinaloa drug cartel with cash and arms, since around 2006, a key reason why cartel boss ”Chapo” Guzman of the Sinaloa Federation has been so difficult to capture or prosecute.
meanwhile, many american presidents are crying “uncle!” (“sam,” no doubt), but obama refuses to listen. the drugwar has cost 50,000 lives in mexico since president calderon swept into office on a promise to destroy the drug cartels, in 2006 – around the same time bush ll began to arm the Sinaloa Cartel. though calderon’s efforts have seen some success, the result has been continuously escalating wars of succession every time a major player is removed from the picture.
the drugwar has also spread southward, through central america, as wealthy, well-armed, well-connected mexican cartels seek to gain more control of the distribution system from middlemen, from el salvador and panama, to guatemala and coasta rica.
let’s back the story up a bit, so we can see what was at play while the summit of the americas was held in america’s drugwar bloodbath supreme, colombia.
Where to start?to bring this story full circle, we have to look back to the 1980′s and the Iran/Contra affair, in which it was eventually discovered that acting President Ronald Reagan’s private terrorist army – Nicaragua’s Honduran-based exiles, the Contras – were being funded (after Congress cut their legal foreign aid funds) through a program which sold arms to the Islamic Republic of Iran, then sent the money to Central America, where CIA-contracted planes would unload supplies, then load up cocaine and other illegal items for delivery to the U.S. the younger generation of bushes – including a former president – were alleged to have been pilots in this affair, flying regularly between panama, and airstrips in texas and arkansas.
it’s not the focus of this investigation to try to trace the Contra’s and Bush’s ties to Colombian drug cartels. i’m focusing instead on the war on drugs as it exists now. But – oddly enough – some of the same people involved in the “anti-communist” carnage back then are getting back into the game now.
Still, why nicaragua? why was the Reagan administration so determined to “take back” Nicaragua that they brought tons of cocaine into the U.S. and made street gangs RICH? Because the Nicaraguan people had the audacity to overthrow the Somosa Dynasty, which had provided America’s main route of illegal drug shipments through central america since the loss of cuba. During the Reagan/Bush era, brutal wars of oppression were being waged against the people of Guatemala and Honduras, and the people of El Salvador seemed to be on the verge of overthrowing their country’s ruling oligarchy. Reagan had other pet armies, too – UNITA in Angola, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.
what could motivate awful, bloody drug wars that only make criminal cartels rich, and are used as justification for restricting civil rights? what could be in the hearts and minds of the people responsible for prolonging these narco-conflicts?
The Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – FARC deserves at least a mention here, as this guerilla group has been in control of large chunks of Colombia’s countryside for decades, and is rumored to have ties to cocaine exporters in and around their territories. They are alleged to have had ties to the Zeta cartel in Mexico, but are also relying on other revenue sources - such as cattle – recently, as their cartel contacts have been getting busted and sent to stand trial in Venuzuela, and the Zetas are at war with the U.S.-backed Sinaloa cartel. Also, much of the prime cocaine-producing turf is now controlled by former members of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), former allies in the war on drugs, during the Bush junta’s reign in D.C.
I’m going to go ahead and post this now, and continue work on the next part, about the u.s./sinaloa pact, which is causing insaneviolence – heads of police on display outside their (now) unstaffed offices, dozens of bodies dumped along roads, dozens of immigrants dumped into mass graves. how are people who live in these places, from mexico to colombia, expected to cope with their lives, witnessing this everywhere; frequently; relentlessly?
so – there they were in colombia – the secret service team in charge of security for the president, who was on his way there to attend a summit meeting of the presidents of the americas. the locals from u.s. military bases in colombia gave the “all clear,” and it was time to PARRRRRTAYYYYY!
how extraordinary, that the president’s security team is so unconcerned with his safety that they partied hard for days. in a country torn apart with drugwar violence and two revolutionary groups which control much of the countryside. and the secret service has no regard at all about doing their jobs hungover, or being otherwise wasted?
this level of comfort in a war zone is creepy, and had some lower-level cheapskate not crashed the party and tried to worm his way out of paying an escort he’d spent the night with, no one would have know about it.
so, hats off to the FARC for at least calling attention to the fact that they can carry out bombings, even with the heavy presence of american military and secret service forces. if the cartels had planned some sort of mischief for the summit of the americas, it could have been bloody hell unleashed if armed gunmen had caught the partyers with their pants down, and taken hostages. to cut the secret service and their military liasons some slack, they weren’t the only ones who dropped the ball during the summit.
coming soon:
U.S./SINALOA PACT RESULTS IN ESCALATION OF INSANELY VIOLENT DRUG WARS
standing beside the comrades duped into an fbi bomb conspiracy
as if the job of marginalizing the anarchist movement in the u.s. was not already being championed by cowards within the occupy movement, five bold, wreckless comrades have found themselves victims of a fraudulent bombing plot which the fbi engineered.
it is imperative not to let these brave, foolish comrades become isolated. more than anything else we must remember:
ATTACKS ON THE FASCIST/CORPORATE INFRASTRUCTURE ARE LEGITIMATE AND NECESSARY!
“There will be a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!
if there is to be shit-talking and back-stabbing over this, let it be over our own cowardice that makes such an arrest an isolated incident. why are the prisons and jails not overflowing with captured comrades? why is our rebellion so weak that the government is not forced to release us as soon as they process us into their jails, for lack of space? naturally, we must all strive in our efforts to avoid being captured, but that should never stop us from doing that which we know must be done. circumstances are changing, and the government’s well-known explicit, and fully documented policy of pre-emptive strikes ensures that we cannot allow the militarized police forces to always push the attack. if not now, then when? even today may be too late.
IF THE INNOCENT DESERVE SUPPORT, THE GUILTY MUST NEVER BE IN DOUBT OF IT!
Demonization of Anarchism
In addition to a continuation of undercover informants and FBI-manufactured plots, this case also reflects on an-going focus on demonizing anarchists.
The government’s press release proclaims that the defendants are “self-proclaimed anarchists.” The affidavit notes that they attended anarchist protests and carried anarchist flags.
The affidavit also says that the defendants talked about anarchists “rioting and destroying each city” that holds May Day protests, and that it will be “off the hook.”
Demonizing anarchists has gone one for over a century, of course, but in recent years the rhetoric has dovetailed with “War on Terrorism” hysteria.
For example, in Scott Demuth’s case, the government argued that: “Defendant’s writings, literature, and conduct suggest that he is an anarchist and associated with the ALF movement. Therefore, he is a domestic terrorist.”
It should come as no surprise, then, that the announcement of these arrests was carefully unveiled yesterday, so that the top news story this May Day would not be about howanarchists are preventing home foreclosures, starting community gardens, teaching collective organizing skills, and re-framing class consciousness, but about how they were part of an FBI-guided “terrorist plot.”
FBI Supplied the Anarchist “Terrorists” Arrested in May Day Plot
the federal government will move to crush dissent at some point. do you know the story of may day?
Commemorating the Fight
for the Eight-Hour Workday
The fight for the eight-hour workday began in earnest in the United States, over a century ago, when the Knights of Labor adopted an historic resolution asserting that “eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s labor from and after May 1st, 1886.” Up until that time, working people were routinely required to work 10 to 16 hours a day, 6 days a week!In the months prior to May 1st, 1886, American workers in the hundreds of thousands were drawn into the struggle for the shorter day. Skilled and unskilled, black and white, men and women, native-born and immigrant – all became involved.In Chicago alone 400,000 were out on strike for the shorter workday. A newspaper of that city reported that “…no smoke curled up from the tall chimneys of the factories and mills, and things had assumed a Sabbath-like appearance.” On May 3, 1886, peaceful public demonstrations by the strikers precipitated violent police retaliation, resulting in the death of at least one striker, and serious injury to many more.The next day in Haymarket Square a public meeting was held to protest the brutal assaults on the demonstrating strikers. The crowd was orderly, and Chicago mayor Carter Harrison advised the police captain to send home the large contingent of police reservists who were waiting at the stationhouse in case they were needed for crowd control.By ten o’clock that rainy evening the meeting was winding down and only about 200 of the demonstrators remained in the Square. Suddenly, a police column of 180 men, led by the police captain, moved in and ordered the people to disperse immediately. At that moment, the peaceful assembly became violent – a bomb was thrown into the police ranks, killing one policeman outright, fatally wounding six more, and seriously injuring about seventy. The police opened fire into the crowd; the number of wounded and killed has never been ascertained.
A reign of terror swept over Chicago. The press and the pulpit called for revenge, insisting the bomb was the work of socialists and anarchists. Meeting halls, union offices, printing works, and private homes were raided, and known socialists and anarchists were rounded up. Even many individuals who had no connections at all to the socialists or anarchists were arrested and tortured. “Make the raids first and look up the law afterwards,” was the public statement of Julius Grinnell, the state’s attorney.
i just noticed that the article reposted above gave credit for the chicago general strike to the afl, which did not exist at the time. the afl is the weakest, most business-friendly union on earth, outside fascist countries, which generally have a state-run labor union. if it were no for the knights of labor and the iww, i doubt we’d have won the right to the eight-hour workday in the u.s.
there’s a race war in the streets of america, and chickenshit white males and privileged peace activists want to debate the use of self-defense?
what makes this truly disgusting is that many of them would turn in a comrade who practices armed self-defense, in order to preserve a system of privilege that allows THEM to dwell securely in THEIR homes. the middle class has NOT been there when cops slaughtered “colored” resisters. and the rest of us – who are not willing to subject ourselves passively to the blows and bullets, chemicals and tazers the police use on us – will not come to your rescue when you end up in one of those FEMA camps you don’t believe exist.
police hunt and kill black people for sport in the u.s., knowing they’ll not be held accountable for murdering unarmed black youth. police are rarely put on trial for murdering people without cause.
About 9,500 people nationally were killed by police during the years 1980 to 2005–an average of nearly one fatal shooting per day (stats are only for cities of 250,000 or more).
And the failure to address unjustified shootings frankly is likely to lead both to greater community distrust of police and an increased probability that the hostile interactions that often precede the shootings will continue.
“There is a crisis of perception where African American males and females take their lives in their hands just walking out the door,” said Delores Jones-Brown, interim director of the Center on Race, Crime and Justice at John Jay College in New York.
“There is a notion they will be perceived as armed and dangerous. It’s clear that it’s not just a local problem.”
The shootings may be explained in part by implicit bias on the part of police officers, according to research by University of Chicago Assistant Professor Joshua Correll.
A second significant point: Latinos are a rising number of fatal police shooting victims.
and even more numbers, from the Advocacy Center for Equality and Democracy:
here are some statistics on arrest-related deaths of civilians.
From 2003 to 2009, 4,813 people died in relation to an arrest in “all manners of deaths.” Each year ranged from 627 (2003) to 745 (2007). Source – Andrea M. Burch, U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Arrest-Related Deaths, 2003-2009 – Statistical Tables, November 2011.
Of those, 2,913 (about 6 in 10) were reported as “homicide by law enforcement.” Each year ranged from 375 (2004) to 497 (2009). See Burch.
In the only year in which the NYT article and the Bureau of Justice Statistics report overlap, 2008, law enforcement killed roughly 10 times the number of people during arrests (404) than officers killed (41). See Burch.
i think the last point needs to be emphasized – police have pointed out their use of non-lethal weapons – which they often describe as “law enforcement tools” – as proof that they are taking steps to ensure the safety of all citizens, even crime suspects, but they use tazers to kill one person each week for ten years.
29 Black People Have Been Killed by Police/Security in 2012
First thing that needs to be noted is that we just had another police shooting of an unarmed man in Austin, Texas on Thursday night.. This happened after the report was compiled, so add another name to this grisly toll..
Twenty-eight Black People (27 Men and 1 Female) Killed by Police Officials, Security
Guards, and Self-Appointed “Keepers of the Peace” between January 1, 2012 and March
31, 2012
- 28 cases of state sanctioned or justified murder of Black people in the first 3
months of 2012 alone have been found (due to under reporting and discriminatory
methods of documentation, it is likely that there are more that our research has yet
to uncover)
- Of the 28 killed people,
18 were definitely unarmed.
2 probably had firearms,
8 were alleged to have non-lethal weapons.
- Of the 28 killed people,
. 11 were innocent of any illegal behavior or behavior that involved a
threat to anyone (although the shooters claimed they looked “suspicious”);
. 7 were emotionally disturbed and/or displaying strange behavior.
. The remaining 10 were either engaged in illegal or potentially illegal
activity, or there was too little info to determine circumstances of their
killing. It appears that in all but two of these cases, illegal and/or harmful
behavior could have been stopped without the use of lethal force.
the question of violence has NEVER been about US! the PEOPLE!
the question is, how are WE going to respond to the violence the police, armed security assets, and any dipshit yahoo with a gun brings to US?
if we could dwell securely in our homes, in neighborhoods we grew up in, without having to worry if our next trip to the corner store would end in bloodshed or a prison cell, i’m sure we’d be peaceful people, too. this, however, is not something i have experienced.