Steven Gaal

HUH ??? The Secret Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Central Intelligence Agency, were not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy conclusion to the HSCA ? QUOTED BY David Joseph +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ steven gaal Posted 27 August 2005 - 07:02 PM Fletcher Prouty in his book ,The Secret Team, discussed Allen Dulles ambition to have the CIA penetrate all areas of the US government.Prouty used the existence of a high level FAA bureaucrat that was really a CIA asset to example CIA penetration. It is my supposition that Dulles started to penetrate the US Secret Service in the early 1950s. I come to this idea by my finding the 1963 lawfirm of Scribner,Hall, and Casey in Wash. DC area. Casey being William Casey,who was identified as a POST (thats post) WWII operative of Allen Dulles in the, The Secret War Against the Jews Book. In 1952 Dulles had a dangerous plan to aid the Republican Party's control of the US Presidency. Dulles set up the Republican Ethnic Division (aka with some variation Heritage Groups today). THe Ethnic Division was organized initially in five states. These groups in the 1950s were a danger to the Republican Party in that key leaders were made up of recent displaced WWII Fascsists,Nazi and neo-Nazis. Though information was reported circa 1979-1980 about these groups, this information on the Ethnic Divisions was never given the emphasis it should have gotten (LIBERAL PRESS ???). Dulles set up the Republican Ethnic Division to counter the Jewish vote that he felt caused Governor Dewey's razor thin loss to Truman. A portion of the money for the creation of this Ethnic Divison would come from the money-laundering organization, The Crusade for Freedom,which was aided by William Casey and Ronald Reagan in the early 1950s. The head of the Republican Congressional divison in 1952 was Leonard (W) Hall. Mr. Hall would also chair the Republican Party. Hall had to have full knowledge of this fascists operation. Some of the money also came from the CIA (very illegal). In 1963 we see the lawfirm of Scibner,Hall and Casey. Who was Fred Scribner ? Mr. Scribner was head lawyer for the Treasury Department from the mid 50s till late 50s and also later the Under Secretary . On the internet I found a document that had Scribner working in the hiring of IRS agents. Now Dulles was so fixated on Presidential control he started the Ethnic Divisions which could have distroyed the Republican Party. What strenghtens this theory is that Dulles also was a friend of another Head Lawyer at the Treasury Deptment, Gasper d' Andelot Belin. Dulles,his lover Mary Bancroft, JJA (Chief CIA CI), the Belin's,and the George Bundy's (Bundy being brother of Belins wife) ,would all share lunch and tennis at the Belin's. "Nobody could beat Allen ,at tennis",mused Mary about the Belin lunches. (A very competitive man, NO ??) There are some misspellings at NARA ,but you can find that Belin did work on the still secret (along with his mother's) Oswald tax returns. It is my supposition that via his relationship with the head lawyers of the Treasury Dept, Dulles penetrated the Secret Service. MORE ON LEONARD HALL'S connections JOHN HOWLEY '29 "Pop" Howley died on Sept. 1, 2000. He was 93. At Princeton, he was Phi Beta Kappa. He then attended Harvard law school, graduating in 1932, and was with the firm of Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine until WWII, when he followed "Wild Bill" Donovan, senior partner of the firm, into the Office of Strategic Services (now the CIA), which Gen. Donovan headed throughout the war. After the war, together with Leonard Hall, who was later the Republican national chair, and William Casey, who later headed the Securities and Exchange Commission and the CIA, they formed the law firm of Hall, Casey, Dickler and Howley, a renowned law firm. +++++++++++++++++++++ Also in the Summer of 63 Casey and CD Jackson attended a John Birch meeting in the Hollywood Bowl. Also in attendance was Edward (Ted) Dealey,part of the family that controlled the AH Belo company. Edward Dealey had shocked Washington in October 1961 by insulting JFK at a White House luncheon. If you read Dallas Conspiracy by Peter Dale Scott ,you will see connections to the assassination from people working for AH Belo. Of note, it is was very unlike CD Jackson to attend such a low brow affair in the Bowl. ================= In 63 Casey worked with Prescott Bush Jr. in a think tank advocating a stronger CIA and increased covert operations. Prescott Bush SR (SR) had been a friend of Dulles from the early 1930s. DID SOMEONE SUGGEST THE CIA BE BROKEN INTO A THOUSAND PIECES ???????????? THANKS SG Edited by Steven Gaal, 01 September 2005 - 08:36 PM. ========================================================== Just as G. B. Dealey's editorial page had changed the Dallas of an earlier era, Ted Dealey's shaped his. The public life of the city turned ugly in the fifties and sixties. The art museum took down a Picasso after a barrage of calls protested that the artist was a communist. When the museum board resisted attempts to close a photography exhibit that included Russian photographers, the News headlined its story MUSEUM SAYS REDS CAN STAY. Police pressure forced all local bookstores to take Tropic of Cancer off their shelves. In 1960 Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson were spat on during a campaign visit to the Adolphus Hotel. Four days later John F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States, an event that led to Ted Dealey's most notorious public acts. In October 1961 Ted joined a group of nineteen Texas publishers for a Friday lunch at the White House. It was a typical presidential courting ritual: an elegant bite to eat, an off-the-record briefing, and a bit of pleasant conversation, all harmless enough. But this time was to be different. After lunch Kennedy spoke to the publishers about foreign affairs and then asked if any of his guests had anything to say. One publisher got up and delivered the best wishes of his local citizenry. Then Ted Dealey rose, pulling out a prepared statement. Since Kennedy's election, the News' editorial page had leveled an unrelenting attack on the president: he was a buffoon, a thief, thirty times a fool. Now, face to face, Dealey continued the assault. "The general opinion of the grassroots thinking in this country is that you and your administration are weak sisters," Dealey read to the president. "If we stand firm, there will be no war. The Russians will back down. We need a man on horseback to lead this nation, and many people in Texas and the Southwest think that you are riding Caroline's tricycle." The other publishers were aghast. "Mr. President," said Jim Chambers, publisher of the Times Herald (Dallas' afternoon paper) and a man who knew Ted Dealey well, "I think you should know that Mr. Dealey does not express the sentiments of all the publishers around this table." The incident produced a national media fire storm, and the News relished every moment. Around the state and the country, Ted Dealey was condemned as a reactionary and a boor. But in Dallas, the News received more than 2,000 letters, and 1700 of them voiced approval of his actions. In Dallas it was Jim Chambers who fielded the stacks of hate mail. Two years later a News advertising salesman took the copy for an unusual ad up to the executive suite. He was worried about the ad's strong language and uncertain origin. Normally such questions would have been routed through Joe Dealey, Ted's son, but Joe was away at a newspaper convention and wouldn't be back until President Kennedy's visit the next day. Instead, the decision was left to Ted. Even today Joe Dealey shakes his head at the memory of the ad. "Damn, we ought not to have done it," he says. "If I'd been sitting there, I'd have killed it." But Ted was sitting there, and so, on November 22, 1963, John Kennedy was greeted with the ad that would forever link the Dallas Morning News with the tragic events of that day. "Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas," it began, and it went on to ask a series of rhetorical questions, such as "Why have you scrapped the Monroe Doctrine in favor of the Spirit of Moscow?" The entire ad was enclosed in a thick black border. That morning Kennedy read the ad and handed it to his wife. "Oh, you know, we're heading into nut country," he said. Three hours later he was struck dead by an assassin's bullet—as his limousine passed through a plaza named for G. B. Dealey. ============================ AH Belo A. H. Belo, which had many odd things connected to the assassination. Belo had Hugh Ainsworthy who had access to Marina when other people did not have access to her, and he was at the Tippit scene. The man who had a seizure that took away an ambulance from Dealey Plaza was an employee of A. H. Belo, oddly. To show the internationalist slant of the organization, A. H. Belo in the 1980s joined the British-American Society. There were not that many American companies that were part of the British-American Society, but A. H. Belo was.

NPR Affiliate: Fukushima cesium detected in Alaska salmon sample — Radioactive plume has already reached West Coast — Concerned fishermen forced to pay for tests since officials not doing it — “People don’t trust gov’t… they don’t trust corporations” (AUDIO) Senior Scientist: Fukushima radiation already on West Coast of N. America — We don’t know how much is coming or how fast it’s moving, situation ‘evolving’ — Levels will continue to rise for years — Unprecedented event for Pacific, largest ever radioactive release into ocean (VIDEO)

An investigation by El Universal found that between the years 2000 and 2012, the U.S. government had an arrangement with Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel that allowed the organization to smuggle billions of dollars of drugs while Sinaloa provided information on rival cartels. http://www.businessi...a-cartel-2014-1 ++++OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO++++ OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO The US Border Patrol Conveniently 'Misplaced' the Records for 200 Predator Drone Flights Late last year, we reported that the U.S. Border Patrol had lent out its Predator drones 500 times over the past three years. Scratch that, because “newly discovered” data shows that it’s actually been 700 times. GEE........helping ??????????? ... (from above) Sinaloa provided information on rival cartels. .... GEE Predator Drones helping Sinaloa(CIA) cartel........intergovernmental cooperation at its best !!!

“They’re All Gone”: Shock as sardines vanish off California — Fishermen didn’t find a single one all summer — Scientist: This is about the entire Pacific coast… Canada, Mexico, U.S. — NOAA: We don’t know why; The young aren’t surviving ==================================================== http://enenews.com/theyre-all-gone-shock-as-sardines-vanish-off-california-fishermen-didnt-find-a-single-one-all-summer-scientist-this-is-about-the-entire-pacific-coast-noaa-the-young ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Related Posts Sardine population plummets along U.S. West Coast — AP: Collapse of species feared — “Canadian Pacific fishermen catch no sardines in 2013″ November 4, 2013 ‘Troubling Mystery’: Complete collapse of sardine population on West Coast of Canada around Vancouver — Official: It’s ‘unexpected’ — Expert: Humpback whales rarely seen, they’re telling us something changed… nobody knows what’s going on October 15, 2013 Study: High concentrations of Fukushima radioactive material will reach west coast of North America — “Entire coast” to be affected from Alaska to Mexico — “Can negatively affect human life for decades… should raise concern” (MODEL) September 23, 2013 L.A. Times: Alarming West Coast sardine crash likely radiating through ecosystem — Experts warn marine mammals and seabirds are starving, may suffer for years to come — Boats return without a single fish — Monterey Bay: Hard to resist idea that humpback whales are trying to tell us something January 5, 2014 Experts: “Really an off year” — Pelicans starving in Pacific Northwest since 2011, killing baby birds for food — Breeding success “really poor” since 2011 — “I believe pelicans are responding to large scale changes” — “Sardine crash” persists in Pacific since decline in 2011 December 22, 2013

CONFIRMED: The DEA Struck A Deal With Mexico's Most Notorious Drug Cartel http://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-government-and-the-sinaloa-cartel-2014-1 ===================================================== Peter Dale Scott http://www.globalresearch.ca/jfk-and-9-11/4207 DRUGS I was thinking of two or three more points. Here’s a broader one, where now you say, “There he goes again…” on the question of drugs. In Deep Politics, and especially in Deep Politics II (which thanks to Rex, is about to be reissued I believe, and will be available shortly from the Mary Ferrell Foundation), I discuss the importance of the Mexican drug traffic as a factor – which was 1) connected to Jack Ruby;[30] 3) connected to the Mexican DFS, which taped Oswald in Mexico City; 3) protected in effect by the CIA, which intervened at least once in an American court to prevent a DFS smuggler from being indicted;[31] 4) connected to Richard Cain, this multifaceted mob and law enforcement figure, who was the chief link between Sam Giancana and the Mexican establishment. And he may have very well, as I say in Deep Politics II, – his specialty was wiretapping, and it’s conceded publicly that he did wiretapping in Mexico of foreign embassies in Mexico City for the Mexican government, which certainly sounds pretty relevant to the over hearing of the man identifying himself as Lee Oswald, and also some of the Cubans, we’ll come back to them again, the Cuban students, particularly Cubans students who were involved in drug trafficking.[32] At that point, when I first wrote this I had not yet looked at the new version of Ultimate Sacrifice; and realized that the Mexican drug connection is, if anything, even more important in Waldron’s book than it is in mine, which may explain my new partiality to want to take that book seriously. He brings in people like, for example the French Connection, and whoever he was (Jean) Souêtre or (Michael Victor) Mertz, who was reportedly in Dallas November 22, 1963.[33] He ties those people to Marcello, and to Trafficante and to Rosselli and there are more people, I could give the rest of my talk on that theme, but I won’t. ============================= The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs DOUGLAS VALINTINE http://www.douglasvalentine.com/the_strength_of_the_wolf__the_secret_history_of_america_s_war_on_drugs_31184.htm FBN (now DEA) = RUBY =========================== CompleteWorks DOUGLAS VALINTINE Non-Fiction History - It's Out The Strength of the Pack: The Personalities, Politics and Espionage Intrigues that Shaped the DEA This exposé documents previously unknown aspects of federal drug law enforcement from the formation of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and the creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration until the present day. Learn how the CIA hijacked federal drug enforcement and turned it into an adjunct of national security. ============================ Non-Fiction History The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs "...highlighting the names and black deeds of an outlandish cast of wayward narcs, killer-spooks and globe-trotting godfathers (Wolf) is an expose of the never-ending lap-dance between organized crime and the national security establishment

British Company that owned boat shipped to China during British Opium period. Of note said family that controlled said company had contracts (in British Opium Period) with Jardine Shipping which was known China Opium trader. per above http://www.ancestry.com/1940-census/usa/Louisiana/James-Frandsen_4dhlgm

please dont forget post #44 above and also companion posts #31 & #38 (AUSTERITY Hows that working UK ??,Gaal) 'Bedroom Tax' Suicide: Grandmother Was Exempt Sky sources reveal that a woman who killed herself, blaming the "bedroom tax", was exempt from the subsidy after all. 3:52am UK, Saturday 11 January 2014 http://news.sky.com/story/1193394/bedroom-tax-suicide-grandmother-was-exempt

500 Years of History Shows that Mass Spying Is Always Aimed at Crushing Dissent (It’s Never to Protect Us From Bad Guys) http://www.globalresearch.ca/500-years-of-history-shows-that-mass-spying-is-always-aimed-at-crushing-dissent/5364462 ================================== It’s Never to Protect Us From Bad Guys No matter which government conducts mass surveillance, they also do it to crush dissent, and then give a false rationale for why they’re doing it. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court noted in Stanford v. Texas (1965): By “libel”, the court is referring to a critique of the British government which the King or his ministers didn’t like … they would label such criticism “libel” and then seize all of the author’s papers. While the Fourth Amendment [of the U.S. Constitution] was most immediately the product of contemporary revulsion against a regime of writs of assistance, its roots go far deeper. Its adoption in the Constitution of this new Nation reflected the culmination in England a few years earlier of a struggle against oppression which had endured for centuries. The story of that struggle has been fully chronicled in the pages of this Court’s reports, and it would be a needless exercise in pedantry to review again the detailed history of the use of general warrants as instruments of oppression from the time of the Tudors, through the Star Chamber, the Long Parliament, the Restoration, and beyond. What is significant to note is that this history is largely a history of conflict between the Crown and the press. It was in enforcing the laws licensing the publication of literature and, later, in prosecutions for seditious libel, that general warrants were systematically used in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. In Tudor England, officers of the Crown were given roving commissions to search where they pleased in order to suppress and destroy the literature of dissent, both Catholic and Puritan. In later years, warrants were sometimes more specific in content, but they typically authorized of all persons connected of the premises of all persons connected with the publication of a particular libel, or the arrest and seizure of all the papers of a named person thought to be connected with a libel. The Supreme Court provided interesting historical details in the case of Marcus v. Search Warrant(1961): The use by government of the power of search and seizure as an adjunct to a system for the suppression of objectionable publications … was a principal instrument for the enforcement of the Tudor licensing system. The Stationers’ Company was incorporated in 1557 to help implement that system, and was empowered “to make search whenever it shall please them in any place, shop, house, chamber, or building or any printer, binder or bookseller whatever within our kingdom of England or the dominions of the same of or for any books or things printed, or to be printed, and to seize, take hold, burn, or turn to the proper use of the aforesaid community, all and several those books and things which are or shall be printed contrary to the form of any statute, act, or proclamation, made or to be made. . . . An order of counsel confirmed and expanded the Company’s power in 1566, and the Star Chamber reaffirmed it in 1586 by a decree “That it shall be lawful for the wardens of the said Company for the time being or any two of the said Company thereto deputed by the said wardens, to make search in all workhouses, shops, warehouses of printers, booksellers, bookbinders, or where they shall have reasonable cause of suspicion, and all books [etc.] . . . contrary to . . . these present ordinances to stay and take to her Majesty’s use. . . . ” Books thus seized were taken to Stationers’ Hall where they were inspected by ecclesiastical officers, who decided whether they should be burnt. These powers were exercised under the Tudor censorship to suppress both Catholic and Puritan dissenting literature. Each succeeding regime during turbulent Seventeenth Century England used the search and seizure power to suppress publications. James I commissioned the ecclesiastical judges comprising the Court of High Commission “to enquire and search for . . . all heretical, schismatical and seditious books, libels, and writings, and all other books, pamphlets and portraitures offensive to the state or set forth without sufficient and lawful authority in that behalf, . . . and the same books [etc.] and their printing presses themselves likewise to seize and so to order and dispose of them . . . as they may not after serve or be employed for any such unlawful use. . . .” The Star Chamber decree of 1637, reenacting the requirement that all books be licensed, continued the broad powers of the Stationers’ Company to enforce the licensing laws. During the political overturn of the 1640′s, Parliament on several occasions asserted the necessity of a broad search and seizure power to control printing. Thus, an order of 1648 gave power to the searchers “to search in any house or place where there is just cause of suspicion that Presses are kept and employed in the printing of Scandalous and lying Pamphlets, . . . [and] to seize such scandalous and lying pamphlets as they find upon search. . . .” The Restoration brought a new licensing act in 1662. Under its authority, “messengers of the press” operated under the secretaries of state, who issued executive warrants for the seizure of persons and papers. These warrants, while sometimes specific in content, often gave the most general discretionary authority. For example, a warrant to Roger L’Estrange, the Surveyor of the Press, empowered him to “seize all seditious books and libels and to apprehend the authors, contrivers, printers, publishers, and dispersers of them,” and to “search any house, shop, printing room, chamber, warehouse, etc. for seditious, scandalous or unlicensed pictures, books, or papers, to bring away or deface the same, and the letter press, taking away all the copies. . . .]” *** Although increasingly attacked, the licensing system was continued in effect for a time even after the Revolution of 1688, and executive warrants continued to issue for the search for and seizure of offending books. The Stationers’ Company was also ordered “to make often and diligent searches in all such places you or any of you shall know or have any probable reason to suspect, and to seize all unlicensed, scandalous books and pamphlets. . . .” And even when the device of prosecution for seditious libel replaced licensing as the principal governmental control of the press, it too was enforced with the aid of general warrants — authorizing either the arrest of all persons connected with the publication of a particular libel and the search of their premises or the seizure of all the papers of a named person alleged to be connected with the publication of a libel. And see this. General warrants were largely declared illegal in Britain in 1765. But the British continued to use general warrants in the American colonies. In fact, the Revolutionary War was largely launched to stop the use of general warrants in the colonies. King George gave various excuses of why general warrants were needed for the public good, of course … but such excuses were all hollow. The New York Review of Books notes that the American government did not start to conduct mass surveillance against the American people until long after the Revolutionary War ended … but once started, the purpose was to crush dissent: In the United States, political spying by the federal government began in the early part of the twentieth century, with the creation of the Bureau of Investigation in the Department of Justice on July 1, 1908. In more than one sense, the new agency was a descendant of the surveillance practices developed in France a century earlier, since it was initiated by US Attorney General Charles Joseph Bonaparte, a great nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, who created it during a Congressional recess. Its establishment was denounced by Congressman Walter Smith of Iowa, who argued that “No general system of spying upon and espionage of the people, such as has prevailed in Russia, in France under the Empire, and at one time in Ireland, should be allowed to grow up.” Nonetheless, the new Bureau became deeply engaged in political surveillance during World War I when federal authorities sought to gather information on those opposing American entry into the war and those opposing the draft. As a result of this surveillance, many hundreds of people were prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act and the 1918 Sedition Act for the peaceful expression of opinion about the war and the draft. But it was during the Vietnam War that political surveillance in the United States reached its peak. Under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and, to an even greater extent, Richard Nixon, there was a systematic effort by various agencies, including the United States Army, to gather information on those involved in anti-war protests. Millions of Americans took part in such protests and the federal government—as well as many state and local agencies—gathered enormous amounts of information on them. Here are just three of the numerous examples of political surveillance in that era: In the 1960s in Rochester, New York, the local police department launched Operation SAFE (Scout Awareness for Emergency). It involved twenty thousand boy scouts living in the vicinity of Rochester. They got identification cards marked with their thumb prints. On the cards were the telephone numbers of the local police and the FBI. The scouts participating in the program were given a list of suspicious activities that they were to report.In 1969, the FBI learned that one of the sponsors of an anti-war demonstration in Washington, DC, was a New York City-based organization, the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee, that chartered buses to take protesters to the event. The FBI visited the bank where the organization maintained its account to get photocopies of the checks written to reserve places on the buses and, thereby, to identify participants in the demonstration. One of the other federal agencies given the information by the FBI was the Internal Revenue Service. *** The National Security Agency was involved in the domestic political surveillance of that era as well. Decades before the Internet, under the direction of President Nixon, the NSA made arrangements with the major communications firms of the time such as RCA Global and Western Union to obtain copies of telegrams. When the matter came before the courts, the Nixon Administration argued that the president had inherent authority to protect the country against subversion. In a unanimous decision in 1972, however, the US Supreme Court rejected the claim that the president had the authority to disregard the requirement of the Fourth Amendment for a judicial warrant. *** Much of the political surveillance of the 1960s and the 1970s and of the period going back to World War I consisted in efforts to identifyorganizations that were critical of government policies, or that were proponents of various causes the government didn’t like, and to gather information on their adherents. It was not always clear how this information was used. As best it is possible to establish, the main use was to block some of those who were identified with certain causes from obtaining public employment or some kinds of private employment. Those who were victimized in this way rarely discovered the reason they had been excluded. Efforts to protect civil liberties during that era eventually led to the destruction of many of these records, sometimes after those whose activities were monitored were given an opportunity to examine them. In many cases, this prevented surveillance records from being used to harm those who were spied on. Yet great vigilance by organizations such as the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought a large number of court cases challenging political surveillance, was required to safeguard rights. The collection of data concerning the activities of US citizens did not take place for benign purposes. *** Between 1956 and 1971, the FBI operated a program known as COINTELPRO, for Counter Intelligence Program. Its purpose was to interfere with the activities of the organizations and individuals who were its targets or, in the words of long-time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” them. The first target was the Communist Party of the United States, but subsequent targets ranged from the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference to organizations espousing women’s rights to right wing organizations such as the National States Rights Party. A well-known example of COINTELPRO was the FBI’s planting in 1964 of false documents about William Albertson, a long-time Communist Party official, that persuaded the Communist Party that Albertson was an FBI informant. Amid major publicity, Albertson was expelled from the party, lost all his friends, and was fired from his job. Until his death in an automobile accident in 1972, he tried to prove that he was not a snitch, but the case was not resolved until 1989, when the FBI agreed to payAlbertson’s widow $170,000 to settle her lawsuit against the government. COINTELPRO was eventually halted by J. Edgar Hoover after activists broke into a small FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971, and released stolen documents about the program to the press. The lesson of COINTELPRO is that any government agency that is able to gather information through political surveillance will be tempted to use that information. After a time, the passive accumulation of data may seem insufficient and it may be used aggressively. This may take place long after the information is initially collected and may involve officials who had nothing to do with the original decision to engage in surveillance. Indeed, during the Vietnam war, the NSA spied on Senator Frank Church because of his criticism of the Vietnam War. The NSA also spied on Senator Howard Baker. Senator Church – the head of a congressional committee investigating Cointelpro – warned in 1975: [NSA's] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. [if a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A.] could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back. This is, in fact, what’s happened … Initially, American constitutional law experts say that the NSA is doing exactly the same thing to the American people today which King George did to the Colonists … using “general warrant” type spying. And it is clear that the government is using its massive spy programs in order to track those who question government policies. See this, this, this and this. Todd Gitlin – chair of the PhD program in communications at Columbia University, and a professor of journalism and sociology - notes: Under the Freedom of Information Act, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) has unearthed documents showing that, in 2011 and 2012, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal agencies were busy surveilling and worrying about a good number of Occupy groups — during the very time that they were missing actual warnings about actual terrorist actions. From its beginnings, the Occupy movement was of considerable interest to the DHS, the FBI, and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies, while true terrorists were slipping past the nets they cast in the wrong places. In the fall of 2011, the DHS specifically asked its regional affiliates to report on “Peaceful Activist Demonstrations, in addition to reporting on domestic terrorist acts and ‘significant criminal activity.’” Aware that Occupy was overwhelmingly peaceful, the federally funded Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), one of 77 coordination centers known generically as “fusion centers,” was busy monitoring Occupy Boston daily. As the investigative journalist Michael Isikoff recently reported, they were not only tracking Occupy-related Facebook pages and websites but “writing reports on the movement’s potential impact on ‘commercial and financial sector assets.’” It was in this period that the FBI received the second of two Russian police warnings about the extremist Islamist activities of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the future Boston Marathon bomber. That city’s police commissioner later testified that the federal authorities did not pass any information at all about the Tsarnaev brothers on to him, though there’s no point in letting the Boston police off the hook either. The ACLU has uncovered documents showing that, during the same period, they were paying close attention to the internal workings of…Code Pink and Veterans for Peace. *** In Alaska, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Wisconsin, intelligence was not only pooled among public law enforcement agencies, but shared with private corporations — and vice versa. Nationally, in 2011, the FBI and DHS were, in the words of Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, “treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity.” Last December using FOIA, PCJF obtained 112 pages of documents (heavily redacted) revealing a good deal of evidence for what might otherwise seem like an outlandish charge: that federal authorities were, in Verheyden-Hilliard’s words, “functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.” Consider these examples from PCJF’s summary of federal agencies working directly not only with local authorities but on behalf of the private sector: • “As early as August 19, 2011, the FBI in New York was meeting with the New York Stock Exchange to discuss the Occupy Wall Street protests that wouldn’t start for another month. By September, prior to the start of the OWS, the FBI was notifying businesses that they might be the focus of an OWS protest.” • “The FBI in Albany and the Syracuse Joint Terrorism Task Force disseminated information to… [22] campus police officials… A representative of the State University of New York at Oswego contacted the FBI for information on the OWS protests and reported to the FBI on the SUNY-Oswego Occupy encampment made up of students and professors.” • An entity called the Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC), “a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the private sector,” sent around information regarding Occupy protests at West Coast ports [on Nov. 2, 2011] to “raise awareness concerning this type of criminal activity.” The DSAC report contained “a ‘handling notice’ that the information is ‘meant for use primarily within the corporate security community. Such messages shall not be released in either written or oral form to the media, the general public or other personnel…’ Naval Criminal Investigative Services (NCIS) reported to DSAC on the relationship between OWS and organized labor.” • DSAC gave tips to its corporate clients on “civil unrest,” which it defined as running the gamut from “small, organized rallies to large-scale demonstrations and rioting.” *** • The FBI in Anchorage, Jacksonville, Tampa, Richmond, Memphis, Milwaukee, and Birmingham also gathered information and briefed local officials on wholly peaceful Occupy activities. • In Jackson, Mississippi, FBI agents “attended a meeting with the Bank Security Group in Biloxi, MS with multiple private banks and the Biloxi Police Department, in which they discussed an announced protest for ‘National Bad Bank Sit-In-Day’ on December 7, 2011.” Also in Jackson, “the Joint Terrorism Task Force issued a ‘Counterterrorism Preparedness’ alert” that, despite heavy redactions, notes the need to ‘document…the Occupy Wall Street Movement.’” *** In 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee learned … that the Tennessee Fusion Center was “highlighting on its website map of ‘Terrorism Events and Other Suspicious Activity’ a recent ACLU-TN letter to school superintendents. The letter encourages schools to be supportive of all religious beliefs during the holiday season.” *** Consider an “intelligence report” from the North Central Texas fusion center, which in a 2009 “Prevention Awareness Bulletin” described, in the ACLU’s words, “a purportedconspiracy between Muslim civil rights organizations, lobbying groups, the anti-war movement, a former U.S. Congresswoman, the U.S. Treasury Department, and hip hop bands to spread tolerance in the United States, which would ‘provide an environment for terrorist organizations to flourish.’” *** And those Virginia and Texas fusion centers were hardly alone in expanding the definition of “terrorist” to fit just about anyone who might oppose government policies. According to a 2010 report in the Los Angeles Times, the Justice Department Inspector General found that “FBI agents improperly opened investigations into Greenpeace and several other domestic advocacy groups after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, and put the names of some of their members on terrorist watch lists based on evidence that turned out to be ‘factually weak.’” The Inspector General called “troubling” what the Los Angeles Times described as “singling out some of the domestic groups for investigations that lasted up to five years, and were extended ‘without adequate basis.’ Subsequently, the FBI continued to maintain investigative files on groups like Greenpeace, the Catholic Worker, and the Thomas Merton Center in Pittsburgh, cases where (in the politely put words of the Inspector General’s report) “there was little indication of any possible federal crimes… In some cases, the FBI classified some investigations relating to nonviolent civil disobedience under its ‘acts of terrorism’ classification.” *** In Pittsburgh, on the day after Thanksgiving 2002 (“a slow work day” in the Justice Department Inspector General’s estimation), a rookie FBI agent was outfitted with a camera, sent to an antiwar rally, and told to look for terrorism suspects. The “possibility that any useful information would result from this make-work assignment was remote,” the report added drily. “The agent was unable to identify any terrorism subjects at the event, but he photographed a woman in order to have something to show his supervisor. He told us he had spoken to a woman leafletter at the rally who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent, and that she was probably the person he photographed.” The sequel was not quite so droll. The Inspector General found that FBI officials, including their chief lawyer in Pittsburgh, manufactured postdated “routing slips” and the rest of a phony paper trail to justify this surveillance retroactively. Moreover, at least one fusion center has involved military intelligence in civilian law enforcement. In 2009, a military operative from Fort Lewis, Washington, worked undercover collecting information on peace groups in the Northwest. In fact, he helped run the Port Militarization Resistance group’s Listserv. Once uncovered, he told activists there were others doing similar work in the Army. How much the military spies on American citizens is unknown and, at the moment at least, unknowable. Do we hear an echo from the abyss of the counterintelligence programs of the 1960s and 1970s, when FBI memos — I have some in my own heavily redacted files obtained through an FOIA request — were routinely copied to military intelligence units? Then, too, military intelligence operatives spied on activists who violated no laws, were not suspected of violating laws, and had they violated laws, would not have been under military jurisdiction in any case. During those years, more than 1,500 Army intelligence agents in plain clothes were spying, undercover, on domestic political groups (according to Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics, 1967-70, an unpublished dissertation by former Army intelligence captain Christopher H. Pyle). They posed as students, sometimes growing long hair and beards for the purpose, or as reporters and camera crews. They recorded speeches and conversations on concealed tape recorders. The Army lied about their purposes, claiming they were interested solely in “civil disturbance planning.” Yes, we hear echoes to the Cointelpro program of the 60s and 70s … as well as King George’s General Warrants to the Colonies … and the Star Chamber of 15th century England. Because – whatever governments may say – mass surveillance is always used to crush dissent. Notes: 1. Spying is also aimed at keeping politicians in check. 2. The East German Stasi obviously used mass surveillance to crush dissent and keep it’s officials in check … and falsely claimed that spying was necessary to protect people against vague threats. But poking holes in the excuses of a communist tyranny is too easy. The focus of this essay is to show that the British and American governments have used this same cynical ruse for over 500 years. 3. For ease of reading, we deleted the footnotes from the two Supreme Court opinions.

Susan George on the secret capitalist cabal behind European austerityThe How to Win the Class War satirist turns the spotlight on the shadowy global 'plot' to claw back working-class gains Link to video: Susan George: austerity means socialising losses and privatising profits In a discreet villa in Switzerland, carefully chosen experts have been assembled by a shadowy group of wealthy and powerful commissioners and tasked with answering a single big question: how, amid the global financial crisis, can a renaissance of western capitalism be best ensured? This is the Machiavellian scene that opens the latest book from Susan George, the prolific Franco-American political scientist and global justice activist. While perhaps best known for her work on world hunger, poverty and debt, George has turned to Europe and the US in How to Win the Class War, a satire of the 1%, or the "Davos class", as she puts it, in reference to the elite annual gatherings of the World Economic Forum. Tongue-in-cheek and at times bizarre, the book is likely to strike a chord with those involved in movements such as Occupy and others increasingly suspicious of political parties and elite institutions. "I don't think preachy books work," says George, who was in London this month. "I think sometimes people are more moved by [satire] and black humour … God knows there's plenty to satirise out there." George, 79, has spent decades studying and critiquing mainstream economic policy and is a key figure in alter-globalisation circles. Born in Ohio during the Great Depression, she moved to France in the 1950s and never left, joining activist movements against France's colonial war in Algeria and America's war in Vietnam. Today, she is honorary president of Attac-France, a group founded to push for taxes on foreign exchange transactions but which now works on a range of issues, and heads the board of the Transnational Institute network of "scholar-activists". Satire is an ancient political tool and George has turned to it before; her latest book is a sequel to The Lugano Report, published in 1999 and sold as a secret report drafted by researchers hired to advise on whether global capitalism could survive the next millennium. International in scope, The Lugano Report concluded that the four horsemen of the apocalypse (conquest, war, famine and pestilence) should be set loose to help rid the planet of its many "useless" people. Brutal enough to earn comparisons with the 18th-century satirical essay A Modest Proposal – in which Jonathan Swift suggested that the impoverished Irish should sell their children as food to rich people – The Lugano Report flew off the shelves in France and has since been published in more than a dozen languages. While she has spent much of her life thinking globally and writing about challenges facing developing countries, George says European governments' commitments to push through austerity policies despite their social costs has given her a new focus. "We are very preoccupied with our own situation and that's where the militant strength is going now, it's not going into fighting hunger or debt," she says. George is quick to argue, however, that there are important links to be drawn between European austerity policies and the structural adjustment programmes that poor countries adopted in the 1970s and 1980s. "Ordinary people in the [global] south from the late 1970s until today have had to pay for the crimes and the greed and the odious debts of the dictators of their own governments, of their own upper classes, and they know very well what this means for the population: it means deep cuts in housing, education, culture, health," she says. "Now it's our turn. Now it's called austerity. Call it what you like, but it's the same policy – it's socialise losses, privatise profits … [and] this has been pushed to a point where, although we began richer than the countries of the south … we are really creating now a situation where there are desperately poor people in Europe, in Britain, in normally wealthy countries." The question for George is whether the austerity programmes pushed by European governments despite their social costs are mistakes, or deliberate policies. She is convinced of the latter and argues there is a class in Europe that has never accepted the gains working people have made since the second world war and has decided that this is the perfect moment to try to claw them back. In her latest book, George's imagined working group of experts give their benefactors the good news first: that they (the 1%) are winning and are "even more firmly in control of economic, political and even social developments than was the case before the crisis struck". The bad news is that the situation remains precarious. Her tips for the rich include exploiting divisions among peoples' movements and exercising restraint in public displays of wealth. Above all, the working group argues that "to persuade is to win", and for the relentless repetition of lines such as: "the private sector will always outperform the public"; "a truly free society cannot exist without a free market"; "inequality is not a so-called problem but is intrinsic to society and could be genetic". If George can seem obsessed with secret cabals hatching grand plans for world domination, she's quick to say she does not believe in conspiracies – only interests and well-thought-out strategies to further them. She also has retorts ready for anyone who suggests she's pessimistic about the future. "I think that when things get to such a point, everyone is disgusted with how the politicians are behaving, that we can innovate and bring new ideas and policies to the fore."

FIGURE 5 ABOVE ARTICLE

German Scientists Show Climate Driven By Natural Cycles – Global Temperature To Drop To 1870 Levels By 2100!By P Gosselin on 3. Dezember 2013 Climate reveals periodic nature, thus no influence by CO2Prof. H. Luedecke and C.O. Weiss (Original German version here.) We reported recently about our spectral analysis work of European temperatures [1] which shows that during the last centuries all climate changes were caused by periodic (i.e. natural) processes. Non-periodic processes like a warming through the monotonic increase of CO2 in the atmosphere could cause at most 0.1° to 0.2° warming for a doubling of the CO2 content, as it is expected for 2100. Fig. 1 (Fig. 6 of [1] ) shows the measured temperatures (blue) and the temperatures reconstructed using the 6 strongest frequency components (red) of the Fourier spectrum, indicating that the temperature history is determined by periodic processes only. On sees from Fig. 1 that two cycles of periods 200+ years and ~65 years dominate the climate changes, the 200+ year cycle causing the largest part of the temperature increase since 1870. Fig. 1: Construction of temperatures using the 6 strongest Fourier components (red), European temperatures from instrumental measurements (blue). It is apparent that only a 200+ year cycle and a ~65 year cycle play a significant role. The ~65 year cycle is the well-known, much studied, and well understood “Atlantic/Pacific oscillation” (AMO/PDO). It can be traced back for 1400 years. The AMO/PDO has no external forcing it is “intrinsic dynamics”, an “oscillator”. Although the spectral analysis of the historical instrumental temperature measurements [1] show a strong 200+ year period, it cannot be inferred with certainty from these measurements, since only 240 years of measurement data are available. However, the temperatures obtained from the Spannagel stalagmite show this periodicity as the strongest climate variation by far since about 1100 AD. The existence of this 200+ year periodicity has nonetheless been doubted. Even though temperatures from the Spannagel stalagmite agree well with temperatures derived from North Atlantic sedimentation; and even though the solar “de Vries cycle”, which has this period length, is known for a long time as an essential factor determining the global climate. A perfect confirmation for the existence and the dominant influence of the 200+ year cycle as found by us [1] is provided by a recent paper [2] which analyses solar activities for periodic processes. Fig. 2: Spectrum of solar activity showing the 208 year period as the strongest climate variation. The spectrum Fig. 2 (Fig. 1d of [2]) shows clearly a 208-year period as the strongest variation of the solar activity. Fig. 3 (Fig. 4 of [2]) gives us the solar activity of the past until today as well as the prediction for the coming 500 years. This prediction is possible due to the multi-periodic character of the activity. Fig. 3: Solar activity from 1650 to present (measurement, solid line) and prediction for the coming 500 years (light gray: prediction from spectrum, dark gray: prediction from wavelet analysis). Letters M,D,G denote the historical global temperature minima: Maunder, Dalton, Gleissberg. The solar activity agrees well with the terrestrial climate. It clearly shows in particular all historic temperature minima. Thus the future temperatures can be predicted from the activities – as far as they are determined by the sun (the AMO/PDO is not determined by the sun). The 200+ year period found here [2], as it is found by us [1] is presently at its maximum. Through its influence the temperature will decrease until 2100 to a value like the one of the last “Little Ice Age” 1870. The wavelet analysis of the solar activity Fig. 4 (Fig. 1b of [2]) has interesting detail. In spite of its limited resolution it shows (as our analysis of the Spannagel stalagmite did) that the 200+ year period set in about 1000 years ago. This cycle appears, according to Fig. 4, regularly every 2500 years. (The causes for this 2500 year period are probably not understood.) Fig. 4: Wavelet analysis of solar activity (showing which periods were active at which time). The dominant oscillations (periods between 125 years and 250 years) are clearly recognizable and recurring at 2500 years. Summary The analysis of solar activity proves the existence and the strength of the 200+ year periodicity which we found from historical temperature measurements, as well as from the Spannagel stalagmite data. This 200+ year cycle is apparently the one known as “de Vries cycle”. This solar “de Vries cycle together with the AMO/PDO determine practically completely the global climate of the past (Fig. 1) and the coming time. A significant influence of CO2 on the climate thus has to be excluded. This latter is not surprising in view of the small amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and its weak infrared absorption cross section (also in view of the various proves of NEGATIVE water feedback). Fig. 5: Predicted global temperature of “official” models (red) and real (measured) global temperature (green). (FORUM COMPUTER SAYS IMAGES EXCEED POST AMOUNT PLEASE SEE POST # 25 THIS THREAD FOR FIGURE 5) The present “stagnation” of global temperature (Fig. 5) is essentially due to the AMO/PDO: the solar de Vries cycle is presently at its maximum. Around this maximum it changes negligibly. The AMO/PDO is presently beyond its maximum, corresponding to the small decrease of global temperature. Its next minimum will be 2035. The temperature can expected to be then similar to the last AMO/PDO minimum of 1940. Due to the de Vries cycle, the global temperature will drop until 2100 to a value corresponding to the “little ice age” of 1870. It accounts for the long temperature rise since 1870. One may note, that the stronger temperature increase from the 1970s to the 1990s, which is “officially” argued to prove warming by CO2, is essentially due to the AMO/PDO cycle. [1] H.Luedecke, A. Hempelmann, C.O. Weiss; Clim. Past. 9 (2013) p 447 [2] F. Steinhilber, J. Beer; Journ. Geophys. Res.: Space Physics 118 (2013) p 1861

LEFTY OBAMA ?? (WAS THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT MADE TO HELP THE COMMON MAN OR THE ELITES ??????????????) ......REM (Now, Andy did you hear about this one? Tell me, are you locked in the punch? Andy are you goofing on Elvis? Hey, baby Are we losing touch? If you believed they put a man on the moon Man on the moon If you believe there's nothing up his sleeve Then nothing is cool ..Andy Kaufman in the wrestling match yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah) +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++\\ Obamacare Could Be Worth More Than $90 Billion to the Insurance IndustryBy Jonathan Wu, ValuePenguin January 8, 2014 | Comments (30) The Affordable Care Act will push the over 45 million uninsured in the United States to find health care coverage. The largest portion of this group will find coverage through the health insurance marketplaces set up by the state and federal exchanges. Consumers purchasing through the exchanges will receive coverage through private insurance companies, with many receiving federal tax credits to help pay for policies. While the consumer may not be paying the full price of the policy, the insurance companies will still receive the full premium. With millions mandated to receive coverage, how much are the currently uninsured worth to the health insurance industry? To answer this question we looked at what the uninsured would pay in monthly premiums for coverage with private insurers. (See our methodology below) Based on our estimates the uninsured are worth a potential $92+ billion in annual premiums to the insurance companies. The Affordable Care Act requires that 80% of the value of the premiums be used to service health care costs, leaving a little over $18.4 billion to be spread across employees, marketing, overhead and profits. Insurance companies we've looked at could expect anywhere from 2-4% of all premiums to come in the form of profits. This would amount to $1.8-$3.6 billion dollars annually. Total Uninsured (2011) 45 million Uninsured Over 138% FPL 26.3 milion Total Annual Premiums $92 billion Profit Margin (2-4%) $1.8-3.6 billionIt will take a number of years for all of the uninsured to get coverage, with the CBO estimating that it may not occur until 2015. Accounting for annual increases in insurance premiums the annual total would easily exceed $100 billion by then. Our Methodology To estimate the potential value of the uninsured we needed to determine how many were uninsured and what their premiums would be for insurance. While the consumer may be paying only a fraction of the actual premiums due to tax credits, the insurance companies would still receive the full value of the premiums. Prices for plans vary dramatically between states and even between counties within states. In order to account for this we approached our analysis at a county by county level. For the cost of plans, we used the premium for the second lowest cost silver plan (SLCSP) available in each county. We chose this plan for the following reasons: The SLCSP is the plan used in the determination of the available subsidies. The cap on what your family spends on health insurance is applied to this plan with any excess paid in the form of tax credits. For those with incomes of less than 250% of FPL only silver plans are adjusted to have improved cost sharing, making silver plans a better deal for those that qualify. Using data from the 2011 census, that underlies our county-by-county map we could get an idea of how many people were uninsured. For the our calculations we only included people who had household incomes over 138% of the Federal Poverty Level. Those with incomes below that line do not qualify for subsidies and were much less likely to be able to afford on-exchange private insurance. The number of uninsured in each county was then broken down by age and a total potential premium was calculated using an age adjusted price for the SLSCP. The resulting total value of each county can be found in our map. Obamacare seems complex, but it doesn’t have to be. In only minutes, you can learn the critical facts you need to know in a special free report called Everything You Need to Know About Obamacare. This FREE guide contains the key information and money-making advice that every American must know. Please click here to access your free copy. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ LEFTY OBAMA ?? yeah,yeah,yeah,yeah....... SEE also +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Obama Affordable Care Act Hurts Twice As Many As It Helps Wed, Jan 08 2014 00:00:00 E A15_ISSUES By BETSY MCCAUGHEY, Investor's Business Daily Posted 01/07/2014 07:02 PM ET http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-on-the-right/010714-685543-obamacare-hurts-twice-as-many-as-it- helps.htm oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 LEFTY OBAMA ?? (WAS THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT MADE TO HELP THE COMMON MAN OR THE ELITES ??????????????) ......REM (Now, Andy did you hear about this one? Tell me, are you locked in the punch? Andy are you goofing on Elvis? Hey, baby Are we losing touch? If you believed they put a man on the moon Man on the moon If you believe there's nothing up his sleeve Then nothing is cool ..Andy Kaufman in the wrestling match yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah)

PLEASE VISIT POST 1 this THREAD Is The Media Now Just Another Word for ‘Control’? by John Pilger, January 06, 2014 A recent poll asked people in Britain how many Iraqis had been killed as a result of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The answers they gave were shocking. A majority said that fewer than 10,000 had been killed. Scientific studies report that up to a million Iraqi men, women and children died in an inferno lit by the British government and its ally in Washington. That’s the equivalent of the genocide in Rwanda. And the carnage goes on. Relentlessly. What this reveals is how we in Britain have been misled by those whose job is to keep the record straight. The American writer and academic Edward Herman calls this "normalizing the unthinkable." He describes two types of victims in the world of news – "worthy victims" and "unworthy victims." The "worthy victims" are those who suffer at the hands of our enemies: the likes of Assad, Qadaffi, Saddam Hussein. "Worthy victims" qualify for what we call "humanitarian intervention," whereas "unworthy victims" are those who get in the way of our punitive might and that of the "good" dictators we employ. Saddam Hussein was once a "good" dictator, but he got uppity and disobedient and was relegated to "bad" dictator. In Indonesia, General Suharto was a "good" dictator, regardless of his slaughter of perhaps a million people, aided by the governments of Britain and America. He also wiped out a third of the population of East Timor with the help of British fighter aircraft and British machine guns. Suharto was even welcomed to London by the Queen and when he died peacefully in his bed, he was lauded as enlightened, a modernizer – one of us. Unlike Saddam Hussein, he never got uppity. When I traveled in Iraq in the 1990s, the two principal Moslem groups, the Shia and Sunni, had their differences but they lived side by side, even intermarried and regarded themselves with pride as Iraqis. There was no Al Qaeda, there were no jihadists. We blew all that to bits in 2003 with "shock and awe." And today Sunni and Shia are fighting each other right across the Middle East. This mass murder is being funded by the regime in Saudi Arabia which beheads people and discriminates against women. Most of the 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. In 2010, WikiLeaks released a cable sent to US embassies by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She wrote this: "Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support for Al Qaeda, the Taliban, al Nusra and other terrorist groups … worldwide." And yet the Saudis are our valued allies. They’re good dictators. The British royals visit them often. We sell them all the weapons they want. I use the first person "we" and "our" in line with newsreaders and commentators who often say "we," preferring not to distinguish between the criminal power of our governments and us, the public. We are all assumed to be part of a consensus: Tory and Labour, Obama’s White House too. When Nelson Mandela died, the BBC went straight to David Cameron, then to Obama. Cameron who went to South Africa during Mandela’s 25th was tantamount to support for the apartheid regime, and it was Obama who recently shed a tear in Mandela’s cell on Robben Island – he who presides over the cages of Guantanamo. What were they really mourning about Mandela? Clearly not his extraordinary will to resist an oppressive system whose depravity the US and British governments backed year after year. Rather they were grateful for the crucial role Mandela had played in quelling an uprising in black South Africa against the injustice of white political and economic power. This was surely the only reason he was released. Today the same ruthless economic power is apartheid in another form, making South Africa the most unequal society on earth. Some call this "reconciliation." We all live in an information age – or so we tell each other as we caress our smart phones like rosary beads, heads down, checking, monitoring, tweeting. We’re wired; we’re on message; and the dominant theme of the message is ourselves. Identity is the zeitgeist. A lifetime ago in Brave New World, Aldous Huxley predicted this as the ultimate means of social control because it was voluntary, addictive and shrouded in illusions of personal freedom. Perhaps the truth is that we live not in an information age but a media age. Like the memory of Mandela, the media’s wondrous technology has been hijacked. From the BBC to CNN, the echo chamber is vast. In his acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, Harold Pinter spoke about a "manipulation of power worldwide, while masquerading as a force for universal good, a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis." But, said Pinter, "it never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest." Pinter was referring to the systematic crimes of the United States and to an undeclared censorship by omission – that is leaving out crucial information that might help us make sense of the world. Today liberal democracy is being replaced by a system in which people are accountable to a corporate state and not the other way around as it should be. In Britain, the parliamentary parties are devoted to the same doctrine of care for the rich and struggle for the poor. This denial of real democracy is an historic shift. It’s why the courage of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange is such a threat to the powerful and unaccountable. And it’s an object lesson for those of us who are meant to keep the record straight. The great reporter Claud Cockburn put it well: "Never believe anything until it’s officially denied." Imagine if the lies of governments had been properly challenged and exposed as they secretly prepared to invade Iraq – perhaps a million people would be alive today. This is a transcript of John Pilger’s contribution to a special edition of BBC Radio 4′s "Today" program, on 2 January 2014, guest-edited by the artist and musician P.J. Harvey.

FTR #305 The Bormann Organization (BORMANN Part 2) Posted by FTR ⋅ August 15, 2001 http://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-305-the-bormann-organization/

Excerpt from pp. 179–183 of Martin Bormann, Nazi in Exile (part 1 Borman) Posted by FTR ⋅ July 17, 2005 The SS sergeant said that much later he had met up with Bormann’s com­pan­ion of those fate­ful ten days; he assured him that the party min­is­ter had made it safely through the British lines by fol­low­ing the Auto­bahn to the out­skirts of Flens­burg, where he was to make con­tact with Grand Admi­ral Doenitz. Mar­tin Bor­mann, in the interim, had met Hein­rich Mueller, who had slipped out of Berlin ear­lier and was wait­ing in a pre­arranged safe house. Mueller told Bor­mann it would not be wise to meet with the new Reich pres­i­dent, who by now had car­ried out the uncon­di­tional sur­ren­der in both Rheims and Berlin. He pre­dicted a war crimes trial of all Ger­man lead­ers, and said that Bor­mann would be invit­ing seri­ous dif­fi­culty if he sur­faced at this par­tic­u­lar time. Mar­tin Bor­mann secluded him­self in a pri­vate Ger­man san­i­tar­ium in Schleswig-Holstein. The Gestapo chief, tak­ing on the secu­rity of the new party min­is­ter and of his safe trans­porta­tion to South Amer­ica by assorted routes, made the exact plans that he would effect at pre­cisely the right time. Mueller had already ini­ti­ated a strat­egy of decep­tion to explain his own dis­ap­pear­ance from promi­nent cir­cles in Berlin. The week he slipped out of the Ger­man cap­i­tal, his griev­ing fam­ily gath­ered for his “funeral.” A cof­fin was borne to a ceme­tery where it was buried with appro­pri­ate cer­e­mony. The grave was marked with a head­stone bear­ing the words “Our Dear Daddy,” Mueller’s name, his birth­date, and the date of his alleged death in Berlin in 1945. Sev­eral years fol­low­ing this inci­dent, an edi­tor of a Ger­man news mag­a­zine, act­ing on an informer’s tip gen­er­ated by the mas­ter decep­tion­ist Mueller him­self, from South Amer­ica, obtained a court order in 1963, and the grave was opened. When the cof­fin in ques­tion was unearthed and opened, the edi­tor and the attend­ing offi­cials found three skele­tons, none remotely match­ing Hein­rich Mueller’s short and thick-set mea­sure­ments, or his markedly promi­nent forehead. A decep­tion plan for Bor­mann had been com­pleted by Mueller in Berlin. Tops in police work and crafty beyond imag­in­ing, he pro­vided for a match­ing skele­ton and skull, com­plete with iden­ti­cal den­tal work, for future foren­sic experts to pon­der over and to reach con­clu­sions that suited his pur­pose. Mueller was a for­mer inspec­tor of detec­tives in the Munich police depart­ment; he had been brought into the higher ech­e­lons of the Gestapo by Rein­hard Hey­drich because of his pro­fes­sion­al­ism and bril­liance. He had risen to the rank of SS chief group leader and senior gen­eral of the Waf­fen SS. The solu­tion was ele­men­tary; his moti­va­tion was pro­tec­tion and enhance­ment of the high­est author­ity of the state. To this prin­ci­ple, Mueller had been devoted for a decade as chief of police. His scheme of sub­sti­tut­ing a stand-in for Mar­tin Bormann’s body in the freight yards of Berlin was told to me three dif­fer­ent times by three dif­fer­ent indi­vid­u­als. One was an agent whose career was in the Secret Intel­li­gence Ser­vice of the British For­eign Office, one served the Fed­eral Repub­lic of Ger­many, and one was a mem­ber of Mossad, the exte­rior ser­vice of Israeli intel­li­gence. The first tip came over din­ner in 1947, in the U.S. press club in Frank­furt. It was the day I returned from Berlin and a per­sonal meet­ing with Gen­eral Lucius D. Clay, mil­i­tary gov­er­nor of the U.S. Zone of Occu­pa­tion. Gen­eral Clay had offered me the posi­tion of his civil­ian deputy, but I had turned it down with some reluc­tance, pre­fer­ring to remain a Euro­pean reporter for Amer­i­can news­pa­pers. Dur­ing the press club din­ner, the British agent and I dis­cussed the fas­ci­nat­ing and bizarre dis­ap­pear­ance of Reich­sleiter Bor­mann; this source said flatly that Mueller had engi­neered Bormann’s escape, using the device of a con­cen­tra­tion camp look-alike to throw future inves­ti­ga­tors off the scent. Many years later, in 1973, on a visit to Bonn, a con­ver­sa­tion with one of Gen­eral Gehlen’s aides in the Fed­eral Repub­lic intel­li­gence ser­vice con­firmed the 1947 British tip. The Ger­man stated: “The skull rep­re­sented as Bormann’s is a fraud. Nat­u­rally the West Ger­man gov­ern­ment wishes to bury the past and estab­lish Bormann’s death once and for all. They have been con­stantly unset­tled by con­tin­ued rev­e­la­tions and scan­dals.” In 1978, an Israeli Mossad agent with a Ger­man spe­cial­iza­tion said to me that they had never closed the Bor­mann file in Tel Aviv. “We know he is in South Amer­ica. We are not very com­pelled to find him because he was never per­son­ally involved in the ‘final solu­tion.’” The Israeli added: “Bormann’s busi­ness was busi­ness, and from what I know per­son­ally he did a thor­ough job of shift­ing Ger­man assets away from the Third Reich.” To piece my infor­ma­tion together: Gen­eral Hein­rich Mueller ini­ti­ated his Bor­mann scheme dur­ing the wan­ing months of the war in the time frame when the Reich­sleiter was mov­ing to trans­fer Ger­man assets to safe havens in other places. At Con­cen­tra­tion Camp Sach­sen­hausen he exam­ined sev­eral inmates in the spe­cial elite group known as Son­derkom­mando, those who had been work­ing in the Ger­man coun­ter­feit oper­a­tion of British pound notes and of other cur­ren­cies. Doc­u­ments pre­pared by them would also be used by SS men in their flight at war’s end (even­tu­ally, over 10,000 for­mer Ger­man mil­i­tary made it to South Amer­ica along escape routes ODESSA and Deutsche Hil­fsverein). The Son­derkom­mando, placed in a spe­cial con­text within the camp, were treated as the skilled pro­fes­sion­als they were—engravers, doc­u­ments spe­cial­ists, and qual­ity print­ers— who had been rounded up from occu­pied coun­tries and put to work for the Third Reich. Peter Edel Hirschweh, who par­tic­i­pated in this spe­cial work and sur­vived, described it as fol­lows: All of the inmates, with­out any excep­tions, were Jews or descen­dants of mixed mar­riages. We were “bear­ers of secrets.” Even if those two qual­i­fi­ca­tions had not alone been suf­fi­cient to clas­sify us as a death com­mand, we received addi­tional con­fir­ma­tion and proof through the fol­low­ing events: If some of the pris­on­ers felt slightly ill, received an injury on the fin­ger (while engrav­ing) or the like they were taken to the doc­tor, heav­ily guarded, to receive treat­ment there; the physi­cian was not allowed to talk to them at all. Per­sons who were seri­ously ill were not allow to go to the infir­mary, even if they could be cured there. They were iso­lated in the wash­room and if this did not help, they were liq­ui­dated, i.e., killed. When Hein­rich Mueller vis­ited Sach­sen­hausen he walked through the engrav­ing, print­ing, and doc­u­ment areas look­ing for any inmates who might resem­ble Bor­mann. In one he noticed two indi­vid­u­als who did bear a resem­blance in stature and facial struc­ture to the Reich­sleiter. He had them placed in sep­a­rate con­fine­ment. There­upon a spe­cial den­tal room was made ready for “treat­ment” of the two men. A party den­tist was brought in to work over and over again on the mouth of each man, until his teeth, real and arti­fi­cial, matched pre­cisely the Reichsleiter’s. In April 1945, upon com­ple­tion of these alter­ations, the two vic­tim­ized men were brought to the Kur­fuer­sten­strasse build­ing to be held until needed. Dr. Blaschke had advised Mueller to use live inmates to insure a believ­able aging process for den­tures and gums; hence the need for sev­eral months of preparation. Exact den­tal fidelity was to play a major part in the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of Hitler’s body by the invad­ing Rus­sians. It was to be of sig­nif­i­cance in Frank­furt twenty-eight years later, when the West Ger­man gov­ern­ment staged a press con­fer­ence to declare that they had “found Bormann’s skele­ton prov­ing he had died in Berlin’s freight yards May 1–2, 1945.” Dr. Hugo Blaschke was the den­tist who had served both Hitler and Bor­mann. He had offices in the fash­ion­able pro­fes­sional area of Uhlanstrasse, but he always went to the chan­cellery for his two most impor­tant clients. Borm ann had estab­lished a well-equipped den­tal office there, where Dr. Blaschke and his nurse, Fraulein Kaete Heuse­mann, would take care of the den­tal require­ments of the Fuehrer and the Reich­sleiter. The den­tal records for both were kept in the chan­cellery. When the Rus­sians had threat­ened Berlin, Dr. Blaschke pru­dently moved his prac­tice to Munich, but Fraulein Heuse­mann had stayed on. Hitler’s den­tal charts were never found, because Bor­mann had removed them from the chan­cellery files. How­ever, the Rus­sians, who had wanted com­plete iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of Hitler after the fall of Berlin, brought Fraulein Heuse­mann to Soviet head­quar­ters. She had iden­ti­fied the den­tal fit­tings gath­ered in a cigar box as belong­ing to Adolf Hitler. This was con­firmed by the den­tal tech­ni­cian, Fritz Echt­mann, who had made the fit­tings for Hitler on order of Dr. Blaschke. Once they had made the iden­ti­fi­ca­tions, both were shipped off to Moscow, remain­ing there in prison so that they could not com­mu­ni­cate with oth­ers for sev­eral years. They were clas­si­fied by the Rus­sians as among the chan­cellery group who had sur­vived the bunker; they would spend years in Russ­ian pris­ons and slave camps until the Krem­lin lead­ers decided how to han­dle their pub­lic announce­ment of Hitler’s death—suicide in the bunker, or escape to Spain and South Amer­ica, as Stalin first believed. In Bormann’s case, the prob­lem was more com­plex, more chal­leng­ing. Yet under Mueller’s skill­ful guid­ance, two bod­ies were planted; their dis­cov­ery was made pos­si­ble when an SS man, act­ing on Mueller’s orders, leaked the infor­ma­tion to a Stern mag­a­zine edi­tor as part of a ploy to “prove” that Bor­mann had died in the Berlin freight yard. The stand-ins for Bor­mann were two unfor­tu­nates from Con­cen­tra­tion Camp Sach­sen­hausen, who had been killed gen­tly in the Gestapo base­ment secret cham­bers with cyanide spray blown from a cig­a­rette lighter (a killing device used later by the KGB in 1957 and 1959 against Lev Rebet and Stephen Ban­dera, two lead­ers of the Ukrain­ian ÎmigrÎs in Munich). At Gestapo head­quar­ters, the night of April 30, the bod­ies were taken by a spe­cial SS team to the freight yards near the Wei­den­damm Bridge and buried not too deep beneath rub­ble in two dif­fer­ent areas. The Gestapo squad then made a hur­ried retreat from Berlin, join­ing their leader, SS Senior Gen­eral Hein­rich Mueller, in Flensburg. The funeral and bur­ial caper was to be a Mueller trade­mark through­out the years of search­ing for Mar­tin Bor­mann. The Mossad was to point out that they have been wit­nesses over the years to the exhuma­tion of six skele­tons, two in Berlin and four in South Amer­ica, pur­ported to be that of Mar­tin Bor­mann. All turned out to be those of oth­ers, although in Frank­furt in 1973 the den­tal tech­ni­cian, Fritz Echt­mann, after years as a Russ­ian pris­oner, was to say that the den­tal work found in the skull of the skele­ton declared to be the remains of Bor­mann resem­bled those fill­ings he had worked on in 1944. Simon Wiesen­thal, direc­tor of the Jew­ish Doc­u­men­ta­tion Cen­ter in Vienna, had been invited to Frank­furt by West Ger­man author­i­ties who were pre­sent­ing the press event, with the CIA in the back­ground. He said that, while the skull resem­bled Bormann’s, he doubted it was Bor­mann. Still, Hein­rich Mueller had done his job well, and from South Amer­ica he pointed the Bonn government’s inves­ti­ga­tors through inter­me­di­aries toward this sec­ond planted Bor­mann skele­ton. So my sources state; the fab­ri­ca­tions of 1945 con­tinue to pro­vide the party min­is­ter with his “pass­port to freedom.”

TO LEARN ABOUT America’s Genocidal Legacy in IRAQ just go to GOOGLE NEWS once a week and put in IRAQ BOMBING. The horror is unending. JUST IN TODAY Over 100 Killed as al-Qaeda Seizes Most of Fallujah Fighting Continues on Outskirts, But City Has Fallen by Jason Ditz, January 03, 2014 Print This | Share This Final death tolls are still up in the air and the fighting is ongoing, but well over 100 people are confirmed dead today in fighting over the Western Iraqi cities of Ramadi and Fallujah, and Fallujah appears to have fallen more or less entirely under al-Qaeda of Iraq’s (AQI) control. Officials reported 71 AQI fighters and 32 civilians dead, and an unknown number of tribal fighters as well as Iraqi military and police are also dead in the fighting, which has grown in intensity over the past few days. Monday’s violent crackdown on protests in Ramadi gave way to mass resignations in parliament and bigger protests in Anbar Province, which AQI used as an opportunity to attack police stations and seize chunks of both Ramadi and Fallujah. They still hold part of Ramadi, but their big possession is Fallujah, where Iraqi security forces are no longer seen, and where virtually the whole city is under their control. AQI has issued a statement declaring Fallujah an “independent Islamic state,” and at the moment the only resistence they’re facing anywhere near the city is from local tribal leaders, with the military pushed back to the highway leading from the area into Baghdad.

POST #2 occurred (PLUS Putin continues to back Assad) then ........BOMBINGS IN RUSSIA >>>>>>CONNECTED ???????????????????? YOU DECIDE +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ US/Saudi covert operations in Chechnya: Ricin, diamonds, Stingers ... english.pravda.ru › LINK Apr 30, 2013 - It was then that the US and Saudi intelligence organizations figured out that diamonds from the African Continent would be a worthy convertible ... Saudis offer Russia secret oil deal if it drops Syria - Telegraph www.telegraph.co.uk › LINK Aug 27, 2013 - Prince Bandar, head of Saudi intelligence, allegedly confronted the Kremlin ... but he also hinted at Chechen terrorist attacks on Russia's Winter ... As-Safir said Prince Bandar pledged to safeguard Russia’s naval base in Syria if the Assad regime is toppled, but he also hinted at Chechen terrorist attacks on Russia’s Winter Olympics in Sochi if there is no accord. “I can give you a guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics next year. The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the games are controlled by us,” he allegedly said. ====================================== POST #2 occurred (PLUS Putin continues to back Assad) then ........BOMBINGS IN RUSSIA >>>>>>CONNECTED ???????????????????? YOU DECIDE +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Global Warming Expedition to Prove Antarctic Ice is Melting Trapped by Ice December 29, 2013 by Daniel Greenfield 105 Comments And it’s an ice so thick that icebreakers have been forced to turn back. Here is how Chris Tuney,a self-proclaimed, “Scientist, explorer and Writer” and a Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Professor of Climate Change at the University of University of New South Wales, described the “Australasian Antarctic Expedition”. How has that worked out for Tuney? The Antarctic ice was unaware that the science was settled… and settled in place instead trapping Tuney and his media Warmist allies in its Climate Change denier grip. The Australasian sector is dominated by the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, the largest of three ice sheets that contains enough freshwater to raise the world’s sea level by some 52 metres. Until recently it was thought this ice sheet was stable, sitting on the continental crust above today’s sea level. However there is an increasing body of evidence, including by the AAE members, that have identified parts of the East Antarctic which are highly susceptible to melting and collapse from ocean warming. One of the purposes of the expedition was to “determine the extent to which human activity and pollution has directly impacted on this remote region of Antarctica.” In Antarctica, the Warmists discovered just how ice cold Global Warming really was. The metaphor just couldn’t be more fitting: desperate true believers of global warming/accelerating polar ice melt now find themselves trapped by thousands of square kilometers of summertime sea ice that wasn’t supposed to be there. No picture could better symbolize and communicate the intellectual bankruptcy and disillusionment of a faithful group who refuse to believe they have been led astray. This has to be deeply embarrassing, if not outright humiliating. It’s reported here that many of the climate science boatpeople are actually from renowned media outlets, like The Guardian, who we can safely assume were onboard hoping to capture dramatic images of vast areas of open sea water, or of calving ice sheets with hundreds of tons of ice breaking off and plunging into the sea hourly. And with a little luck, maybe even some photos of a couple of drowned penguins. Nowadays true believers find themselves journeying to the extreme corners of the globe in a desperate search for signs of the coming climate catastrophe. Signs are getting tougher to come by. Indeed in Antarctica what they found was a reality that was precisely the exact opposite of what they had expected or had hoped for: no open sea seas – just thousands and thousands of square kilometers of sea ice, which ironically turned on them. On Christmas Eve, a blizzard hit our ship with 50-knot winds – mild for these parts – that made it difficult to stand up straight on the deck … By Christmas morning, we were beset with ice. Our expedition was forced into a temporary pause, while we waited for the polar winds to be kind to us and blow the pack ice out of our way. Antarctica is not just cold, windy and wet. It is the extreme of all those things. Leave a hole in your armour – a glove not tucked into a sleeve, a gap around your neck where you forgot your scarf – and the weather will find and punish you fast. The cold starts off as stabbing, then it sears the skin and eventually sends the nerve-endings into a symphony of confusion. I took a glove off to type an email outside at one point and, after my fingers turned white and I lost the ability to move them, I swear they felt hot. Painful, boiling hot, as though I had just plunged them into a cup of coffee. This is what happens when a bunch of Warmists decamp from their local coffee shop to try and prove the climate wrong while tweeting and tumblring and emailing their way around the coldest place on earth.

"Angry Arab" or CIA operative? As'ad AbuKhalil has worked for the CIA. That's not a mischief nor is it something dishonorable; the agency is a huge bureaucracy and it often commissions different tasks from different experts, and AbuKhalil identifies as someone who knows about the Middle East. Washington is a small town and these types of activities are difficult to conceal. Yet due to non-disclosure protocols, no one who has seen AbuKhalil at any CIA function can share this information publicly without risk of legal action. Even so, many in Washington have long seen or heard rumors of AbuKhalil’s attendance at Langley-sponsored events. And AbuKhalil routinely posted about his trips to Washington on his frequently updated blog – but he rarely shared what kind of activity he was engaged in during these trips. So whenever AbuKhalil lobbed accusations against anyone he disagreed with, those familiar with his activities in Washington knew he was a hypocrite. But only until today was evidence finally uncovered after Syrian activist Ahed al-Hendi, while perusing through public records on the Internet, discovered that AbuKhalil had been paid by the CIA. Although AbuKhalil's position as a "host" may not be senior enough or even relevant to the work of the agency, the fact that he has been cleared to work at Langley, has actually done so, and has managed to hide it all these years, tells us something about his character. AbuKhalil – the staunch anti-imperialist, anti-White Man freedom fighter – quickly realized that this revelation would be a damaging one. He swiftly contacted al-Hendi in an attempt to nip the problem in its bud. "You are endangering my life with your distortions and lies. You can go to jail for something like that and I will sue you and drag you to court," AbuKhalil wrote via email. "I will give you till tomorrow otherwise I will notify my lawyer and Facebook […] My lawyer says you have an hour." Notice AbuKhalil, who has long insisted that he is the most transparent man on the planet and would post anything that he would get his hands on, makes no effort to explain why public records indicate he was paid by the CIA. Instead, AbuKhalil sounded scared for his life, perhaps because during the craze of the Global War on Terror, he was consulted on Islamist movements, judging by his book on the subject. Or perhaps AbuKhalil’s other employers, like pro-Hezbollah Beirut newspaper Al-Akhbar, knew of such links and were happy to see one of them bash their rivals at Langley. As for what work AbuKhalil did for the CIA, no one can be sure due to non-disclosure protocol and the fear of legal suit. But thanks to al-Hendi, we now have proof that the Lebanese-American professor has worked with the CIA, no matter how small his involvement. What AbuKhalil did for the CIA is his business. But what is our business is to show that the man who swears on his honor about his anti-Americanism, and continuously bashes others for being pro-America, clearly has a few skeletons in his closet. If you are a US citizen, working for the government, including the CIA, is an honorable task. Indeed, Americans are required to recite the pledge of allegiance, and this entails doing whatever it takes to defend the homeland. But the problem with AbuKhalil is that his apparent insecurity about being an American citizen has led him on frequent anti-American crusades. Maybe it is the Lebanese political culture that has forced AbuKhalil to perfect his trademark ad hominem attacks that blast people’s characters instead of their ideas. Perhaps the only way a man of AbuKhalil’s intellect to be heard is to propagate offensive and populist rhetoric while carrying out his punditry gigs. AbuKhalil's academic credentials are weak anyways. The sheer amount of time he must spend away from his professorial duties on blogs, social media, and TV appearances make many wonder whether his scholarly work is even diligent or credible.For those who meet him, AbuKhalil seems like a humble guy. Yet for someone with his background and position, he should know better. AbuKhalil should be more respectful when making his points, and he should do them without slandering others. No one cares whether AbuKhalil actually worked, or still works, for the CIA. No one cares about his social background or preferences. No one cares who sends him his paychecks or why. What many care about is for him to stop his populism and stop spewing unsubstantiated claims about the character and integrity of those he disagrees with. Hussain Abdul-Hussain is the Washington Bureau Chief of Kuwaiti newspaper Alrai. He tweets @hahussain "Angry Arab" or CIA operative? Read more at http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=7af_1388415528#gDkfkBgVEHvaGola.99 ================================================================= AND The ‘Islamist’ who wasn’t By Inayat Bunglawala | The News | February 12, 2009 ===============================0o0o0o0=================================== He was a self-confessed al-Qaida insider who in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was interviewed by all the major news networks eager to hear his fiery rhetoric. Following the 7/7 bombings, he told us that he had now recognised the error of his ways and was committed to countering “Islamism”. He was going to spill the beans in a keenly anticipated book called Leaving al-Qaida relating how he had gone about recruiting British Muslims to go overseas and fight. The American CBS network’s flagship documentary programme 60 Minutes broadcast an interview with him in March 2007 in which he talked about his “recruiting and fundraising techniques” in his extremist days. Government ministers such as Tony McNulty sought an audience with him in order to listen to his learned thoughts on how to de-radicalise young Muslims. Nick Cohen praised him for steering British Muslims:… away from violence while teaching wider society that radical Islam is not a rational reaction to Western provocation, but a totalitarian ideology with a life of its own. In Manchester in April (2007), Hassan Butt, a one-time jihadist who is now opposed to extremism, was stabbed and beaten for speaking out against fanaticism. He now lives in hiding. There was only one problem with all this though – it was complete bullxxxx. Hassan Butt’s admission in court that he was a “professional xxxx” who said what “the media wanted to hear” because all he was really interested in was making money will not have come as a surprise to many British Muslims who have long viewed him as a charlatan. Butt “confessed he had also stabbed himself in the arm to make it appear as if he had been attacked by extremists for speaking out against violence.” The tens of millions of pounds that the government has poured into its preventing violent extremism programme has inevitably attracted a number of self-professed “ex-Islamists” who are prepared to say exactly what the government and sections of the media want to hear ie that the rise of violent extremism in the UK has little to do with our government’s warmongering abroad and is mainly the fault of “Islamist ideology”. Such an answer of course perfectly suits the government, which does not favour closer scrutiny of the impact of some of its actions abroad. It also suits those like Cohen who were enthusiastic propagandists for those misbegotten wars. With the election of Barack Obama and his warmly received call for there to be a “new partnership based on mutual respect and mutual interest” between the United States and the Muslim world, there at long last exists an opportunity to make amends for some of the disastrous mistakes of the past. If we in the UK are to also avail ourselves of that opportunity it will require the government to do more than simply offer what are in effect bribes to those who are willing to turn a blind eye to its unjust policies.

LEFTY OBAMA ?? !!!!!!!!!!! (no) New Revelation that AG Eric Holder Is Protecting JPMorgan Chase NYC From Criminal Investigation http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/18387-new-revelation-that-attorney-general-eric-holder-is-protecting-jpmorgan-chase-nyc-from-criminal-investigation

UPDATE Economic Times Ukraine's Outlook Raised by S&P to Stable on Russian Aid Bloomberg-4 hours ago Ukraine had its credit-rating outlook upgraded to stable from negative by Standard & Poor's after Russia said this month that it would provide ... + Show moreShow less Ukraine outlook brightens after Russia bailout: S&P Economic Times-7 hours ago Ukraine expects remaining $12 billion of Russian bailout in early 2014 Reuters-Dec 25, 2013 Ukraine protests: The view from Moscow Opinion -Aljazeera.com-Dec 22, 2013 Why Putin Bailed Out Ukraine Blog -Washington Post (blog)-Dec 24, 2013

(AUSTERITY.....its a bitch,Gaal,Rolling Stones) +++++++++++ THE TELEGRAPH 13,000 died needlessly at 14 worst NHS trusts The needless deaths of thousands of NHS patients will be exposed in a report this week. Basildon and Thurrock Hospitals NHS Trust saw 1,600 more deaths than might have been expected in seven years Photo: PAUL GROVER Laura Donnelly and Patrick Sawer 9:21PM BST 13 Jul 2013 950 Comments The NHS’s medical director will spell out the failings of 14 trusts in England, which between them have been responsible for up to 13,000 “excess deaths” since 2005. Prof Sir Bruce Keogh will describe how each hospital let its patients down badly through poor care, medical errors and failures of management, and will show that the scandal of Stafford Hospital, where up to 1,200 patients died needlessly, was not a one-off. The report will also pile pressure on Labour over its handling of the NHS, with the Conservatives likely to seize on it to attack Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary who was in charge of the NHS in England from June 2009 until May 2010. The report, due to be published on Tuesday, will: • Name 14 hospitals as having excess rates of death, with hundreds of patients dying needlessly at each of them since 2005; Related Articles Hundreds of women may have aborted healthy babies after NHS blunder 01 Nov 2013 Lives torn apart by failure to do the basics at 14 hospitals 13 Jul 2013 NHS will 'sleepwalk' into more Staffords without radical change 11 Jul 2013 Health watchdog put 20 gagging orders on staff 30 Jun 2013 Watchdog accused of hospital cover-up 'still not fit for purpose' 19 Jun 2013 Eleven hospital trusts to be put under 'special measures' 16 Jul 2013 How to recognise atrial fibrillation Bupa • Severely criticise the worst hospital, Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which had 1,600 more deaths than would have been expected in seven years – a higher death toll than that at Stafford; • Show that the warning signs were there for managers and ministers to see, including alarming levels of infections, patients suffering from neglect and appalling blunders such as surgery performed on the wrong parts of bodies. The report was commissioned in February by the Prime Minister after the inquiry by Robert Francis QC into the Stafford scandal exposed appalling lapses in both care of patients and the regulation of hospitals. Sir Bruce investigated the 14 hospital trusts with the worst mortality rates over the past two years. They were: Basildon and Thurrock in Essex; United Lincolnshire; Blackpool; The Dudley Group, West Midlands; George Eliot, Warwickshire; Northern Lincolnshire and Goole; Tameside, Greater Manchester; Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire; Colchester, Essex; Medway, Kent; Burton, Staffordshire; North Cumbria; East Lancashire; and Buckinghamshire Healthcare. Research carried out by one of Sir Bruce’s advisers, Prof Sir Brian Jarman of Imperial College London, found that in some cases appalling death rates stretched back to 2005. In total Sir Brian calculated that up to 13,000 more patients died in that period than would have been statistically expected. His analysis shows that in the last five years of the last Labour government, from 2005 to 2010, eight of the trusts had death rates well above the average in at least four of those years. Mortality rates at Basildon and Thurrock, Blackpool Teaching Hospitals and East Lancashire Hospitals were statistically “high” – persistently above average – in all of the five years to 2010, while Colchester, Dudley, George Eliot, Tameside and United Lincolnshire were “high” in four out of five years before the general election. At the worst hospital, Basildon and Thurrock, the “mortality ratio” from 2005 until last year was 20 per cent above the NHS average, with up to 1,600 more deaths than there would have been if it had the average level of deaths among its patients. However, from 2005 until 2009 the hospital was given a “good” rating by NHS regulators, first the Healthcare Commission, then its successor, the Care Quality Commission. Tameside Hospital has paid out £30  million in settlements for negligence in the past three years (CAVENDISH) Among the worst hospitals exposed in the review is Tameside Hospital Foundation Trust in Ashton-under-Lyne. At Tameside, which is about half the size of the Basildon and United Lincolnshire trusts, there were more than 830 excess deaths. Christine Green, its chief executive, and Tariq Mahmood, its medical director, resigned just over a week ago, before publication of the report. Several board members have also resigned. Sir Bruce examined not just mortality rates but also infection levels, the number of patients suffering from preventable and potentially fatal neglect and numbers of so-called “never events”, such as operations on the wrong part of the body or surgical instruments left inside a patient. He found that at United Lincolnshire hospitals, there were 12 such events in three years, with seven at Basildon and Thurrock and five at Buckinghamshire Healthcare Trust. Separate research showed that the hospitals were paying out large amounts in compensation for failures and errors. The negligence bills were three times those of the average NHS trust. Between them, the 14 hospitals have paid £234 million in negligence settlements in the past three years. Many of the cases will date back far longer, as the legal battles often take several years. Tameside and East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust have paid out £30 million each to victims of poor care since 2009. United Lincolnshire Hospitals Trust paid out £28 million and Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals £19 million. Sir Bruce will say that none of the hospitals was failing on the “scale” of Stafford, sources said, but NHS campaigners will point to the report as evidence of a series of “mini-Staffords”. The review will decide whether the existing steps being taken by the 14 trusts to improve quality go far enough and whether regulatory action is needed to protect patients. The recommendations could lead to the removal of the hospitals’ chief executives, or the replacement of entire boards or even the closure of services. At Basildon and Thurrock just 51 per cent of staff said they would be happy for friends or family to be treated at the hospital, while at United Lincolnshire 55 per cent said so. At North Cumbria University Hospitals Trust just 35 per cent of staff said last year that they would be happy with the standard of care a relation or friend might receive there should they need treatment, compared with the national average of 60 per cent. Sir Bruce’s findings were seized on by the Conservatives last night to attack Labour over its handling of the NHS, and particularly, Mr Burnham’s record. David Morris, a Conservative MP on the Commons health select committee, said: “Andy Burnham and his predecessors missed far too many warnings about high hospital death rates. He should take a long hard look at his record and ask himself whether he is really fit for the role of shadow health secretary.” The Conservative attack will be stepped up on Tuesday but Labour said last night that it stood by its record. A spokesman said: “The claim that Labour ignored problems at these hospitals is disgraceful and not supported by a shred of evidence. In fact, the truth is the precise opposite.” He said Mr Burnham had ordered his own review of five of the hospitals covered by Sir Bruce’s report — Basildon and Thurrock, Medway, Northern Lincolnshire and Goole, Sherwood Forest and Tameside – and claimed its warnings had been “clearly ignored” by the current government “as evidence shows all five hospitals have deteriorated sharply on the Coalition’s watch”. Two hospitals named by Sir Bruce last night said they had improved their performances. Colchester trust said its death rate had fallen and was now “within the expected range” and Dudley said current figures showed mortality rates are not above average. Northern Lincolnshire, East Lancashire and United Lincolnshire said they would not comment until the Keogh review is published in full this week. The others did not respond. Clarification We have been asked to make clear that, contrary to an earlier version of this report, Sir Brian Jarman's findings reflected the number by which mortality figures exceeded what would have been statistically expected. He made no finding as to the causes of any deaths or whether they were "needless".

(PART III of three) The Real Grand Chessboard and the Profiteers of War By Prof Peter Dale Scott Global Research, December 25, 2013 11 August 2009) Barlett and Steele could have mentioned that SAIC senior analyst Fritz Ermarth, a long-time associate of Gates from his years in the CIA, is now an official of the Nixon Center. Commenting in 2003 on State Secretary Colin Powell’s briefing to the UN Security Council, Ermarth praised Powell for his charges (repeating one of Judith Miller’s false stories) about Saddam’s acquisition of aluminum tubing “for centrifuges and not rocketry.” Ermarth faulted Powell however for not mentioning two matters: Iraqi involvement in the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 (a charge by Laurie Mylroie now generally discredited), and that “During the 1970s and 1980s…the USSR and its allies supported terrorists in Western Europe and in Turkey,” (alluding to the false charges, promoted at the time by Robert Gates and Claire Sterling, about Mehmet Ali Agça’s attempted assassination of Pope Paul II).[40] I certainly do not wish to suggest that SAIC single-handedly created the will to fight in Iraq. The combined efforts of defense contractors, oil companies, PMCs and PICs created a mindset in which all those eager for power were caught up, including, I have to say, career-minded academics. In Iraq as in Afghanistan and Vietnam a generation earlier, a sure ticket to consultations in Washington was support for interventions that ordinary people could see would be disastrous. The yea-saying of academics has approved even the privatization of intelligence which we have just been describing. According to political scientist Anna Leander, Private firms not only provide, but also analyse intelligence. Private translators, analysts and ‘interrogators’ are hired, as illustrated by the involvement of Titan and CACI in Abu Ghraib. Even more directly, private firms are hired in to assess threats and risks and suggest what to do about them. This involves constructing a security picture as done for example, by Diligence LLC and SAIC, two firms specialised in intelligence gathering and analysis….. This privatisation of intelligence has direct consequences for the relation between PMCs and security discourses. It places the firms in a position where they are directly involved in producing these discourses. They provide a growing share of the information that forms the basis of decisions on whether or not something is a security concern. Leander concludes that this privatization is beneficial: it “empower a more military understanding of security which, in turn, empowers PMCs as particularly legitimate security experts.”[41] Another political scientist, Chaim Kaufmann, has noted more critically that arguments for escalation and what he calls threat inflation against Iraq were not adequately disciplined by “the marketplace of ideas.” He gives five reasons for this failure, duly supported by other political scientists. But the obvious reason mentioned by Barlett and Steele – profit – is not mentioned.[42] What we have been talking about until now is advocacy disguised as expertise. But overseas associates of Diligence LLC and its allies have also been accused of false-flag operations intended to provoke war. The passage of the Patriot Act generated a new realm of profit for SAIC contractors — domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens – as well as new intelligence fusion centers to carry this out. “As part of the Pentagon’s domestic security mission, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld created the Counterintelligence Field Activity office in 2002 and filled its staff with contractors from Booz Allen, BAE systems, SAIC, and other suppliers of cleared personnel. CIFA, as we’ve seen, was used against people suspected of harboring ill will against the Bush administration and its policies….At present, there are forty-three current and planned fusion centers in the United States where data from intelligence agencies, the FBI, local police, private sector databases, and anonymous tipsters are combined and analyzed by counterterrorism analysts…. According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the project “inculcates the project “inculcates DHS with enormous domestic surveillance powers.”[43] These fusion centers, “which combine the military, the FBI, state police, and others, have been internally promoted by the US Army as means to avoid restrictions preventing the military from spying on the domestic population.” [44] Responding to such criticisms, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano stated in March 2009 that the mandate of fusion centers was not to launch independent domestic surveillance operations but connect the dots between lawfully obtained information already in fragmented “siloed” databases.[45] She did not mention that some of this information was from private and even anonymous sources. One SAIC contractor, Neoma Syke, worked at such a fusion center, wearing two hats: During 2003-2004, she was “working for SAIC” as a force protection analyst with “SAIC’s” 205th Military Intelligence Battalion. And while she was “a contractor for SAIC”, specifically, “SAIC’s” 205th Military Intelligence Battalion, apparently she served as Counterintelligence Watch Officer at USARPAC’s Crisis Action Center.[46] Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. His latest prose books are The Road to 9/11 (2007) and his reissued and expanded War Conspiracy (2008). His new book of poems (including political poems) is Mosaic Orpheus, from McGill-Queen’s University Press. Visit his website at http://www.peterdalescott.net/ Notes [1] Dwight David Eisenhower, “Military-Industrial Complex Speech,” 1961, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp. [2] Former SAIC manager, in Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, “Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow.” Vanity Fair, March 2007, http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/03/spyagency200703?currentPage=1. [3] The Economist, July 8, 1999. [4] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 7-9. [5] Halford J. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality (New York: Holt, 1919). [6] Henry Kissinger, in Colin S Gray, G R Sloan. Geopolitics, Geography, and Strategy (Portland: Frank Cass Publishers, 1999). [7] For the events leading to the displacement of Kissinger see Scott, The Road to 9/11, 50-54, etc. [8] Le Nouvel Observateur, January 15-21, 1998. In his relentless determination to weaken the Soviet Un ion, Brzezinski also persuaded Carter to end U.S. sanctions against Pakistan for its pursuit of nuclear weapons (David Armstrong and Joseph J. Trento, America and the Islamic Bomb: The Deadly Compromise (Steerforth, 2007). Thus Brzezinski’s obsession with the Soviet Union helped produce, as unintended byproducts, both al Qaeda and the Islamic atomic arsenal. [9] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: basic Books), xiii, 30, 40. [10] Memorandum of February 18, 1992, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb245/index.htm. [11] For specific parallels to The Grand Chessboard, see Scott, Road to 9/11, 191-2. [12] “Joint Vision 2020 Emphasizes Full-spectrum Dominance,” DefenseLink, http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=45289, emphasis added. [13] Zeyno Baran, “Hizb-ut-Tahrir: Islam’s Political Insurgency,” Nixon Center, December 2004, www.HizbutahrirIslamsPoliticalInsurgency.pdf. [14] Brzezinski was so unafraid of Islamic jihadism that when National Security Adviser he convened a working group to deliberately stir up Muslim dissatisfaction inside the Soviet Union (Scott, Road to 9/11, 70-71). [15] He has since taken credit for persuading President Aliyyev of Azerbaijan to commit to the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Geopolitically Speaking: Russia’s `Sphere of Influence’ – Chechnya and Beyond,” Azerbaijan International, Spring 2000, p. 24, http://www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/81_folder/81_articles/81_brzezinski.html. This pipeline, a favor to U.S. and British oil companies, makes geopolitical but not economic sense; and is further destabilizing an already tense region. See Pepe Escobar, “Liquid War Across Eurasia and the Asia-Pacific: Postcard from Pipelineistan,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, http://japanfocus.org/-Pepe-Escobar/3149. [16] Scott, Road to 9/11, 70-79. [17] Dana Milbank and Justin Blum, “Document Says Oil Chiefs Met With Cheney Task Force,” Washington Post, November 16, 2005. This story noted that CEOs of three majors had falsely denied this: ” A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney’s energy task force in 2001 — something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress….In a joint hearing last week of the Senate Energy and Commerce committees, the chief executives of Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips said their firms did not participate in the 2001 task force. The president of Shell Oil said his company did not participate `to my knowledge,’ and the chief of BP America Inc. said he did not know. Chevron was not named in the White House document, but the Government Accountability Office has found that Chevron was one of several companies that ‘gave detailed energy policy recommendations’ to the task force.” [18] Scott, Road to 9/11, 188-89; citing Linda McQuaig, Crude Dudes,” Toronto Star, September 20, 2004; Jane Mayer, “Contract Sport,” New Yorker, February 16-23, 2004. [19] Scott, Road to 9/11, 189; “Strategy Energy Policy: Challenges for the 21st Century,” Report of the James A. Baker Institute of Public Policy and Council on Foreign Relations Task Force, 40, emphasis added. [20] Seymour M. Hersh, “Selective Intelligence: Donald Rumsfeld Has His Own Special Sources. Are They Reliable?” New Yorker, May 6, 2003 [21] Michael Massing, “Now They Tell Us,” New York Review of Books, February 26, 2004, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16922. [22] Peter Bergen, “Armchair Provocateur — Laurie Mylroie: The Neocons’ favorite conspiracy theorist,” Washington Monthly, December 2003, http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0312.bergen.html. [23] For Israel links, see Michael Lind, Made in Texas (New York, Basic Books), 139 (Feith); John J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 166, etc. (Libby); Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (New York: Crown, 2006), 68-70 (Mylroie). [24] Jon Wiener, “Obama’s Limits: An Interview With Andrew Bacevich,” Nation, August 28, 2008, http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/350252/obama_s_limits_an_interview_with_andrew_bacevich. Cf. Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008). Michael Scheuer also argues that the campaign against terrorism took a big step backwards when the U.S. invaded Iraq. “Experts Fears ‘Endless’ Terror War,” MSNBC, July 9, 2005, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8524679. Peter Bergen agrees: “Many jihadists are so happy that the Bush administration invaded Iraq. Without the Iraq war, their movement—under assault from without and riven from within—would have imploded a year or so after Sept. 11″ (Bergen, “The Jihadists Export Their Rage to Book Pages and Web Pages,” Washington Post, September 11, 2005). So does Richard Clarke (Against All Enemies, 246): “Nothing America could have done would have provided al Qaeda and its new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country.” [25] I am not the first to notice the analogy. See e.g. Thomas Jäger and Gerhard Kümmel, Private Military and Security Companies (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2007), 22; Eugene B. Smith, “The New Condottieri and US Policy: The Privatization of Conflict and Its Implications,” U.S. Army War College, Parameters, Winter 2002, www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/02winter/smith.pdf, 104. [26] Michael Mallett, Mercenaries and their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1974), 22. [27] Donald J. Kagay and L. J. Andrew Villalon (eds.), Crusaders, Condottieri, and Cannon (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2002), 286. [28] “Iraq Reviewing Security Firms After Blackwater Shooting,” FoxNews.com, September 18, 2007, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,297153,00.html. [29] “The former Betsy Prince — Edgar and Elsa’s daughter, Erik’s sister — married into the DeVos family, one of the country’s biggest donors to Republican and conservative causes. (`I know a little something about soft money, as my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party,’ Betsy DeVos wrote in a 1997 Op-Ed in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call.) She chaired the Michigan Republican Party from 1996 to 2000 and again from 2003 to 2005, and her husband, Dick, ran as the Republican candidate for Michigan governor in 2006. Erik Prince himself is no slouch when it comes to giving to Republicans and cultivating relationships with important conservatives. He and his first and second wives have donated roughly $300,000 to Republican candidates and political action committees” (Ben Van Heuvelen, “The Bush administration’s ties to Blackwater,” Salon, October 2, 2007, http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/10/02/blackwater_bush/). Cf. Robert Young Pelton, Licensed to Kill, Hired Guns in the War on Terror (New York: Crown Books, 2006). [30] David Isenberg , “Corporate Mercenaries – Part 2: Myths and mystery,” AsiaTimes, May 19, 2004, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FE20Ak02.html. [31] David Isenberg, “Myths and mystery,” Asia Times, 5/20/04. While in CIA, Bruner negotiated the deal for Ahmad Chalabi and the CIA to work together (Aram Roston, The Man Who Pushed America to War [New York: Nation Books, 2009], 76). Bruner later joined BGR and in 2007 became the full time chairman of BKI Strategic Intelligence. In 2004 Bruner participated with BGR and an Israeli PMC operative in a scheme to help re-elect George W. Bush. (Laura Rozen, “From Kurdistan to K Street,” Mother Jones, November 2008, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/11/kurdistan-k-street). [32] Douglas Jehl, “Washington Insiders’ New Firm Consults on Contracts in Iraq,” New York Times, September 30, 2003. [33] Financial Times, 12/11/03. Ed Rogers, Diligence’s vice chairman, was one of George H.W. Bush’s top assistants when he was US president. On resigning from the White House, he negotiated a lucrative contract to act as lobbyist for the former Saudi intelligence chief and BCCI front man Kamal Adham, at a time when American and British prosecutors were preparing criminal cases against him. Rogers used Adnan Khashoggi as a go-between to secure the contract, which was canceled after White House criticism of it (Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 362-64). [34] Ibid. Cf. Mother Jones, March/April 2004: “More recently, Bush scored a $60,000-a-year consulting deal from a top adviser to New Bridge Strategies, the firm set up by George W.’s ex-campaign manager to “take advantage of business opportunities” in postwar Iraq. His job description: taking calls for three hours a week.” [35] “SAIC, which employs 44,000 people and took in $8 billion last year—sells brainpower, including a lot of the “expertise” behind the Iraq war….[sAIC is] a “stealth company” with 9,000 government contracts, many of which involve secret intelligence work” (Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, “Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow.” Vanity Fair, March 2007, http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/03/spyagency200703?currentPage=1). [36] Barlett and Steele, “Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow.” [37] Barlett and Steele, “Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow: “Mark A. Boster left his job as a deputy assistant attorney general in 1999 to join SAIC, and was already calling Justice three months later on behalf of his new employers—a violation of federal law. Boster paid $30,000 in a civil settlement.” Yet another PIC for a while was Interop, combining former CIA director James Woolsey and former FBI director Louis Freeh with former Mossad chief Danny Yatom (Rozen, “From Kurdistan to K Street). [38] Charlie Cray, “Science Applications International Corporation,” CorpWatch, http://www.corpwatch.org/section.php?id=17; cf. Barlett and Steele, “Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow.” [39] Barlett and Steele, “Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow.” [40] Fritz W. Ermarth, “Colin Powell’s Briefing to the Security Council: Brief Comments from an Ex-Intelligence Officer,” In the National Interest, http://inthenationalinterest.com/Articles/Powell%27s%20UN%20Speech/Powell%27s%20UN%20speech%20ermarth.html. Ermarth’s remarks were also posted by Laurie Mylroie, “Fritz Ermarth, Iraq & Al Qaeda, In The National Interest,” February 5, 2003, www.mail-archive.com/sam11@erols.com /msg00040.html. [41] Anna Leander, “The Power to Construct International Security: On the Significance of Private Military Companies,” Millennium – Journal of International Studies, 2005; 33; 803, emphasis added. At the time the Observer reported from ” sources in the Bush administration” an allegation that “members of the al-Qaeda network, detained and interrogated in Cairo, had obtained phials of anthrax in the Czech Republic” (“Iraq ‘behind US anthrax outbreaks,’” Observer, October 14, 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oct/14/terrorism.afghanistan6). [42] Chaim Kaufmann, “Threat Inflation and the Failure of the Marketplace of Ideas,” International Security (Summer 2004). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/international_security/v029/29.1kaufmann.html. Neither SAIC nor Diligence is mentioned in his essay. [43] Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 344. [44] Julian Assange, “The spy who billed me twice,” Wikileaks, http://wikileaks.org/wiki/The_spy_who_billed_me_twice. The March 2009 Army manual “US Army Concept of Operations for Police Intelligence Operations” contains phrases such as “It [fusion] does not have constraints that are emplaced on MI [Military Intelligence] activities within the US, because it operates under the auspice and oversight of the police discipline and standards.” [45] Phil Leggiere, “Napolitano Praises Fusion Centers.” HSToday, March 13, 2009, http://www.hstoday.us/content/view/7616/149/ . [46] Assange, “The spy who billed me twice.”

(PART II of three) The Real Grand Chessboard and the Profiteers of War By Prof Peter Dale Scott Global Research, December 25, 2013 11 August 2009) Its partner in Diligence Middle East (DME) is New Bridge Strategies, whose purpose has been described by the New York Times as “a consulting firm to advise companies that want to do business in Iraq, including those seeking pieces of taxpayer-financed reconstruction projects.”[32] Its political clout was outlined in the Financial Times: New Bridge was established in May [2003] and came to public attention because of the Republican heavyweights on its board – most linked to one or other Bush administration [officials] or to the family itself. Those include Joe Allbaugh, George W. Bush’s presidential campaign manager, and Ed Rogers and Lanny Griffith, former George H.W. Bush aides.[33] The firm of Barbour, Griffith and Rogers was the initial funder of Diligence, which shares an office floor with BGR and New Bridge in a building four blocks from the White House. The Financial Times linked the success of New Bridge in securing contracts to their relationship to Neil Bush, the President’s brother.[34] When Mack McLarty, Clinton’s White House Chief of Staff, resigned, he became a director of Diligence, and also joined Henry Kissinger to head, until 2008, Kissinger McLarty Associates. Another Private Intelligence Contractor or PIC is Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), an $8 billion corporation involved in defense, intelligence community, and homeland security contracting. In the words of veteran journalists Donald Barlett and James Steele, SAIC has displayed an uncanny ability to thrive in every conceivable political climate. It is the invisible hand behind a huge portion of the national-security state—the one sector of the government whose funds are limitless and whose continued growth is assured every time a politician utters the word “terrorism.” SAIC represents, in other words, a private business that has become a form of permanent government….[sAIC] epitomizes something beyond Eisenhower’s worst nightmare—the “military-industrial-counterterrorism complex.”[35] (Later their article made it clear that SAIC is not a unified bureaucracy, but more like a platform for individual entrepreneurship in obtaining contracts: “at SAIC your job fundamentally was to sell your high-tech ideas and blue-chip expertise to [any] government agency with money to spend and an impulse to buy.”)[36] Before becoming Secretary of Defense, Robert M. Gates was a member of SAIC’s board of directors. SAIC personnel have also been recruited from CIA, NSA, and DARPA. Scores of influential members of the national-security establishment clambered onto SAIC’s payroll, among them John M. Deutch, undersecretary of energy under President Jimmy Carter and C.I.A. director under President Bill Clinton; Rear Admiral William F. Raborn, who headed development of the Polaris submarine; and Rear Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who served variously as director of the National Security Agency, deputy director of the C.I.A., and vice director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.[37] SAIC helped supply the faulty intelligence about Saddam’s WMD that then generated ample contracts for SAIC in Iraq. SAIC personnel were instrumental in pressing the case that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and that war was the only way to get rid of them. When no weapons of mass destruction were found, SAIC personnel staffed the commission set up to investigate how American intelligence could have been so disastrously wrong, including Gordon Oehler, the commission’s deputy director for review, a 25-year CIA veteran, Jeffrey R. Cooper, vice president and chief science officer for one of SAIC’s sub-units and Samuel Visner, a SAIC vice president for corporate development who had also passed through the revolving door and back to the NSA. David Kay, who later chaired the Iraq Survey Group (which showed that Hussein didn’t possess WMD, thereby proving that the war was launched under false pretenses), is also an SAIC shareholder and former director of SAIC’s Center for Counterterrorism Technology and Analysis.[38] Needless to say, this SAIC-stuffed commission did not report that SAIC itself had been a big part of the problem. But according to Barlett and Steele, the same David Kay in 1998 told the Senate Armed Services Committee: that Saddam Hussein “remains in power with weapons of mass destruction” and that “military action is needed.” He warns that unless America acts now “we’re going to find the world’s greatest military with its hands tied.” Over the next four years, Kay and others associated with SAIC hammered away at the threat posed by Iraq. Wayne Downing, a retired general and a close associate of Ahmad Chalabi, proselytized hard for an invasion of Iraq, stating that the Iraqis “are ready to take the war … overseas. They would use whatever means they have to attack us.” In many of his appearances on network and cable television leading up to the war, Downing was identified simply as a “military analyst.” It would have been just as accurate to note that he was a member of SAIC’s board of directors and a company stockholder…. 9/11 was a personal tragedy for thousands of families and a national tragedy for all of America, but it served the interests of private intellience and military contractors including SAIC. In the aftermath of the attacks, the Bush administration launched its “Global War on Terror” (GWOT), whose chief consequence has been to channel money by the tens of billions into companies promising they could do something—anything—to help. SAIC was ready. Four years earlier, anticipating the next big source of government revenue, SAIC had established the Center for Counterterrorism Technology and Analysis. According to SAIC, the purpose of the new unit was to take “a comprehensive view of terrorist threats, including the full range of weapons of mass destruction, more traditional high explosives, and cyber-threats to the national infrastructure.” In October of 2006 the company told would-be investors flatly that the war on terror would continue to be a lucrative growth industry.[39]

The Real Grand Chessboard and the Profiteers of War (IN THREE PARTS ) By Prof Peter Dale Scott Global Research, December 25, 2013 11 August 2009 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ “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.” Dwight David Eisenhower, “Military-Industrial Complex Speech,” 1961, [1] “My observation is that the impact of national elections on the business climate for SAIC has been minimal. The emphasis on where federal spending occurs usually shifts, but total federal spending never decreases. SAIC has always continued to grow despite changes in the political leadership in Washington.” Former SAIC manager, quoted in Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, “Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow.” Vanity Fair, March 2007[2] “We make American military doctrine” Ed Soyster, MPRI[3] The Myth of the Grand Chessboard: Geopolitics and Imperial Folie de Grandeur In the Road to 9/11 I summarized the dialectic of open societies: how from their energy they expand, leading to a higher level of more secretive corporations and agencies, which eventually weaken the home country through needless and crushing wars.[4] I am not alone in seeing America in the final stages of this process, which since the Renaissance has brought down Spain, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. Much of what I wrote summarized the thoughts of writers before me like Paul Kennedy and Kevin Phillips. But there is one aspect of the curse of expansion that I underemphasized: how dominance creates megalomanic illusions of insuperable control, and how this illusion in turn is crystallized into a prevailing ideology of dominance. I am surprised that so few, heretofore, have pointed out that from a public point of view these ideologies are delusional, indeed perhaps insane. In this essay I will argue however that what looks demented from a public viewpoint makes sense from the narrower perspective of those profiting from the provision of private entrepreneurial violence and intelligence. The ideology of dominance was expressed for British rulers by Sir Halford Mackinder in 1919: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.”[5] This sentence, though expressed after the power of Britain had already begun to decline, accurately articulated the anxieties of imperial planners who saw themselves playing “the Great Game,” and who thus in 1809 sacrificed an entire British army of twelve thousand men in the wilderness of Afghanistan. Expanded by Karl Haushofer and other Germans into the alleged “science” of geopolitics, this doctrine helped to inspire Hitler’s disastrous Drang nach Osten, which in short order terminated the millenary hopes of the Nazi Third Reich. One might have thought that by now the lessons of Napoleon and Hitler would have subdued all illusions that any single power could command the “World Island,” let alone the world. Kissinger for one appears to have learned this lesson, when he wrote that: “By geopolitical, I mean an approach that pays attention to the requirements of equilibrium.”[6] But (largely because of his commitment to equilibrium in world order) Kissinger was swept aside by events in the mid-1970s, leading to the triumph of the global dominance mindset, as expressed by thinkers like Zbigniew Brzezinski.[7] Brzezinski himself has recognized how his gratuitous machinations in Afghanistan in 1978-79 produced the responses of al Qaeda and jihadi terrorism. Asked in 1998 whether he regretted his adventurism, Brzezinski replied: “Regret what? The secret operation was an excellent idea. It drew the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? On the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.’” Nouvel Observateur: “And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?” Brzezinski: “What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?” When he was asked whether Islamic fundamentalism represented a world menace, Brzezinski replied, “Nonsense!”[8] In some ways, the post-Afghanistan Brzezinski has become more moderate in his expectations from U.S. power: he notably warned against the Gulf War in 1990 and also Vice-President Cheney’s agitations when in office for some kind of preemptive strike against Iran. But he has never retracted the Mackinderite rhetoric of his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, which revives the illusion of “controlling” the Eurasian heartland: For the first time ever, a non-Eurasian power has emerged not only as a key arbiter of Eurasian power relations but also as the world’s paramount power. The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power.” (p. xiii) “For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia… Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia – and America’s global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.” (p.30) “To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.” (p.40)[9] This kind of brash talk is not unique to Brzezinski. Its call for unilateral dominance echoed the 1992 draft DPG (Defense Planning Guidance) prepared for Defense Secretary Cheney by neocons Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis “Scooter” Libby: “We must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”[10] It is echoed both in the 2000 PNAC Study, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” and the Bush-Cheney National Security Strategy of September 2002 (NSS 2002).[11] And it is epitomized by the megalomanic JCS strategic document Joint Vision 2020, “Full-spectrum dominance means the ability of U.S. forces, operating alone or with allies, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations.”[12] Such overblown rhetoric is out of touch with reality, dangerously delusional, and even arguably insane. It is however useful, even vital, to those corporations who have become accustomed to profiting from the Cold War, and who faced deep cuts in U.S. defense and intelligence spending in the first years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They are joined by other groups (discussed below) that also have a stake in preserving the dominance mindset in Washington. These include the new purveyors of privatized military services, or what can be called entrepreneurial violence, in response to defense budget cuts. The Real Grand Chessboard: Those Profiting from Enduring Violence The delusional grandiosity of Brzezinski’s rhetoric is inherent above all in the false metaphor of his book title. “Vassals” are not chess pieces to be moved effortlessly by a single hand. They are human beings with minds of their own; and among humans an unjust excess of power is certain to provoke not only resentment but ultimately successful resistance. One can see this easily in Asia, from the evolution of anti-Americanism in Iran to the Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HT) in Central Asia: although still ostensibly nonviolent, HT’s rhetoric is now more and more aggressively anti-American.[13] The notion of a single chess player is equally false, especially in Central Asia, where dominant states (the U.S., Russia, and China) and local states are all alike weak. Here major multinational corporations like BP and Exxon are major players. In countries like Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan they dwarf both local state power and also the U.S. governmental presence, whether official or covert. The true local powers are apt to be two which governments are notoriously inept at controlling: first, the “agitated Muslims” which Brzezinski insanely derided, and second, illicit trafficking, above all drug trafficking.[14] Ultimately however Brzezinski is not constrained by his chess metaphor. The goal of a chess game is to win. Brzezinski’s goal is quite different: to exert permanent restraints on the power of China and above all Russia. He has thus sensibly opposed destabilizing moves like a western strike on Iran, while supporting the permanent containment of Russia with a ring of western bases and pipelines. (In 1995 Brzezinski flew to Azerbaijan and helped negotiate the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline linking Azerbaijan to Turkey.)[15] As I have argued elsewhere, Brzezinski (though he no doubt thinks to himself in terms of strategy) thus promotes a policy that very much suits the needs of the oil industry and its backers. These last include his patrons the Rockefellers, who first launched him into national prominence.[16] In March 2001 the biggest oil majors (Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Conoco, and Shell) had their opportunity to design the incoming administration’s energy strategies, including Middle East policy, by participating secretly in Vice-President Cheney’s Energy Task Force.[17] The Task Force, we learned later, developed a map of Iraq’s oil fields, with the southwest divided into nine “Exploration Blocks.” One month earlier a Bush National Security Council document had noted that Cheney’s Task force would consider “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.”[18] Earlier the oil companies had participated in a non-governmental task force calling for “an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments.”[19] Of course, oil companies were not alone in pushing for military action against Iraq. After 9/11, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith established the Pentagon’s neocon Office of Special Plans (OSP), which soon “rivalled both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., as President Bush’s main source of intelligence regarding Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda.”[20] Neocon influence in the Administration, supported by Lewis Libby in Vice-President Cheney’s office, trumped the skepticism of CIA and DIA: these two false charges against Saddam Hussein, or what one critic called “faith-based intelligence,” became briefly the official ideology of the United States. Some, notably Dick Cheney, have never recanted. Many journalists were eager to promote the OSP doctrines. Judith Miller of the New York Times wrote a series of articles on Saddam’s WMD, relying, like OSP itself, on the propaganda of Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi.[21] Miller’s book collaborator Laurie Mylroie went even further, arguing that “Saddam was not only behind the ’93 Trade Center attack, but also every anti-American terrorist incident of the past decade, from the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to the leveling of the federal building in Oklahoma City to September 11 itself.”[22] Many of these advocates, notably Feith, Libby, and Mylroie, had links to Israel, which as much as any oil company had reasons to wish for U.S. armies to become established militarily in Central Asia.[23] Private Military Contractors (PMCs), Whose Business is Violence for Profit The inappropriateness of a military response to the threat of terrorism has been noted by a number of counterterrorism experts, such as retired U.S. Army colonel Andrew Bacevich: the concept of global war as the response to violent Islamic radicalism is flawed. We ought not be in the business of invading and occupying other countries. That’s not going to address the threat. It is, on the other hand, going to bankrupt the country and break the military.[24] Because of budgetary constraints, America has resorted to uncontrollable subordinates to represent its public power in these remote places. I shall focus chiefly in this essay on one group of these, the so-called Private Military Contractors (PMCs) who are authorized to commit violence in the name of their employers. These corporations are reminiscent of the marauding condottieri or private mercenary armies contracted for by the wealthy city states of Renaissance Italy.[25] With the hindsight of history, we can see the contribution of the notoriously capricious Condottieri to the violence they are supposedly hired to deal with. Some, when unemployed, became little more than predatory bandits. Others, like the celebrated Farinata whom Dante placed in the Inferno, turned against their native cities. Above all, the de facto power accumulated by the condottieri meant that, with the passage of time, they came to dictate terms to their ostensible employers.[26] (They were an early example of entrepreneurial violence, and the most common way of avoiding their path of destruction was “to buy reprieve by offering bribes.”[27]) To offset the pressure on limited armed forces assets, Donald Rumsfeld escalated the increasing use of Private Military Contractors (PMCs) in the Iraq War. At one point as many as 100,000 personnel were employed by PMCs in the US Iraq occupation. Some of them were involved in controversial events there, such as the Iraq Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and the killing and burning of four contract employees in Fallujah. The license of the most controversial firm, Blackwater, was terminated by the Iraqi government in 2007, after eight Iraqi civilians were gratuitously killed in a firefight that followed a car bomb explosion.[28] (After much negative publicity, Blackwater renamed itself in 2009 as Xe Worldwide.) Insufficiently noticed in the public furor over PMCs like Blackwater was the difference in motivation between them and the Pentagon. Whereas the stated goal of Rumsfeld and the armed forces in Iraq was to end violence there, the PMCs clearly had a financial stake in its continuation. Hence it is no surprise that some of the largest PMCs were also political supporters for pursuing the ill-conceived “War on Terror.” Blackwater was the most notorious example; Erik Prince, its founder and sole owner, is part of a family that figures among the major contributors to the Republican Party and other right-wing causes, such as the Council for National Policy. His sister once told the press that “my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party.”[29] Private Intelligence Companies and the Provision of Violence Blackwater has attracted the critical attention of the American Mainstream Media. But it was a mere knight on the grand chessboard, albeit one with the ability to influence the moves of the game. Far less noticed has been given to Diligence LLC. Diligence, a more powerful company, that unlike Blackwater interfaced heavily with Wall Street, “set up shop in Baghdad [in July 2003] to provide security for companies involved in Iraqi reconstruction. In December, it established a new subsidiary called Diligence Middle East, and expanded its services to include screening, vetting and training of local hires, and the provision of daily intelligence briefs for its corporate clients.”[30] Certainly the political clout of Diligence outshone and outlasted Blackwater’s. Two of its founding directors (Lanny Griffiths and Ed Rogers) were also founders of the influential Republican lobbying team Barbour Griffiths and Rogers (later renamed BGR). Haley Barbour, the senior founder of BGR, also served as Chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1993 to 1997. Diligence LLC was licensed to do business in Iraq as a private military contractor (PMC). But it could be called a Private Intelligence Contractor (PIC), since it is virtually a CIA spin-off: Diligence was founded by William Webster, the only man to head both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mike Baker, its chief executive officer, spent 14 years at the CIA as a covert field operations officer specializing in counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operations. Whitley Bruner, its chief operating officer in Baghdad, was once the CIA station chief in Iraq.[31]