“Rockefeller, Gates, Turner, Buffet, Gore, Rothchilds, etc, etc. Can anyone be  man (or woman) enough to admit they’ve been duped? Just be stubborn… is that how it works. Mass group think. Kinda like how Obama was elected… Ouch.”

-Fred Face 4/27/10

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
April 27, 2010

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the bedazzled underwear non-bomber, has debuted in an al-Qaeda video. The cartoonish video of black-clad Muslims running around in the desert firing Kalashnikovs is intended to underscore Abdulmutallab’s assertion — according to the FBI — that “others like me” are ready to wage holy war against the United States.

On Christmas Day, 2009, Abdulmutallab set his underwear on fire aboard a Northwest Airlines plane carrying 290 people from Amsterdam to Detroit. The corporate media immediately assumed the foiled attack was linked to al-Qaeda and has labored to make that connection ever since.

Detroit lawyer Kurt Haskell, who was on the flight and witnessed the attack, has maintained that he saw a well-dressed Indian man aid the accused bomber as he boarded the plane despite the fact that he had no passport and was on a terror watch list.

Undersecretary for management at the State Department, Patrick F. Kennedy, told Congress in February that the State Department wanted to keep Abdulmutallab out of the country but intelligence agencies insisted he be allowed in.

British officials knew Abdulmutallab was “reaching out” to extremists whom MI5 had under surveillance while he was studying at University College London. Officials said the 23-year-old Nigerian was “starting out on a journey” in Britain that culminated in his attempt to bring down flight 253 as it prepared to land in Detroit, Michigan, on Christmas Day, according to the Australian.

The corporate media portrayed Abdulmutallab as a former president of the Islamic Society at University College London where he advertised speakers including political figures, human rights lawyers and former Guantánamo detainees.

U.S. born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki allegedly sent Abdulmutallab to Yemen for training prior to his underwear stunt. “In tracing the path of Abdulmutallab, intelligence officials say he apparently attended a sermon at the [London] Finsbury Park Mosque in the fall of 2006 or 2007. He went to listen to the man who would become his mentor and perhaps his al-Qaida recruiter: Awlaki,” NPR reported in February.

Awlaki also appears in the video. He is marked for assassination by the U.S. government.

A large number of patsies and dupes were connected to the Finsbury Park Mosque, including the doltish shoe bomber, Richard Reid, supposed 7/7 suicide bomber Mohammed Sidique Khan, Nizar Trabelsi, Zacarias Moussaoui, Feroz Abbasi, and others. The Finsbury Park Mosque also served as a center for the the Islamic Army of Aden, said to be an al-Qaeda affiliate.

The British MI-5 is notorious for breeding “Londonistan” dupes and patsies who are then passed off as serious threats to national security. For instance Abu Qatada, said to have links to the 9/11 hijackers, was protected and sheltered by MI-5. ”

“Abu Qatada boasted to MI5 that he could prevent terrorist attacks and offered to expose dangerous extremists, while all along he was setting up a haven for his terror organization in Britain,” the Times Online reported in 2004. “Among the scores of young militants who came to visit him in London was the chief suspect in the Madrid train bombings. His followers also included people who wanted to be suicide bombers for al-Qaeda, such as Richard Reid, the shoe bomber.”

In July of 2005, former Justice Department prosecutor John Loftus appeared on Fox’s Day Side and revealed that another patsy-terrorist, Haroon Rashid Aswat, was linked to British intelligence. Aswat was said to be the “mastermind” behind the July 7 London bombings. “Back in 1999 he came to America. The Justice Department wanted to indict him in Seattle because him and his buddy were trying to set up a terrorist training school in Oregon… we’ve just learned that the headquarters of the US Justice Department ordered the Seattle prosecutors not to touch Aswat… apparently Aswat was working for British intelligence,” said Loftus.

CIA contractor Billy Waugh admitted he had trained al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen. Waugh worked there during the 1994 civil war, when the U.S. supported the religiously-oriented North Yemen against the breakaway south, according to his autobiography. Both the U.S. and Osama bin Laden supported North Yemen.

It is interesting to note that many of the faces in the Abdulmutallab al-Qaeda training video are blurred. “The other people in the video are presumably the people we are still looking for,” said Richard Clarke, an ABC News consultant and former White House counter-terrorism official.

The appearance of the video arrives as Nigerian Minister of Foreign Affairs Odein Ajugomobia calls for the U.S. to give Abdulmutallab a fair trial. “He said the foreign affairs ministry has appealed to US government to treat Farouk according to the rule of law,” the Daily Trust reports today.

On April 13, federal prosecutors shared hundreds of documents and other evidence with Abdulmutallab’s lawyer, including video. “Assistant U.S. Attorney Cathleen Corken said the government has turned over a substantial amount of evidence, including FBI reports and video surveillance, but that more still needs to be done. She did not elaborate on what the video shows,” theAssociated Press reported.

http://www.infowars.com/underwear-patsy-appears-in-al-qaeda-video/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“A letter from C4L April 5th…

F.F.

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“This is what happens when you ban law abiding citizens from owning hand guns & stripping them their God given right to protect themselves… you fucking idiot politicians asking for Military help. Kinda like so…..

Problem-Reaction-Solution:

*Dismantle The Economy By Design- (Making Desperate People Do Desperate Things)

*Have the infrastructure in place to wear the people can’t protect themselves – (Banning hand guns in Chicago, D.C., NYC, etc)

*For all the people that know not what is is to be a free human, they will beg for protection and welcome Marshall Law & cry-out for banning all guns from all citizens – (This is precisely the plan of the global elite scum-fucks little takeover, (never work), and how easy they think the common American can be manipulated, conned, and have their backs broken)….. They’re right w/ a large percentage… but that percent will have a quick crash course if things break down enough… and resist like the rest of the educated & brave people will have to do.

Fuck The Establishment.”

-Fred Face 4/26/10

The Associated Pres

Chicago Democratic Reps. John Fritchey and LaShawn Ford made a public plea to Gov. Pat Quinn on Sunday to deploy troops.

The request comes amid a recent surge in violent crime, including a night last week that saw seven people killed and 18 wounded, mostly by gunfire.

Fritchey says Chicago has had 113 homicide victims this year. He says the police department has done a commendable job, but its resources are stretched thin.

Chicago Police Supt. Jody Weis says he appreciates the lawmakers’ frustration and willingness to help, but doubts the National Guard is the best answer.

A message left for Quinn wasn’t returned Sunday.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/25/AR2010042503518.html

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

by Bill Van Auken

The Obama administration is spending billions of dollars to develop new weapons systems, including powerful conventional warhead missiles capable of striking any target in the world within less than an hour.

The US Air Force carried out two separate test launches April 22—one at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and the other at Cape Canaveral, Florida—designed to further the development of these weapons systems.

The first system, known as Conventional Prompt Global Strike, or CPGS, would be capable of striking anywhere across the globe within under an hour of a launch order, using intercontinental ballistic missiles fired from the US to deliver conventional warheads against targets in other countries.

Capable of striking a target with an impact speed of up to 4,000 feet per second and a payload of up to 8,000 pounds, these warheads would be able to obliterate everything within a 3,000-foot radius.

The Obama administration has requested $240 million in appropriations by Congress to pay for developing CPGS in 2011, an increase of 45 percent over this year’s budget. The total cost of the program is expected to mount to over $2 billion by 2015, by which time the Pentagon hopes to have deployed the first elements of the weapons system.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) carried out a test launch Thursday of a space plane known as the Falcon, or Hypersonic Technology Vehicle (HTV-2), a suborbital vehicle that is the prototype for the CPGS delivery system.

It was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on a decommissioned ballistic missile, from which the plane separated just outside of the atmosphere, hurtling back to the Earth at a speed of more than 13,000 miles per hour, more than 20 times the speed of sound. The plane was supposed to crash into the Pacific Ocean near a US military test site on the Kwajalein Atoll.

The other unmanned space vehicle launched Thursday from Cape Canaveral was the X-37B. The Pentagon remained tight-lipped about the highly classified program, refusing to say even when the 29-foot plane—which resembles a smaller version of the space shuttle—would return to earth, much less specify what it was carrying or give any detailed explanation of its mission.

While it is estimated that the cost of developing the X-37B will run into the billions, the precise amount also remains classified, included as part of the Pentagon’s “black” budget.

Gary Payton, the deputy undersecretary for Air Force space programs, would say only that the test flight was designed to further “development programs that will provide capabilities for our warfighters in the future.”

It is widely believed that the vehicle is being developed as part of a US effort to militarize space, providing a weapons platform and launch pad for smaller spy satellites. There is also speculation that it is being developed as part of the Prompt Global Strike system.

Advocates of Prompt Global Strike have promoted the weapons system as a means to respond instantaneously to intelligence on the location of alleged terrorists or supposed threats of an imminent launch of weapons of mass destruction. They have also argued that the deployment of the new weapons would reduce the dependence of the US military on its nuclear arsenal.

Critics, including Russian officials, have pointed out, however, that the launching of intercontinental ballistic missiles, even if they were carrying conventional warheads, could easily trigger a nuclear war.

“World states will hardly accept a situation in which nuclear weapons disappear, but weapons that are no less destabilizing emerge in the hands of certain members of the international community,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters earlier this month in Moscow.

In a state of the nation address following the announcement of the proposed weapons system under the Bush administration, then-Russian President Vladimir Putin warned, “The launch of such a missile could provoke a full-scale counterattack using strategic nuclear forces.”

Largely as a result of such warnings, Congress previously failed to provide funding for the program. The proposal “really hadn’t gone anywhere in the Bush administration,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in an interview on the ABC news program “This Week.” Gates, who was held over in his post by incoming President Barack Obama, noted that the weapons system had been “embraced by the new administration.”

The New York Times reported Friday that in an interview Obama had defended the weapons system as a “move towards less emphasis on nuclear weapons” and argued that it would insure “that our conventional weapons capability is an effective deterrent in all but the most extreme circumstances.”

In a separate interview with the Times, Air Force Gen. Kevin Chilton, the head of the Strategic Command, argued that the weapons system was needed to give the White House more military options.

“Today we can present some conventional options to the President to strike a target anywhere on the globe that range from 96 hours, to several hours maybe, 4, 5, 6 hours,” Chilton told the Times.

“That would simply not be fast enough, he noted, if intelligence arrived about a movement by Al Qaeda terrorists or the imminent launching of a missile,” the newspaper said. “‘If the president wants to act on a particular target faster than that, the only thing we have that goes faster is a nuclear response,’ he said.”

Advocates of the program within the military and the administration have claimed that the danger of Russia or China interpreting the launch of a Prompt Global Strike missile as the beginning of a nuclear attack could be alleviated by positioning launch vehicles above ground, giving them a different flight path and even opening launch sites up for inspection. Military analysts point out, however, that such a system would provide an ideal subterfuge in the event that Washington decided to launch a “preventive” nuclear war.

Moscow’s concern over the proposed weapons system found expression in the recently signed New Start nuclear weapons treaty agreed by the US and Russia, which requires that the introduction of any US intercontinental ballistic missile carrying a conventional weapon capable of reaching Russian soil be compensated by the decommissioning of an existing nuclear-armed missile.

Obama’s rhetoric about the new weapons system contributing to nuclear disarmament notwithstanding, there is ample evidence that Washington remains committed to maintaining and upgrading its nuclear arsenal.

Speaking Thursday at the NATO foreign ministers meeting in Estonia, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rejected proposals from European governments for the removal of so-called tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons that the US has deployed on the continent.

“We should recognize that as long as nuclear weapons exist, NATO will remain a nuclear alliance,” Clinton told the gathering in Tallinn. “As a nuclear alliance, sharing nuclear risks and responsibilities widely is fundamental.”

Meanwhile, at a recent hearing of the House Armed Services Committee, General Chilton, the head of the US Strategic Command, assured members of Congress that the military is proceeding with work on a “follow-on to the current Ohio-class Trident submarine fleet,” which carries D-5 nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Sounding the same theme, James Miller, the principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, said, “The department is currently looking at the mix of long-range strike capabilities that the military will need for the coming decade or two,” adding that both nuclear and conventional weapons would figure in this “mix.”

The development of these new weapons systems will only provide Washington and the Pentagon with another instrument for carrying out so-called “preventive wars” and acts of aggression, giving the US president a non-nuclear capacity to kill thousands of people virtually instantaneously with the push of a button.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18867

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“This is all about killing free speech on the internet… no more, no less.”

-F.F.

by Hal Silliman

WASHINGTON D.C.—Central Intelligence Agency director Leon Panetta told 300 Sacramento Metro Chamber Cap-to-Cap delegates that the next “Pearl Harbor” is likely to be an attack on the United States’ power, financial, military and other Internet systems.

Panetta addressed the Sacramento delegation that includes 43 elected officials and hundreds of business and civic leaders who are in Washington D.C. for the annual program that advocates for the region’s most pressing policy issues. He spoke on Monday, April 19, during the Cap-to-Cap opening breakfast.

“Cyber terrorism” is a new area of concern for the CIA, Panetta said. The United States faces thousands of cyber attacks daily on its Internet networks. The attacks are originating in Russia, China, Iran and from even hackers.

“The next Pearl Harbor is likely to be a cyber attacking going after our grid…and that can literally cripple this country,” Panetta said. “This is a whole new area of threat.”

But cyber terrorism is just one of four primary missions for Panetta, who took over directing the CIA last year after appointment by President Obama. The CIA is also focusing on counter-terrorism, reducing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and fighting narcotics trafficking.

Al Qaeda is becoming a viscous target, and as CIA and military operations tamp it down in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, the terrorist elements are moving to places like Somalia, Yemen and North Africa—as well changing its tactics, he said.

“The president’s direction…is we must dismantle and destroy Al Qaeda and its known elements,” he said. “It’s a fundamental mission….The primary effort takes place in Pakistan and tribal areas. We are now focused on Afghanistan and have increased our presence there.”

Meanwhile, CIA is working to help Iraqis fight Al Qaeda. “Even as our military draws down in Iraq, we’ll keep our presence there…to provide intelligence to the Iraqis so they can secure their own country.”

Worrisome, he added, is how Al Qaeda is “coming at us in other ways.” These include using individuals who have clean records and are not being tracked; individuals who are already in the U.S.A. and in contact with Al Qaeda; and individuals who decided to “self-radicalize” and are easily and quickly recruited as terrorists.

Previously, Panetta served as a congressional representative from the Monterey area, rising to the House Budget committee chair, and then latter as President Clinton’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget.

“I’ve spent most of my life on budget issues,” he said, noting the “work we did eventually produced a balanced budget for the country.” When he’s asked why he took on the job at the CIA, he told the group, “Because considering the size of the federal deficit, I’d rather fight Al Qaeda.”

http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/25185/CIA_Director_tells_CaptoCap_delegates_Cyber_attack_could_be_next_Pearl_Harbor

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, April 26, 2010

Homosexual rumors surrounding Senator Lindsey Graham underscore the core reason why the vast majority of Congress members habitually support legislation that is anathema to the interests of the people they are supposed to represent, because politicians rarely achieve positions of influence without being beholden to one form of blackmail or another.

ALIPAC’s William Gheen provoked national headlines last week during a speech in front of thousands of Tea Party supporters when he publicly requested that Graham come out of the closet and admit that he is gay.

“William Gheen called on Senator Lindsey Graham to be honest with American voters about his homosexual lifestyle to assure that Graham’s desire to keep it a secret could no longer be potentially used by political insiders to manipulate Graham’s behavior,” reports Before It’s News. “There are many precedents in American politics where affairs, corruption, addictions, and other situations that politicians wanted concealed were used to manipulate them with unfair advantage.”

“When you have a U.S. Senator from such a conservative state like South Carolina working hand in hand with Obama and New York liberals like Senator Chuck Schumer to pass an Amnesty bill for illegal aliens, there is something very wrong,” said Gheen. “After today’s national broadcasts, the American public will know what the DC insiders know and that was my goal.”

Gheen’s speech has since gone viral on You Tube and prompted a national debate about Graham’s sexuality and if it is being used to blackmail him into pushing the big government agenda.

The open secret that Graham is an alleged homosexual explains why he constantly supports legislation and policies that are almost universally abhorred by his South Carolina constituency – carbon taxes and the phony global warming agenda, pro-amnesty immigration reform, as well as his hostility towards the Tea Party movement.

Graham has been labeled a “Democrat in drag,” a “traitor” and a “disgrace” by conservatives for his policies and was confronted on his global warming advocacy during a town hall meeting in October last year.

This strikes at the very root of why government is broken – politicians may pay lip service to the will of the people to get elected but once in office they click their heels and march to the tune of the controlling elite. That’s because almost every one of them has some dark secret that they can be blackmailed over if they fail to follow the Washington consensus.

This is precisely what we’ve witnessed with President Obama. Despite his promises of hope and a change from the direction of the Bush administration, Obama has followed the same agenda with aggressive uniformity – beefing the war in Afghanistan while expanding it into Pakistan, renewing the Patriot Act, extending warrantless wiretaps, and growing the size of the federal government to unthinkable levels while preparing massive tax hikes.

Obama’s dubious origins, not only the “birther” controversy but the admitted fact that his real name is Barry Soetoro, have been manipulated by the controlling elite to perfection. While never blown wide open, the scandal is kept suitably bubbling under the surface as a threat that if Obama ever does try to be a real leader, his legacy will be completely destroyed.

A more sinister aspect of the same process of blackmail being exercised against Obama is the fact that he is constantly reminded that he is a target for assassination. This was in the news again today with the story of a man who was arrested carrying a gun at a North Carolina airport as President Obama was leaving on board Air Force One.

As we reported earlier this year, throughout the presidential campaign, the public was constantly told that Obama was an assassination target and that his safety was always in jeopardy, a claim that was given credibility after numerous odd secret service security lapses at public events where Obama really was put in danger, whether intentionally or otherwise.

The “gatecrashers” story also served to increase awareness about Obama being vulnerable to attack by people who can seamlessly slip through security and get face to face with the President relatively easily.

It is clear that the neo-cons are holding Obama hostage and issuing a thinly veiled threat by repeating the mantra that the only way to save his political career and his presidency is to attack Iran. There is undoubtedly a mountain of dirt being held back regarding Obama’s past that is being used to blackmail the President into following the new world order agenda – the same as with any President before him.

Becoming President of the United States and indeed being elected top any prominent political office isn’t an opportunity to change things for the better, it’s a deal that politicians make to follow the agenda or if they don’t, to have every intricacy of their private lives exposed to the attack dog media.

Being outed as a homosexual, an adulterer, or having any other personal secret exposed for the endless titillation of the press is the lightest possible punishment a politician can face for stepping out of line. If they don’t have sufficient dirt on them that can be brought out to discredit their name, then all together more unpleasant methods are used.

Blackmail is the primary reason why those in Washington consistently ignore their electorate and push for policies that enjoy little or no support from the majority of Americans.

This is why Congress has an approval rating of a paltry 10 per cent. Nine in ten Americans think Congress is doing a terrible job. This disconnect between politicians and the people isn’t merely due to inherent corruption, it’s primarily because Congress members are completely compromised before they even take office. In most cases, politicians are destroyed by the media before they can even get elected if they don’t have dirt on them that can later be used for blackmail.

Indeed, this is why the cult of personality behind Obama was allowed to be built up to sweep him into office. This is why Wall Street poured billions of dollars into Obama’s campaign fund – because they knew he was compromised, could be easily blackmailed, and would therefore dutifully acquiesce to the orders of the banking elite that he obediently serves.

http://www.infowars.com/blackmail-how-the-controlling-elite-owns-politicians/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
April 26, 2010

Members of We Are Change from the San Francisco area were kicked out of a Tea Party event on April 15. The event was held at the Alameda County Fairgrounds in Pleasanton, California. See the video below.

It appears only supporters of the Republican hijacked Tea Party were welcome at the event.

Orly Taitz, an Orange County attorney who has gone to court to disqualify Obama on constitutional grounds, was invited to speak at the event. She was dis-invited after establishment Republican political candidates got wind of her planned attendance. “It’s not worth it,” Bridget Melson, founder and president of the Pleasanton Tea Party, told the Los Angeles Times. “She’s too controversial. This is not what the tea party is about at this point.”

The event was announced and promoted by the Tea Party Patriots, an organization partnered withFreedomWorks, the “conservative” (neocon) organization headed up by the former establishment Republican Dick Armey and funded by the Sarah Scaife Foundation, a neocon operation directed by the billionaire and CIA operative Richard Mellon Scaife. Other Tea Party Patriots partners include the Republican news portal and blog site RedState and the neocon blogger, concentration camp apologist and Fox News darling Michelle Malkin.

The Pleasanton Tea Party does not list partners or financial backers on its website. However, since they are teamed up with the Tea Party Patriots, FreedomWorks, and the scurrilous neocon Scaife we can assume they share the Republican Borg hive version of Tea Party activism (including swearing fealty to theRepublican national platform of total war and the bankster agenda).

The Tea Party Patriots website has posted effusive praise for the Fox News disinfo operative Glenn Beck. Beck has denounced the 9/11 truth movement on numerous occasions, accused it of being in cahoots with al-Qaeda and white supremacists, and believes truthers plan to assassinate Obama.

If the Republican version of the Tea Party manages to absorb the Libertarian Tea Party movement, we can expect a new crop of neocon Republicans to replace the “socialist” Democrats come November. If the momentum continues into 2012, we can expect another George W. Bush as president and a continuation of the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. The bankster agenda and the Federal Reserve will move forward, albeit with the trappings of the Tea Party (confined to the same sort of fake Libertarian lip-service Reagan read from a script while fronting as president for the New World Order).

Is it unfair to characterize the Republican Tea Party as the CIA Tea Party? Considering the involvement of Richard Mellon Scaife, a covert takeover of the movement by the spook agency is a distinct possibility. It certainly would not be the first time a legitimate political movement was taken over by an intelligence agency. In fact, the CIA specializes in creating political movements from the ground-up.

http://www.infowars.com/we-are-change-booted-out-of-california-tea-party-event/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“Greece should serve as warning to the rest of the world that the push for globalism only benefits the globalists and will subject the people of planet Earth to perpetual debt slavery so long as they believe they should pay for the reckless behavior of government and business.

Clearly the people of Greece (and Iceland) are too smart to fall for that hoax. I hope Americans are just as smart.”

-From: http://whatreallyhappened.com/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

Kim-Mai Cutler

Facebook has been gradually boosting its profile in Washington D.C. over the past year and is on the hunt for a second senior lobbyist to add to its office of four. Disclosures released a few days ago show that, on top of lobbying the usual suspects Internet companies reach out to like the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. senators and representatives, the fast-growing social network has also been busy deepening ties to government intelligence and homeland security agencies.

Facebook spent $41,390 on lobbying in the first quarter of 2010. That’s on top of the $207,878 it spent last year — the first year Facebook began releasing such disclosures. Although these numbers are tiny compared to the $4.3 million Google spent on lobbying last year, expect them to grow with the company’s influence and ambitions.

What’s interesting about Facebook’s lobbying in D.C. is what it spends money on despite its small size. It was the only consumer Internet company out of Google, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft, Yahooand Apple to reach out to intelligence agencies last year, according to lobbying disclosure forms. It has lobbied the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — an umbrella office founded in the wake of Sept. 11 that synthesizes intelligence from 17 agencies including the CIA and advises the President — for the last three quarters on privacy and federal cyber-security policy. It has reached out to the Defense Intelligence Agency too.

Andrew Noyes, the company’s manager of public policy communications, says most of Facebook’s work in D.C. consists of basic education — helping legislators and agencies understand how to use the social network for campaigning, reaching out to their constituencies and in their regular line of work. The U.S. Navy used Facebook to alert Hawaiians of a possible tsunami from the Chilean earthquake earlier this year, while the company says 35 government agencies are using social media for governance.

He said the meetings with intelligence agencies were similar. “We disclose this because it’s the right thing to do,” he said. (To be fair, Google and Microsoft also lobbied the Department of Defense last year although they did not reach out to intelligence agencies.)

At the very top of Facebook’s agenda in D.C. is privacy, he said. There’s much at stake. The ease of data collection and sharing on the web is on a collision course with privacy. The suite of projects the company unveiled yesterday at its f8 conference in San Francisco may spark further privacy concerns about the mass of data it will now be tracking on users as they traverse the web. To head off concerns that it is too cavalier with pushing users to be more public, Facebook made a savvy move when it brought longtime privacy advocate Tim Sparapani from the American Civil Liberties Union on-board last year.

Even though the company says its role in D.C. is about awareness for now, developing these relationships will help Facebook get ahead of and influence legislation that may curb its ad targeting abilities. For the last year, Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA) has pledged that he would draft a web privacy bill, but little has come of it so far. Facebook’s competitor Google has already become a punching bag for privacy advocates; ten governments including France, Germany and the U.K. issued a letter to the search giant on Monday asking it to do more to protect consumer privacy, while legislators have asked the Federal Trade Commission to look into Google Buzz.

http://social.venturebeat.com/2010/04/22/facebook-lobbying/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“The Teas Party has turned into a joke. And thats exactly what the media and the Republicans, (who hijacked the whole movement to distract & discredit what the whole movement was really about early on when it was just normal Librarians & Ron Paul supporters), sought out to do.”

-Fred Face 4/23/09

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“Wow… has confusion reached a fevered pitch or what? No. It’s not a matter of confusion… she’s just another agent vessel spewing out horse-shit propaganda… just like the anchors on the news every night, and the majority of our Republican & Democratic “leaders.” Lots of souls being sold. Dignity… a thing of the past.”

-F.F.

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“Whether these clowns in the photo are useful idiots with a few provocateur’s, or real, sociologically & sexually confused, dumb-fuck ignorant skin-heads… they deserve a beatin’ either way. You realize the power of images, right. Get some CIA/FBI provocateur’s to dress up like fuck-head skin-heads, (yes, it happens), hold up some other image that may be representing good things to all people like the “Don’t Tread On Me” flag… grab that image via camera, edit & package it for the 6 o’clock news… and walaa you have masses of American people that will associate the Don’t Tread On Me flag with evil nazi shit. The same flag you’ll see an educated, compassionate, tolerant, constitutionalist holding high at an End The Fed rally. But this will short circuit  your average Americans brain.”

-Fred Face 4/22/10

“Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have.” – Richard Salent, Former President CBS News.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————-

The government, the SPLC, and the corporate media have attempted to portray patriot groups as white supremacists.

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
April 21, 2010

Police raided the Southern California homes of dozens of white supremacists on April 20, according to the Associated Press. Federal and local officers converged on 35 homes and took 16 people into custody in Riverside County in connection with an investigation into deadly booby trap attacks targeting police officers.

None of the arrests were directly related to the alleged attacks that have plagued the small Hemet Police Department since New Year’s Eve, but police believe the arrests will lead to suspects, according to Hemet, California, police Captain Dave Brown.

“They are upset with our aggressive posture against all gangs,” District Attorney Rod Pacheco told the AP. “White supremacist gangs have been very violent, especially toward law enforcement.”

Hemet police officials initially suspected the Vagos motorcycle gang may have been behind the attacks but a number of arrests did not lead to any charges.

Last year the Department of Homeland Security issued a report attempting to link patriot groups and returning veterans to white supremacists and militias.

The Department of Homeland Security’s “Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment” document connects white supremacists with the militia movement, advocates of the Second Amendment, activists opposed to illegal immigration, and other loosely defined “antigovernment” groups.

The Strategic Analysis Group, Homeland Environment and Threat Analysis Division of the DHS created the document during the Bush administration and it was revived by the incoming the Obama administration. Veterans in particular took exception to the report because it claims “returning military veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have joined extremist groups.”

A FOIA request subsequently revealed that the Department of Homeland Security’s report was not based on any reliable supporting evidence. A response to the FOIA filed by Americans for Limited Government revealed that the DHS “undertook no statistical analysis at all, failed to conduct any interviews with the groups it went on to demonize and complied the report based purely on a scattering of web posts from some extremely dubious sources,” Steve Watsonwrote on August 12, 2009.

A document created by the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC) entitled “The Modern Militia Movement” specifically names Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin and their supporters as dangerous domestic terrorists. The MIAC document also attempts to connect the patriot movement to white supremacist groups. The MIAC document was leaked to Alex Jones last year and has since gained national notoriety.

In June, 2009, the government “authenticated” a video by a supposed al-Qaeda recruiter who claimed he had the ability to smuggle a biological weapon into the United States via tunnels under the Mexico border. In the video, Abdullah al-Nafisi also suggested that al-Qaeda might collaborate with “members of native U.S. white supremacist militias who hate the federal government.”

Also in June of 2009, Glenn Beck said 9/11 truthers are in league with al-Qaeda and white supremacists. Beck said 9/11 truth activists consider the late James Von Brunn a hero. Von Brunn allegedly shot to death a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

There is ample evidence that many if not most white supremacist groups are directed by the FBI and the government. During the trial of white supremacist Hal Turner, it was revealed that he worked closely with the FBI as an agent provocateur.

In addition, the SPLC has been linked to white supremacist groups. In 2004, a declassified FBI memoobtained by an Oklahoma newspaper revealed that the SPLC had operatives inside the Identity settlement in Elohim City, Oklahoma.

The California raids are a significant development and will likely be exploited by the government and the SPLC to bolster their fallacious argument that patriot groups are racist and violent.

http://www.infowars.com/cops-link-white-supremacists-to-bombs-in-california/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“I’m an idiot. Yesterday, I saw some posts a few of my friends had on facebook about 4:20 this & that. Then my friend called and left me a message saying Happy 4:20 Day. So, I was thinking to myself that maybe it’s some kinda stoner appreciation memorial day… like Cheech & Chong’s birthday or Hemp day… (you know stupid stuff that gives pot-heads more excuses to burn up). I didn’t think much of it until I went to write a check to pay a bill today and looked at the date on the computer… I’m retarded. Pot’s not perfect… there are some side effects like temporary stupidity.”

-Fred Face 4/21/10

So, Happy 4/20 Day (W/ Headphones)

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“This is all being done under Obama.”

(Yes, that needs pointing out. For all those blindingly following Obama into the abyss. Just as Obama’s expansion of the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan AND Pakistan needs pointing out… and they seem pretty intent on starting another war with Iran. Yes, change… and lots of it).

-Fred Face 4/20/10

The United States Air Force has announced that it will launch a secret space plane that has sparked speculation about the militarization of space.

The Pentagon has set April 21 as the date for the launch of the robotic space plane known as the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV), which is a reusable unmanned plane capable of long outer space missions at low orbits.

Since the nature of the project is shrouded in mystery, defense analysts allege that the US military is building the first generation of US ’space Predator drones’ that will build up the United States’ space armada, the Christian Science Monitor wrote in a recent article.

Military experts argue that the US Department of Defense would not have saved NASA’s costly X-37B project, which had been scrapped, if it did not have a military application.

They say the US wants to maintain a leading role in space via the development of the new ’space weapon’ at a time when other countries like China are expanding their space programs.

However, US military officials maintain that the X-37B will only be used for transporting payloads and facilitating space experiments.

The OTV is capable of supporting a range of tests, the Air Force spokesperson for the project said earlier at the 26th National Space Symposium.

“The first mission will emphasize proving technologies necessary for long duration reusable space vehicles with autonomous reentry and landing capabilities,” Angie Blair added.

She went on to say that the “specific details of the OTV capabilities, limitations and vulnerabilities” remain classified.

The X-37B can stay at an orbit between 200 and 800 kilometers for around 270 days before landing automatically at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, reports say.

The location of the mission control center for the Boeing-made space vehicle is also a classified secret, but Blair says that Air Force Space Command’s 3rd Space Experimentation Squadron (AFSPC) will run the operation.

Military space specialist Professor Roger Handberg, who is the chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, told Space.com that the X-37B project may signify continued U.S. Air Force interest in a rapid response vehicle along the lines of the long-proposed space maneuver vehicle.

He added that the project could be viewed “as the logical extension of the push into unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) where vehicles used for observation have moved into weapon carriers and various other missions, many classified.”

“From the perspective of international observers, especially in space-aspiring states such as China, the X-37B program just reinforces their view that the U.S. is pushing to gain first mover advantage in rapid response, including possible weaponization of space using this vehicle or a derivative,” Handberg noted.

Political analysts say that the X-37B project could be interpreted as a violation of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 if the space plane is used for military purposes.

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, officially known as the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, states that the exploration and use of outer space shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries and shall be the province of all mankind; states shall not place nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner; the Moon and other celestial bodies shall be used exclusively for peaceful purposes; astronauts shall be regarded as the envoys of mankind; states shall be liable for damage caused by their space objects; and states shall avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies.

Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty states: “A State Party to the Treaty which has reason to believe that an activity or experiment planned by another State Party in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, would cause potentially harmful interference with activities in the peaceful exploration and use of outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, may request consultation concerning the activity or experiment.”

In addition, a proposal has been put forward for a Space Preservation Treaty that would ban all space weapons, but no country has signed the treaty so far.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=123813&sectionid=3510203

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“Washington deserves all the backlash. Really. No, really. I advocate only peaceful forms of dissent and revolution but I think the majority of politicians should be verbally harassed and taunted daily whenever they hit the public streets. What a nice world that would be…. accountability. Ummm… sweet accountability.”

-Fred Face 4/19/10

WASHINGTON — Nearly one out of three Americans view the US government as a “major threat” to their freedoms, and four out of five say they don’t trust Washington to solve their problems, according to a new poll out Monday.

Just 19 percent say they are “basically content” with the federal government, against 56 percent who say they are “frustrated” and 21 percent who describe themselves as “angry,” the Pew Research Center survey found.

Only 22 percent say they trust Washington to do what is right4 almost always or most of the time, according to the survey, which had an error margin of plus or minus four percentage points.

The first time Pew asked the question, in 1958, 73 percent of Americans said they trusted the government. In mid-1994, just 17 percent said the same.

The US public has historically expressed distrust in Washington, but a sour economy, epic frustration with the US Congress, and an increasingly polarized electorate have fanned the flames, Pew said.

The findings could spell trouble for President Barack Obama’s Democrats in November mid-term elections, with 53 percent saying the federal government needs “very major reform,” though Republicans do not get high marks either.

When Obama took office in January 2009, 62 percent of Americans said they viewed Democrats favorably, against just 40 percent for Republicans — and the president’s party now only has a 38 percent-37 percent edge over his critics.

Just 25 percent said they had a favorable view of the Congress, just half of what it was one year ago and the lowest in a quarter century of Pew surveys.

But while 58 percent say the government has gone too far in regulating the economy, 61 percent say they want tougher government rules for Wall Street — a boon to Obama and Democrats who have made that their top domestic goal now that the president has signed his historic health care overhaul into law.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jUB2NX_5u3A9ZhXFsHOpMZbImzXw

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“Al Gore is such a whore… Pushing this… Global Warming… Nafta & Gatt.   You realize the skeletons a guy has to have in his closet to be ordered as a pitch man for selling elite globalist evil agendas. Do people watch him when he speaks?? Something ain’t right about the guy?”

-Fred Face 4/19/10

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, April 19, 2010

Bill Clinton, the Southern Poverty Law Center and almost the entire corporate media are not letting a good opportunity go to waste today – by dancing on the graves of 168 victims and exploiting the 15th anniversary of the false flag Oklahoma City Bombing to demonize their political enemies, the Internet, and anyone who dares to express dissent against the federal government.

The propaganda putsch coincides with FBI head Robert Mueller stating that right-wing extremist groups and anti-government militias now represent as big a terror threat as Al-Qaeda, as the whole apparatus of the war on terror is shifted to target Americans increasingly angry at the egregious corruption in government and the global economy as their standard of living plummets and theirpension funds are under threat of seizure.

It also dovetails President Obama’s hyping last week of the threat posed by individuals acquiring nuclear weapons, a claim top nuclear experts like Henry Sokolski have derided as overstated and not based on any new intelligence.

Obama’s warning arrives shortly after FEMA was forced to scale back a simulated nuclear bomb attack by terrorists in Las Vegas that was set to involve 10,000 emergency responders, U.S. troops and officials in role playing exercises.

Former President Bill Clinton told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Friday that he is worried rising anger at the federal government could lead to another OKC bombing, implying that people who use the Internet to express dissent will be to blame for the violence.

Clinton’s exploitation of the Oklahoma City bombing anniversary is being parroted across the establishment media as if it’s just a year or two since the attack on the Alfred P. Murrah building. Clearly, such intense coverage of an incident that took place fifteen years ago is being done to keep the heat on the millions of Americans who distrust the federal government in the continuing effort to portray them as domestic terrorists.

A key facet of this PR campaign is to reinforce the official story behind the Oklahoma City Bombing, that the attack was carried out by right-wing anti-government extremists and a similar tragedy could strike again unless the Internet is censored and Constitutionalists, tea party members, libertarians and anyone who expresses dissent are harassed and have their free speech revoked.

The top story on the SPLC’s website today also invokes the OKC bombing as a lesson through which to refocus attention on “right-wing extremists”.

“April 19 marks the 15th anniversary of the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City – the worst single act of domestic terrorism in our nation’s history and a grim reminder of the fruits of right-wing radicalism. The anniversary comes as the antigovernment militia movement is experiencing a resurgence,” states the SPLC website.

There can be little doubt that the American people are being manipulated to accept the inevitability that right-wing militias and lone wolf extremists are preparing another attack, and that the culprit for the violence will be talk radio, the Internet, and the widespread dissent now being displayed against the federal government.

Don’t be surprised if the feds activate their networks of paid provocateurs and stooges to stage yet another false flag attack that will be used to silence the free speech of the government’s most prominent critics.

As part of this propaganda effort, MSNBC will today air “The McVeigh Tapes: Confessions of an American Terrorist,” where viewers will hear for the first time Timothy McVeigh admitting that he carried out the attack. What they won’t hear is McVeigh admitting, as he explained in a letter to his sister prior to the attack, that he was working at the behest of the federal government when he detonated the bomb that tore apart the Alfred P. Murrah building.

“In a Oct. 20 letter, McVeigh wrote his sister that he and nine other soldiers had been taken to a private intelligence briefing at Fort Bragg, where they were told they could be required to participate in government-sanctioned assassinations and government-sponsored drug trafficking,” reported the New York Times on July 1 1998.

In reality, as anyone who has done five minutes research into the OKC bombing will understand, the official story crumbles on the merest hint of casual examination.

While the media, the SPLC, the ADL and similar organizations are happy to play the Timothy McVeigh card over and over again, they are less enthusiastic to mention the fact that McVeigh planned his deadly assault on the Alfred P. Murrah building under the intimate direction of a high-level FBI official, according to McVeigh’s co-conspirator Terry Nichols, a claim voluminously backed up by a plethora of evidence that has been presented in court on several occasions.

The SPLC fear-mongering machine has long claimed the patriot movement is associated with white supremacists and militias and may engage in violence. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that the SPLC itself has “enabled” the miniscule and completely irrelevant white supremacist movement in order to magnify the ludicrous threat they claim these fringe groups pose.

In 2004, a declassified FBI memo obtained by an Oklahoma newspaper revealed that the SPLC had operatives inside the Identity settlement in Elohim City, Oklahoma. “References to an informant working for the SPLC at Elohim City on the eve of the Oklahoma City bombing raises serious questions as to what the SPLC might know about McVeigh’s activities during the final hours before the fuse was lit in Oklahoma City – but which the SPLC has failed to disclose publicly,” the Daily Gazette reported.

Fifteen years after the Oklahoma City Bombing, the establishment is using the same tactics in an effort to make history repeat itself, by obsessing about the supposed extremist threat, which is clearly part of an attempt to prod and provocateur any potential nutcases out there into convincing themselves to become the next Timothy McVeigh, if not merely a prelude to the government itself using patsies to carry out an attack as they did with McVeigh.

The salacious media storm surrounding “Jihad Jane” and the Hutaree militia is completely unjustified from an objective perspective and indeed, had these stories occurred when Bush was in office they wouldn’t have received one tenth of the attention.

No matter whether such terror plots are genuine or contrived, they only get press coverage when they complement the targeting of whichever group the establishment is trying to demonize at that particular time.

Consider the case of Joel Henry Hinrichs III, a young white man who killed himself on October 1 2005 when he detonated a suicide bomb on the University of Oklahoma (OU) main campus just 200 yards west of Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, where 84,501 spectators were attending a football game.

This happened a few months after the 7/7 London bombings, which were blamed on radicalized Muslim terrorists. Merely because the media at that time was obsessed with demonizing Muslims as terrorists, the story received next to no attention. Imagine if a white American were to blow himself up in Oklahoma in 2010, do you think the media would be interested? The establishment only plays up terror plots when they feed into the agenda they are pursuing, which is a pretty big clue as to who is behind provocateuring such incidents in the first place.

While hyping the deadly threat posed by violent right-wing extremists, the government itself is paying people to pose as right-wing extremists and make violent threats.

Remember, it was the feds, paid for with your tax dollars, who directed phony right-wing radio host Hal Turner to make death threats against federal judges in Illinois and lawmakers in Connecticut.

The supposed white supremacist worked for the agency from 2002 until 2007. “His job was basically to publish information which would cause other parties to act in a manner which would lead to their arrest,” Michael Orozco told the Associated Press.

http://www.infowars.com/government-preparing-to-stage-domestic-terror-attack/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

WeAreChange Talks to Stephen Colbert About Bilderberg

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

By Shane Musgrove

The will of the people, the power of the states

Some say that you can “vote with your feet” — a phrase popularized by Ronald Reagan (most often taken out of context) in 1976 and a philosophy some attribute to Ayn Rand which was alluded to in Atlas Shrugged. Nevertheless, taken for only the meaning of the phrase in itself, it is questionable whether that philosophy exists today or if it is even plausible. Others say, “All politics are local,” a catchphrase quote from Democrat Thomas O’Neill. However catchy these phrases might be, they are hardly true if we stare realism in the face.

Evidence of this can be seen in the back room dealings, the handling of legislation of the House and Senate, and the constant push against the will of the people. Last week, I watched a live vote on C-Span of the health-care reform bill and was appalled by the remarks, demeanor, and the political bribes that surrounded this legislation. Who was it that said “transparency?” That is a joke – nothing more than a campaign ad to gain power along with the slogan of change and hope. Pelosi, Reid and Obama have no such knowledge of the meaning of transparency. What they do know better than anything is “agenda.” For all the Democrats that are waiting to come after me, let me go ahead and say the Republicans have shown the same tactics, so the matter is not unprecedented on either side.

So, the votes were cast — just a little over enough for a win. Slightly fishy, as I am sure Pelosi knows who is up for a tough race for their seat and who is not. This is an obvious sign that this bill is highly unpopular. I would love to say all this came as a surprise, but it doesn’t — not now, not in this era. The federal government voting against the will of the people in order to fulfill their own wishes and desires is now the common trend. Whether you believe this legislation is right or wrong, you cannot negate the fact that an overwhelming majority of the public was against it.

Are there problems with our health care system? Yes, absolutely. Did the majority of people believe this was the answer? The answer: simply no. Argue with the data, not me. Therefore, the trust in our federal government dwindles and again the approval rating of the Congress drops even lower. As stated last week, give them all ten points of standard deviation and they are viewed as an utter failure by the majority.

They cannot run a Social Security program, the US Postal Service, Medicaid, Medicare, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, yet they can run a health care system? To the non-believers — do you not love paying Social Security taxes every two weeks? And to what end? Long ago a promise was made that this money would be placed in a trusted fund; not so — spent, disappeared, and we have still racked up a massive debt. China is on its way to owning the United States. Wherever you stand on the aisles of politics, common logic should say you cannot spend what you do not have no matter how good you think it might be. If the money is not there, it simply is not there. Bluntly speaking, the money is not there unless you want to steal from the rich and possibly the middle class, which is simply socialism. If you have doubts that it is socialism, read Marx. The underlying tenant of Marx’s political philosophy: redistribution of wealth from beginning to end. Simply stated, stealing what people have worked hard for because others feel that they are entitled to something. Hope for a utopian society? Not in this life.

Maybe you want this and maybe you do not. My assumption is that the many hard working American’s do not. Why would they? Another assumption: those who do not want to work and earn want things handed to them on a silver platter as if they are due to be paid something. Any reasonable person should know that no one in this life is entitled to anything. What do we deserve? At most, we should embrace charity and help those in need – not mandates from an ever increasing federal government.

What is next? No one knows with certainty, but I believe the smiles on Obama’s, Pelosi’s, and Reid’s face will soon change. Yet, another power monger will step in to fill their shoes no matter what party wins the favor of the people. That is, unless we can truly say, “All politics are local.” However, this requires the will of the people and the power of the states and a certain degree of boldness regarding state rights.

Thomas Jefferson once had the fortitude to stand against this and established the doctrine of nullification as he opposed an overreaching federal government in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798. A profound statement by Jefferson: “I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground that all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states or to the people. To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.”

Therefore, a line is drawn in the sand between the Congress, the States, and the will of the people. Of course, men of valor comparable to Jefferson must be elected at the state level and this solely depends on the people and a gallant effort to bring power back to the states. To this end, it might be plausible that soon we can all confidently say, “All politics are local” and you may truly have the ability to “vote with your feet.” If the majority of a state wants it, let it be — let them say yes. If they do not, let it be — let them say nay and adopt the doctrine of nullification. Only then will power rest in the hands of the states and the people, which happens to be their diminishing tenth amendment constitutional right.

This diminishing tenth amendment right is a breaking point that we undoubtedly reached long ago. And to that I quote, “Whensoever the General Government assumes un-delegated powers, its acts are un-authoritative, void, and of no force.” — Thomas Jefferson

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=783

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

By Sarah Klein

The fast-food industry has long been under fire for selling high-fat, high-calorie meals that have been linked to weight gain and diabetes, but the financial health of the industry continues to attract investors — including some of the leading insurance companies in the U.S., a new study reports.

According to Harvard Medical School researchers, 11 large companies that offer life, disability, or health insurance owned about $1.9 billion in stock in the five largest fast-food companies as of June 2009.

The fast-food companies included McDonald’s, Burger King, and Yum! Brands (the parent company of KFC and Taco Bell). Companies from both North America and Europe were among the insurers, including the U.S.-based Massachusetts Mutual, Northwestern Mutual, and Prudential Financial.

The researchers say insurance companies should sell their fast-food stock or use their influence as shareholders to make fast food healthier, by pressuring big restaurant chains to cut portion sizes or improve nutrition, for instance.

There’s a “potential disconnect” between the mission of insurance companies and the often-unhealthy food churned out by companies like McDonald’s, they write.

“The insurance industry cares about making money, and it doesn’t really care how,” says the senior author of the study, J. Wesley Boyd, M.D., an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, in Boston. “They will invest in products that contribute to significant morbidity and mortality if doing so is going to make money.”

Boyd and his colleagues used a database that draws on financial filings and news reports to estimate the fast-food investments of the 11 companies. Their findings appear in the American Journal of Public Health.

7 health insurance horror stories

Massachusetts Mutual and Northwestern Mutual — which both offer life, disability, and long-term care insurance — owned $367 million and $422 million in fast-food stock, respectively, much of it in McDonald’s, the authors report. Prudential, which offers life insurance and long-term disability coverage, held $356 million in fast-food stock, according to the study.

Insurance companies disputed these figures. Andrea Austin, the assistant director of corporate relations for Northwestern Mutual, in Milwaukee, says the company’s investment in fast-food companies is only about $250 million, and was at the time the study was conducted. That amounts to about one-fifth of 1 percent of the company’s portfolio, she adds.

Austin also disagrees that the company’s fast-food investments represent a disconnect with its mission. “We have to determine what’s going to give our policy owners value,” she says. “We have to make sure we fulfill our obligations to them, and to do that we invest in a wide variety of industries. It’s that diversification that enables us to return value to them.”

In an e-mail, MassMutual spokesman Mark Cybulski called the study’s findings “absolutely incorrect” and said that as of December 31, the company’s holdings of fast-food-related stock amounted to just $1.4 million, which represents less than one-hundredth of 1 percent of the company’s $86.6 billion in cash and total invested assets.

Austin says she has “no idea” why the figures differ and says that Northwestern Mutual doesn’t use subsidiaries.

Theresa Miller, the vice president of global communications for Prudential Financial, said in an e-mail that she could not discuss the specifics of the company’s portfolios. But she noted that the investments in the report are within index funds, and that “a large portion” are managed on behalf of third-party clients.

MassMutual, Northwestern, and Sun Life (another insurer mentioned in the report) have contested Boyd’s findings in the past. Last year Boyd led a similar analysis, published as a letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine, that found that seven insurance companies held some $4.5 billion in tobacco-company stock. Then, too, Cybulski said that MassMutual’s holdings were just a fraction of what Boyd and his colleagues claimed.

According to Boyd, the discrepancy in his figures and those cited by MassMutual may be due in part to two factors: Insurance companies may invest in fast-food stocks through subsidiaries over which they have limited oversight (and therefore may not consider them direct investments), and some of the investments may be in index funds, a type of mutual fund tied to the collective performance of a large group of stocks, such as the S&P 500, which may include those of fast-food companies.

The database used in his analysis provides only the aggregate of a company’s holdings, Boyd says.

Austin says she has “no idea” why the figures differ and says that Northwestern Mutual doesn’t use subsidiaries.

Boyd and his co-authors emphasize that fast food — unlike cigarette smoking — can be safe in moderation.

15 ways smoking ruins your looks

However, a growing body of research has linked frequent fast-food consumption to weight gain, obesity, and type 2 diabetes.

As a result, the study notes, several cities and towns have restricted fast-food restaurants via zoning laws. And under the health-care legislation passed by Congress in March, chain restaurants will have to post calorie information on their menus, as is already required in New York City.

In their 2009 paper on tobacco, Boyd and his colleagues suggested that insurance companies profit twice over by investing in tobacco stocks, since they can charge higher premiums to smokers and also profit if the stock rises. A similar dynamic may be at work with fast food, according to Boyd.

“They can charge you more for life insurance if you have these negative health outcomes that people have as a result of eating fast food,” he says.

But investing in unhealthy industries such as fast food and tobacco isn’t necessarily a win-win for insurers over the long term, especially for health insurers, says Sara N. Bleich, Ph.D., an assistant professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in Baltimore, Maryland.

“Health insurance companies get profits if they invest in tobacco and fast food, [but] these are some of the top drivers of mortality in the country,” says Bleich, who researches obesity policy but was not involved in the current study.

25 diet-busting foods you should never eat

“They are essentially killing off their consumer base, so it’s not a sustainable model in the long-term. Long-term goals should be consistent with health, because that ensures a large population from which to draw consumers.”

Robert Zirkelbach, the press secretary for America’s Health Insurance Plans, a national association representing health insurers whose Web site lists three of the companies named in the study, declined to comment on the specifics of the study. “Our industry is strongly committed to prevention and wellness,” Zirkelbach said in a statement.

America’s Top 10 healthiest fast food restaurants

“Health insurance companies are doing things across the country that are working to address obesity, to promote prevention, and to encourage people to live healthier lifestyles.”

Gigi Kellett, the director of the anti-tobacco campaign of Corporate Accountability International, a Boston-based watchdog group, says that both tobacco and fast food are inappropriate investments for insurance companies.

“Tobacco remains the leading cause of preventable death around the world, and there is growing research that diet-related diseases could soon surpass tobacco,” she says. “It’s irresponsible for insurance companies to invest in companies that make people sick.”

Corporate Accountability International recently launched a “Retire Ronald” campaign to pressure McDonald’s to discontinue the Ronald McDonald clown character and rein in its marketing to children, Kellett adds.

For her part, Bleich says that while health insurance companies, specifically, should be encouraged to divest their fast-food investments, encouraging self-regulation and competition in the fast-food industry may be a more effective way to make the industry healthier.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/15/insurance.fast.food.stock/index.html?hpt=Sbin

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

Climategate scientists cleared of wrongdoing” read the headline in yesterday’s Post. Who expected anything else?

By Peter Foster

Climategate scientists cleared of wrongdoing” read the headline in yesterday’s Post. Who expected anything else? The two self-inquiries launched by the University of East Anglia into its Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were always destined to produce whitewashes, as did a recent UK parliamentary inquiry, and as will an “independent” review by the UN.

The first of the UEA reports, from a committee headed by ardent warmist and anti-carbon profiteer Lord Oxburgh, appeared this week. As Lawrence Solomon points out elsewhere on this page, the choice of Lord Oxburgh indicated that the fix was always in for an inquiry which fails to address, let alone probe, most of the major issues. And yet there is a mountain of condemnation-by-faint-exoneration between the lines of the report’s ridiculously slim five pages.

Its attempt to present CRU head Phil Jones, and his beleaguered band, as unworldly boffins who were blindsided by all this attention is ridiculous. The report claims that it found a “small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers.” The key question is: dedicated to what? Certainly, they weren’t expecting to be outed quite so spectacularly, but to paint them as innocents in the big bad world of climate realpolitik is nonsense.

After reviewing a cherry-picked group of eleven CRU studies, the report gently raps the knuckles of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, for failing to note the reservations that CRU researchers so assiduously attached to their peer-reviewed work. “All of the published work was accompanied by detailed descriptions of uncertainties and accompanied by appropriate caveats,” notes the report.

Global warming alarmists relentlessly chant that there is scientific “consensus” that the “science is settled.” Yet now we are told that somehow the main body for promoting the climate change agenda “neglected” to tell the world that the science wasn’t settled. What we are not told is that the scientists who removed the caveats in the IPCC reports were lead IPCC authors Mr. Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa!

The CRU is concerned with temperature data. Indeed it is one of the principal sources for claims that the earth warmed alarmingly in the 20th century after 900 years of alleged climatic calm (Medieval Warm Period? Little Ice Age? Never happened).

Data from the distant past is reconstructed from problematic “proxies” such as tree rings; but even assembling readings for more recent periods is difficult due to the thin coverage of weather stations and, more seriously, to the impact of the “urban heat island effect” on readings from stations where development has encroached. There, temperature increases may be due to traffic, tarmac and local barbecues rather than global climate.

The CRU’s data has appeared in two forms: raw and cooked. Much of the raw variety, unfortunately, has been “lost.” This is treated by the review as infinitely excusable due to the pressures of the academic life. You know, tedious admin meetings, the pressure to publish, the need to get in those applications for multi-million dollar grants attached to proving man-made global warming. But how can ditching the fundamental data on which your science depends be dubbed mere carelessness with “non-essential record keeping?”

As for the cooked data, the CRU has been accused of “manipulation” not in the legitimate statistical sense, so that different data sets may be comparable, but in support of the results required by government-funded, highly politicized science. Without data suggesting rising temperatures due to anthropogenic emissions, there would be no justification for massive global programs such as cap-and-trade, redistributionist “clean development,” or the hefty subsidization of alternative energy.

The CRU is also gently fingered for its lack of statistical sophistication. As the report admits, “It is regrettable that so few professional statisticians have been involved in this work because it is fundamentally statistical.”

But hang on. Draconian global policies have been made on the basis of dodgy data handled by those who are less than expert? This is surely a little more than “regrettable.” If statistics are so important, why didn’t the IPCC make sure the CRU, and itself, had the world’s greatest statistical minds on tap? Could that be because the data and science are there to support the political position rather than guiding it?

The report does dish out some harsh criticisms, but only to the unnamed CRU critics whose “tone” it “deplores.” They presumably refer to the likes of Canadians Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, whom Lord Oxburgh and his team assiduously avoided. Meanwhile the emphasis on “tone” is farcical, particularly when compared with the kind of anti-skeptic vitriol exposed in the Climategate emails.

According to the report “some of these criticisms show a rather selective and uncharitable approach to information made available by CRU.” So skeptics such as Messrs. McIntyre and McKitrick might have been stonewalled, insulted, undermined and threatened by the CRU cabal, but apparently it was they who should have been more “charitable.”

Lord Oxburgh suggested this week that attacks on the CRU had come from people who do not like the “implications” of their conclusions. If by “implications” he means suicidal and pointless policies, then that might have been the one thing he got right. Otherwise, his report is a travesty.

http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/04/15/peter-foster-climategate-whitewash.aspx

Related Article:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7550325/MPs-begin-the-Climategate-whitewash.html

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“When your treated like the scum of the earth… your self-esteem tends to go down…”

-F.F.

An assault rifle lies in front of the Dayton VA Medical Center, located at 4100 W. Third St. Police on the scene said the death is the result of a suicide. The deceased man, Jesse C. Huff, was 27 years old and had been seen in the medical center’s emergency room prior to his body being found outside, according Donna Simmons, VA spokeswoman.

By Lucas Sullivan and Kelli Wynn

DAYTON — A 27-year-old Army veteran shot and killed himself at the front steps of the Dayton Veterans Administration Medical Center just hours after he had been in the center’s emergency room.

Jesse C. Huff, address unknown, was wearing full military fatigues and was armed with a military-style rifle, which he used to shoot himself twice in the head about 5:45 a.m. Friday, April 16, according to police and the Montgomery County Coroner’s Office.

The coroner’s office had not determined Huff’s address as of 3:30 p.m. Friday, However, he has at least one relative who lives in the Dayton-area, according to Ken Betz, executive director for the Montgomery County Coroner’s Office.

Betz said Huff apparently pulled the trigger of his weapon twice.

Huff had been a patient at the center and was seen in the center’s emergency room prior to his body being found outside, according Donna Simmons, VA spokeswoman.

“He was a veteran that we (had treated),” Simmons said.

Members of the Dayton Bomb Squad detonated a satchel found next to Huff’s body. The squad used a remote-controlled robot to load the satchel into the bucket of a bulldozer, then detonated the bag. Officials later said the satchel did not contain any explosives.

Police and center officials reopened all entrances to the center, located at 4100 W. Third St., by early afternoon.

Police searched Huff’s van in the VA center parking lot after the shooting. The panel van, which has military-style decals on the rear doors, was parked about three rows from the entrance.

Dayton fire paramedics were called to the center after receiving a report of a shooting in front of a Civil War statue in front of the VA.

No one else was injured during the shooting, according to Simmons.

“This is an unfortunate incident,” Simmons said.

http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/veteran-commits-suicide-in-front-of-dayton-va-center-656012.html

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

• By Kim Zetter

A former senior National Security Agency official was slammed with a 10-count indictment Thursday after allegedly leaking top secret information to a reporter at a national newspaper.

Thomas Andrews Drake, 52, was a high-ranking NSA employee with access to signals intelligence documents when he repeatedly leaked classified information to the unnamed reporter, who ran stories based on the leaks between February 2006 and November 2007, the indictment alleges.

Fox News is reporting that the journalist was Siobhan Gorman, who worked at the time for the Baltimore Sun and is now a reporter with The Wall Street Journal, which is published by Fox parent corporation News Corp.

According to the indictment, Drake exchanged hundreds of e-mails with the reporter, and the two met in the Washington, D.C., area half a dozen times. Drake also researched stories for the journalist, sending e-mail to other NSA employees asking questions, and accessing classified documents to obtain information.

Drake even “reviewed, commented on, and edited drafts, near final and final drafts” of the reporter’s articles, according to the government.

He later allegedly shredded documents and lied about his activity to federal agents investigating the leaks.

Articles Gorman published at the time dealt with the threat of cyberattacks and the NSA’s struggles to modernize its data collection and sifting technology. A February 2006 article discussed the failure of a $300 million NSA project management system and other mission-critical software programs the agency needed to combat terrorism and attacks.

Another article published in May 2006 discussed a collection program called ThinThread that was abandoned in favor of another program called Trailblazer. Privacy safeguards that were inherent in ThinThread and not in Trailblazer were dropped as a result. Gorman wrote:

NSA managers did not want to adopt the data-sifting component of ThinThread out of fear that the Trailblazer program would be outperformed and “humiliated,” an intelligence official said.

Without ThinThread’s data-sifting assets, the warrantless surveillance program was left with a sub-par tool for sniffing out information, and that has diminished the quality of its analysis, according to intelligence officials.

Sources say the NSA’s existing system for data-sorting has produced a database clogged with corrupted and useless information.

Gorman attributed information in the articles to anonymous sources and, in at least one article published in March 2007, said the source was given anonymity because the document discussed was “classified” in nature.

Drake was charged in the U.S. District Court of Maryland with five counts of willfully retaining classified national security documents, as well as obstruction of justice and making false statements to the FBI.

“Our national security demands that the sort of conduct alleged here — violating the government’s trust by illegally retaining and disclosing classified information — be prosecuted and prosecuted vigorously,” said Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer in a statement.

Drake’s attorney did not immediately return a call for comment.

“The damage to our national security caused by leaks won’t stop until we see a couple of perpetrators in orange jump suits,” said Senator Kit Bond (R – Missouri), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a press release praising the indictment. Bond called on the Justice Department to prosecute other whistleblowers, such as Thomas Tamm, whom Bond said should be following Drake to federal court.

Tamm is a former Justice Department prosecutor who revealed in 2008 that he was a source for a story the New York Times broke in December 2005 about the warrantless wiretapping program the NSA was conducting with authorization from the Bush administration.

Drake’s leaking to the Baltimore Sun began around November 2005, according the the indictment, when a former congressional staffer who had a “close, emotional friendship” with Drake asked him to speak with the reporter, now identified as Gorman. Drake had provided the congressional staffer with classified and unclassified information while the person worked for Congress, and after the staffer retired in May 2002.

Drake opened a Hushmail e-mail account to contact Gorman, and volunteered to provide information about the NSA. Drake instructed the reporter to open her own Hushmail account so they could communicate covertly.

Hushmail is a Canada-based encrypted e-mail service that allows account holders to communicate securely with a client-side Java encryption applet.  But Threat Level previously reported that the company has subverted its own encryption to help U.S. and Canadian authorities gain access to customer e-mail, in response to court orders.  It’s unclear if the FBI used that capability in investigating Drake.

Gorman agreed that information gathered from Drake would be attributed in articles to a “senior intelligence official” and that Drake would never be her only source for information.

Drake worked as a contractor for the NSA in 1991 until August 2001 when he became an employee in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate as Chief of the Change Leadership and Communications Office. A year later, he became technical leader in the Directorate of Engineering.

His work focused not on signals intelligence itself, but on developing efficiencies in the agency. In November 2007 the agency suspended his security clearance, and in April 2008 he resigned in lieu of termination, according to court records.

When government investigators searched Drake’s home computer in November 2007 they found copies of classified documents, including internal NSA e-mails headed “Volume is our Friend,” “Trial and Testing,” “the Collections Sites,” and “What a Success.”

Updated 15:00 to identify the reporter who allegedly worked with Drake.

Photo courtesy NSA.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/04/nsa-executive-charged

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“The SPLC is such a laughing stock of a C.I.A. front, counterintelligence goon squad. Did you ever watch Mark Potok speak… enough said. Glenn Beck is a fuckin’ freak show I could care less what they say about another fellow CIA payroll shill. But to declare Ron Paul & Judge Napolitano as “Extremist” enablers is pretty funny and just reveals there roll as a race dividing CIA payroll banking, twisted counterintelligence organization. Divide & conquer… thats what it’s all about with these globalist.”

-Fred Face 4/16/10

The SPLC insinuates that Paul and Napolitano are “enablers” for domestic terrorism.

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
April 16, 2010

Ron Paul and Andrew Napolitano, along with Michele Bachmann and Glenn Beck, are anti-government patriot movement “enablers,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“These men and women have helped to put key Patriot themes — the idea that President Obama is a Marxist, that he and other elites in the government are pushing a socialist takeover, that the United States plans secret concentration camps and so on — before millions of Americans, many of whom actually believe these completely false allegations,” declares the SPLC in a recent web posting. “Whether these people tell such tall tales because they believe them or simply because they are willing to shamelessly pander for votes or ratings, is anyone’s guess; but the noxious effect on the body politic is the same.”

More lies. In fact, Ron Paul has deemed Obama a corporatist, not a Marxist. During the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans, Dr. Paul said: “The question has been raised about whether or not our president is a socialist. I am sure there are some people here who believe it. But in the technical sense, in the economic definition of a what a socialist is, no, he’s not a socialist…. He’s a corporatist. And unfortunately we have corporatists inside the Republican party and that means you take care of corporations and corporations take over and run the country.”

“Whether he’s advocating pulling out of the United Nations, trashing the Fed, or returning to the gold standard, Paul’s views have scored him plenty of points among the Patriot crowd,” writes the SPLC, and these mainstream Libertarian ideals “stoke fears of an overreaching government on the far right.”

The SPLC fear-mongering machine has long claimed the patriot movement is associated with white supremacists and militias and may engage in violence. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that the SPLC itself has “enabled” the miniscule and completely irrelevant white supremacist movement in order to magnify the ludicrous threat they claim these fringe groups pose.

In 2004, a declassified FBI memo obtained by an Oklahoma newspaper revealed that the SPLC had operatives inside the Identity settlement in Elohim City, Oklahoma. “References to an informant working for the SPLC at Elohim City on the eve of the Oklahoma City bombing raises serious questions as to what the SPLC might know about McVeigh’s activities during the final hours before the fuse was lit in Oklahoma City – but which the SPLC has failed to disclose publicly,” the Daily Gazette reported.

In order to defame Ron Paul and characterize him as a racist fellow traveler, the SPLC dredges up comments published in The Ron Paul Survival Report in 1996. “The quotations in The New Republic article [the neocon publication that attempted to discredit Paul with the accusation] are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed. I have never uttered such words and denounce such small-minded thoughts,” Paul said. “In fact, I have always agreed with Martin Luther King, Jr. that we should only be concerned with the content of a person’s character, not the color of their skin.”

“Paul claimed in 2001 that ghostwriters had penned the newsletters that bear his name but acknowledged he bore ’some moral responsibility,’” adds the SPLC in a crude attempt to make the controversy stick and portray Paul as a racist.

The SPLC has completely ignored Ron Paul’s denouncement of racism. “Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans only as members of groups and never as individuals. Racists believe that all individual who share superficial physical characteristics are alike; as collectivists, racists think only in terms of groups,” he has said.

Former New Jersey judge Andrew Napolitano, according to the SPLC, “missed out on rubbing elbows with neo-Confederates, conspiracy theorists and antigovernment Patriot activists” when he failed to show as a keynote speaker in February at the first annual Tenth Amendment Summit in Atlanta. “It seems the TV judge is vying to become a fixture on the far-right lecture circuit” and his very presence of Fox weakens the network’s credibility, according to the SPLC.

For the SPLC, any defense of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights represents far-right kookiness. It is a bellwether of violence, racial hatred, and “antigovernment extremism.”

The SPLC characterizes Napolitano as a conspiracy nut for pointing out Obamacare contains death panels. In fact, the legislation does contain provisions for moving the elderly off the mortal coil, although it does not specifically mention death panels. In late March, the so-called economist Paul Krugman admitted Obamacare contains language providing for what amounts to death panels.

The SPLC slams Sarah Palin on her death panel comments but fails to put the remarks in a larger context. “Government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course,” Palin wrote on her Facebook page.

The SPLC is tasked with destroying the patriot movement by portraying it as a fringe phenomenon consisting of dangerous radicals and even psychopathic domestic terrorists who have supposedly teamed up with white supremacist militias and other violent miscreants. Of course, this is nothing more than propaganda, character assassination, slander, and defamation.

Both Ron Paul and Andrew Napolitano are dedicated constitutionalists who demand the federal government return to the principles of the founding document and stop imposing mandates on the states in violation of the Tenth Amendment and the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. They have consistently defended the Bill of Rights against the tyrannical actions of both the Republicans and Democrats.

The SPLC and its ideological twin, the Anti-Defamation League, are engaged in a desperate effort to silence the patriot movement through baseless and slanderous accusations. It will not work. Millions of Americans have arrived at the conclusion that the federal government is indeed an authoritarian leviathan. In response, increasing numbers support the Tea Party movement and other patriot groups.

http://www.infowars.com/splc-declares-paul-and-napolitano-extremist-enablers/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

The bodies of eight children and young men killed by troops during a night raid in Kunar province in eastern Afghanistan

Jerome Starkey, Kabul

It was dark when Mohammed Taleb Abdul Ajan woke to the sound of dogs barking. Then he heard boots crunching on gravel and men’s voices outside his bedroom. “Their guns killed without a sound,” he said. By dawn three of Taleb’s sons, two of his brothers, three nephews, a shepherd boy staying with them and a neighbour were dead.

All the victims were aged 12 to 18. Eight of them were enrolled in the local school. Most were shot at close range where they slept but one was dragged from the bed that he shared with his wife and killed with his nephews in a different room, Taleb said.

Taleb woke sometime between midnight and 3am on Sunday, December 27 — the cockerel had not yet crowed, he said.

A covert group of US and Afghan forces had landed by helicopter 2km outside Ghazi Khan village, investigators said, in a remote and mountainous part of Kunar province, close to the Pakistan border.

Originally Nato said that the “assault force” was hunting a group of men suspected of making and smuggling improvised explosives — the Taleban’s deadly roadside bombs — although it denied that the troops were under its command. Now it believes that most of the victims were innocent. “Ultimately we did determine this to be a civilian casualty incident,” a Nato official told The Times.

Speaking publicly for the first time since the operation, Taleb, 50, and his brother Farooq, 46, insisted that their home was raided by mistake. “They had no idea who they had killed,” Farooq said. On the night of the raid, Taleb came to the door of his room and was immediately ordered back inside by soldiers wearing night-vision goggles. “It was dark. I couldn’t see them, but they could see me.”

At the time of the raid his brother Farooq was being held at the US military detention centre at Bagram. Farooq said that he was held for 20 months in a case of mistaken identity, a claim supported by a local MP. He was released without charge a few days after his children were killed.

Their version of events, told to The Times in Kabul, is partly based on the testimony of one of Farooq’s surviving sons, Sefatullah, 19, who was handcuffed, searched and marched around the family’s mountain compound by men he believes were Americans, and on statements by the wife of one of the victims and other female relatives.

“They took Sefatullah to each room and asked him who was sleeping inside,” Farooq said. “But they didn’t show him inside. He didn’t know they were dead. He told them, ‘My brothers, my cousins, they are students’. The Americans were writing down the names and their classes.”

As soon as the troops left, Sefatullah ran to his mother’s room and she cut the plastic cuffs that had bound his hands behind his back. “Then they went into one of the rooms, where six people had been sleeping,” Farooq said. “It was dark and my wife walked on her son’s dead body. Then they brought a hurricane lamp.”

They found Taleb’s son, Rahimullah, 17, and a boy called Samar Gul, 12, dead in a guest room. Taleb said that Samar Gul was staying overnight because he needed some wheat milled and Taleb’s family own the local mill. “He was afraid to stay on his own so Rahimullah slept in the room with him.”

Next, Taleb said, the soldiers burst into the room of his half-brother, Najibullah, 18. According to his widow, Hassina, they dragged him out of bed and searched his belongings. “All they found were books,” Taleb said. The family discovered Najibullah’s body slumped together with Farooq’s son Sebhanullah, 17, and two of Taleb’s sons, Matiullah, 16, and Attahullah, 15, in a room that led on to a second bedroom.

“When I entered their room I saw four people lying in a heap,” said Taleb. “I shook them and shouted their names but they didn’t respond. Some of them were shot in the head. Some of them were shot in the chest.

“I was praying that in the next room maybe they were still alive but when I went in I saw everyone was dead. I saw blood on their necks. I became crazy. I don’t remember what I felt.”

In the second room they found Farooq and Taleb’s half-brother Samiullah, 12, Farooq’s son Atiqullah, 15, and a nephew, Ismael, 12. All of them had been shot.

After the soldiers shot the boys they took photographs of their bloodied faces. Farooq said his daughter heard a man curse their informant in the local language, using an expression that implied that the soldiers realised they had been fed bad information.

Investigators said that the school register showed that eight victims had attended classes the previous day and the school’s headmaster confirmed their identities. “If they were terrorists how did they have time to go to school?” Farooq asked. A United Nations investigation confirmed that eight of the victims were students. The tenth victim was a farmer, Abdul Khaliq, 18, who was shot when he ran out of a nearby house, Taleb said.

One relative, Rahmatullah, who lives closer to the district centre, said that Americans blocked the road until 8am the following day. He added that they saw soldiers walking and driving down the valley. Some were picked up by a helicopter. “There were helicopters flying over all morning,” he said.

US forces based in Kunar have denied any knowledge of the raid. The family found shell casings and plastic glow sticks that they believe prove the troops were American, but a number of Western officials in Kabul hinted that the gunmen were Afghans.

A Nato spokesman said: “Incidents such as this do not reflect any conduct that Isaf [regular Nato troops] would condone and it is not the way Isaf trains any of our Afghan partners.”

Officials in Kabul confirmed that “US forces” were present but refused to say if they were military or civilian.

Taleb and Farooq believe that the Americans were fed false information by one of their enemies. In the past, Afghan informants have deliberately misled US forces to engage them in old vendettas.

“The Government said that in ten days they would bring the spy who gave the Americans information to court. It is a great shame they can’t find him,” Farooq said. “We want justice for our family.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/afghanistan/article7040216.ece

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

By Bob Ivry

April 14 (Bloomberg) — The biggest U.S. commercial banks will take their fight against disclosure of Federal Reservelending in 2008 to the Supreme Court if necessary, the top lawyer for an industry-owned group said.

Continued legal appeals will delay or block the first public look at details of the central bank’s $2 trillion in emergency lending during the 2008 financial crisis. The Clearing House Association LLC, a group that includes Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co., joined the Fed in defense of a lawsuit brought by Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, seeking release of records related to four Fed lending programs.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled March 19 that the central bank must release the documents. A three-judge panel of the appellate court rejected the Fed’s argument that disclosure would stigmatize borrowers and discourage banks from seeking emergency help.

“Our member banks are very concerned about real-time disclosure of information that could cause a run on the banks,” said Paul Saltzman, the group’s general counsel, in an interview yesterday. “We’re not going to let the Second Circuit opinion stand without seeking a review.”

Regardless of whether the Fed appeals, the Clearing House will take the next legal step by asking for a review by the full appellate court, Saltzman, 49, said at his office in New York. If the ruling is unfavorable, the bank group will petition the Supreme Court, he said.

Joined Lawsuit

The 157-year-old, New York-based Clearing House Payments Co., which processes transactions among banks, is owned by its 20 members. They include Citigroup Inc., Bank of New York Mellon Corp., Deutsche Bank AG, HSBC Holdings Plc, PNC Financial Services Group Inc., UBS AG, U.S. Bancorp and Wells Fargo & Co.

The Clearing House Association, a lobbying group with the same members, joined the lawsuit in September 2009, after an initial ruling against the central bank in federal court in Manhattan.

The Fed is “reviewing the decision and considering our options,” said Fed spokesman David Skidmore in Washington. He had no comment on Saltzman’s plans.

Attorneys face a May 3 deadline to file their appeals.

“We’ll wait to see the motion papers,” said Thomas Golden, attorney for Bloomberg who is a partner at New York- based Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP. “The judges’ decision was well-reasoned, and we doubt further appeals will yield a different result.”

Bloomberg sued in November 2008 under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, after the Fed denied access to records of four Fed lending programs and a loan the central bank made in connection with New York-based JPMorgan Chase’s acquisition of Bear Stearns Cos. in March 2008.

231 Pages

The central bank contends that 231 pages of daily reports summarizing lending activity, which were prepared by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for the Fed Board of Governors in Washington, aren’t covered by the FOIA. The statute obliges federal agencies to make government documents available to the press and the public. The suit doesn’t seek money damages.

The Fed released lists on March 31 of assets it acquired in the 2008 bailout of Bear Stearns.

The New York Times Co., the Associated Press and Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Wall Street Journal, are among media companies that have signed up as friends of the court in support of Bloomberg.

The Fed Board of Governors’ “refusal to disclose the names of borrowers renders public oversight of its actions impossible — it prevents any assessment of the effectiveness of the Board’s actions and conceals any collusion, corruption, fraud or abuse that might have occurred,” the news organizations said in a letter to the appeals panel.

The case is Bloomberg LP v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 09-04083, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (New York).

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601010&sid=ax8ulGXswn4E

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

Being against Amnesty For Illegal Immigrants ain’t got nothing to do with racism…

(Unfortunately, these things need to be explained in a country steaming with “white liberal guilt).”

-Fred Face 4/15/10

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

-“I am very sorry about the incident,” Shaver said outside the courtroom. “Hopefully things will work out where we become friends enough so that he gives me back my bullet.”

(…. CLASSIC)

Patrick Doyle

After a three-day trial that drew friends Willie Nelson and Robert Duvall to a Waco, Texas courtroom, outlaw country artist Billy Joe Shaver was found not guilty Friday on charges of aggravated assault for shooting a man in the face outside a Texas bar in 2007. “I am very sorry about the incident,” Shaver said outside the courtroom. “Hopefully things will work out where we become friends enough so that he gives me back my bullet.”

In a packed, sweltering courtroom, Shaver, 70, admitted to shooting Billy Bryant Coker on the back porch of Papa Joe’s Saloon, a beer joint outside Shaver’s Waco hometown. The singer pleaded self-defense, claiming Coker stirred his drink with a pocket blade, wiped it on Shaver’s shirt and asked him to come outside. “I felt he was gonna kill me,” Shaver testified. “He was a big bully, the worst I ever seen — a big bad one. And I been all around the world.”

State prosecutors argued Shaver could have left in his truck before shooting Coker. “I’m from Texas,” Shaver responded in his honky-tonk Texas drawl. “If I was a chicken shit I would have left.”

The shooting occurred March 31, 2007, after Shaver stopped into the smoky bar for a beer with his former wife, Wanda. Shaver testified Coker was rude to Wanda and told Shaver to “Shut the fuck up.” After the two went outside, witnesses testified Shaver asked Coker, “Where do you want it?” then pointed a .22 pistol at Coker’s cheek, pulled the trigger and fled in his truck. When Shaver was asked on the stand if he shot Coker because Shaver was jealous the victim was talking Shaver’s wife, Shaver laughed. “I get more woman than a passenger train can haul,” he said.

Shaver’s song “Live Forever” was used prominently in Crazy Heart, and Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan have recorded his music. In 1973, Waylon Jennings recorded nearly an entire record of Shaver songs, Honky Tonk Heroes, and Willie Nelson says he considers Shaver the greatest living songwriter. Nelson leaned forward in his seat as Shaver testified, and told RS outside the courtroom, “I don’t think Billy Joe would do anything wrong. Whatever happened, I don’t think it was Billy Joe’s fault.”

http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2010/04/12/billy-joe-shaver-found-not-guilty-for-shooting-on-the-scene-in-waco/#

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites