AMERICAN PRESIDENTS KOW TOW TO THE HEAD OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER
HERE
AMERICA SAYS WIKILEAKS COULD THREATEN NATIONAL SECURITY
A US soldier looks on as two Afghan police officers frisk civilians - 21 July 2010 The leaks raise "serious" questions about US policy in the region, a senior US senator has said
The United States has condemned as "irresponsible" the leak of 90,000 military records, saying publication could threaten national security.
The documents released by the Wikileaks website include details of killings of Afghan civilians unreported until now.
Three news organisations had advance access to the records, which also show Nato concerns that Pakistan and Iran are helping the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Pakistan has denied claims its intelligence agency backed the Taliban.
The huge cache of classified papers - posted by Wikileaks as the Afghan War Diary - is one of the biggest leaks in US history. It was given to the New York Times, the Guardian and the German news magazine, Der Spiegel.
In a statement, US National Security Adviser Gen James Jones said such classified information "could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk".
He said the documents covered the period from 2004 to 2009, before President Obama "announced a new strategy with a substantial increase in resources for Afghanistan".
Pakistan denied claims its intelligence agency, the ISI, backed the Taliban in the war in Afghanistan.
"I think that the American leadership knows what Pakistan is doing," Pakistan's ambassador in Washington, Husain Haqqani, told the BBC.
"We have paid a price in treasure and in blood over the last two years. More Pakistanis have been killed by terrorists, including our military officers and intelligence service officials.
"We are not going to be distracted by something like this," he said.
The reports also suggest:
* The Taliban has had access to portable heat-seeking missiles to shoot at aircraft.
* A secret US unit of army and navy special forces has been engaged on missions to "capture or kill" top insurgents.
* Many civilian casualties - caused by Taliban roadside bombs and Nato missions that went wrong - have gone unreported.
The BBC's David Loyn, in Kabul, says these revelations will be "hugely embarrassing" for the White House, who are "infuriated" by the leak.
"These documents show aid that has not worked; political policy that was naïve at the beginning; and it shows quite how difficult a foe the Taliban have been. The Americans have misunderstood that until today," he says.
'Civilian deaths'
“Start Quote
Broadly speaking the leaks are unwarranted and uncalled for. But it lends the ongoing war a semblance of transparency”
But the head of the Foreign Relations Committee in the US Senate said the leak came at a "critical stage" for US policy in the region.
"However illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan," Democratic senator John Kerry said.
Wikileaks says it has delayed the release of about 15,000 reports from the archive as part of a "harm minimisation process demanded by our source".
The Guardian and the New York Times say they had no contact with the original source of the leak, but spent weeks crosschecking the information.
Earlier this year, Wikileaks posted a video on its website which it said showed the killings of civilians by the US military in Baghdad in 2007.
A US military analyst, Bradley Manning, is awaiting trial on criminal charges of leaking the video.
A former hacker, Adrian Lamo, said Mr Manning boasted to him about handing over military videos and 260,000 classified US embassy messages to Wikileaks.
Wikileaks has refused to identify its source for the video or the US military documents.
Meanwhile, Nato says it is investigating reports that as many as 45 civilians died in an air strike in Helmand province on Friday.
Although an initial Nato investigation found no evidence, a BBC journalist visiting Regey village spoke to several people who said they had witnessed the incident.
They said the attack had come in daylight as dozens sheltered from fighting in nearby Joshani.
A Nato spokesman said international forces went to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties.
"The safety of the Afghan people is very important to the International Security Assistance Forces," Lt Col Chris Hughes added.
FOR ANYONE UNFAMILIAR WITH BP CONNECTIONS THEIR MAIN WORLD HEADQUARTERS ARE AT ST JAMES SQUARE
LONDON. THAT IS NEXT TO CHATHAM HOUSE AND AROUND THE CORNER FROM THE 33 DEGREE HEADQUARTERS OF WORLD
FREEMASONRY THAT HAVE EVEN MORE POWER THAN THE UNITED GRAND LODGE OF ENGLAND. BP ARE PART OF THE
ILLUMINATI AND WHO LIKE THE ROTHSCHILD'S FUND ALL MAJOR POLITICAL GOONS IN THE UK AND USA AND
EVERY OTHER CORRUPT COUNTRY THAT IS CONTROLLED BY MASONIC HENCHMEN.
US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have both accepted large donations from a BP employees committee.
In the donation period ending in 2008, Obama took $71,051, and Clinton $6700 from BP staff in donations.
And three out of the four senators who demanded a meeting with David Cameron last week over Lockerbie and the BP involvement into the release of Abdelbaset al Megrahi, have taken political donations from a BP staff organisation, leading to accusations of hypocrisy.
Senator Robert Menendez, who is chairing this week’s Senate investigation into BP’s involvement in the release of the Lockerbie bomber, received $2000 from the oil giant’s staff committee.
In the donation cycle ending this year, two of the other senators from New York and New Jersey, where many of the bombing victims came from, and who are pressing for an investigation into the bomber’s release — Kirsten Gillibrand and Charles Schumer — received $750 and $250 each in donations.
Donations
The donations don’t come from the company itself but from their Political Action Committee — groups of individuals within BP who wish to donate to a particular politician or party.
A number of major oil companies now have drilling interests in Libya — Amerada Hess, Marathon Oil, Royal Dutch Shell, Occidental Petroleum and ConocoPhillips.
In 2010 employees from ConocoPhillips are registered as having made donations to House Democrats of $36,500, Senate Democrats of $17,000.
Marathon Oil staff gave House Democrats $28,500, Senate Democrats $22,500.
Occidental Petroleum workers made donations to House Democrats of $43,000, and Senate Democrats $14,000.
Royal Dutch Shell staff gave Barack Obama $117,946, and Hillary Clinton $20,348.
Condemned
SNP MSP Michael Matheson condemned the US politicians for accepting the cash.
“It’s astonishing that after all the rhetoric and talk of BP funds as ‘blood money’ that those Senators attacking BP have benefited from their donations,” he said.
“It exposes some of the sheer political opportunism currently being played out over the tragic events at Lockerbie and in the Gulf.
“It is hypocritical of these senators, when Kenny MacAskill and Alex Salmond have been clear no discussions or lobbying of the Scottish Government by BP took place.”
A spokesman for BP said it was not their policy to make political donations and added, “The donations come from the Political Action Committee.
“They come under BP’s name, but are from employees, though they’re identified as coming from the company.”
We contacted the White House for a comment, but have yet to receive a reply.
When I was growing up, I learned in school that one of the reasons the United States of America was better than the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was because we didn't hold political prisoners in our jails. That was something the bad, bad communists did. That was something that was done in communist countries to keep dissidents in line and to silence them. Such a thing could never be done in America. I don't know if this is still taught in the schools, but if it is then I believe our children are being grossly misinformed. The United States of America has become the leading nation when it comes to jailing its citizens, and the vast majority of them have been jailed for non violent crimes. We are, in effect, being jailed by the political class for disobeying rules they have deigned necessary, not for actions that have harmed another human being or his property. Most of those jailed are, in effect, political prisoners.
The federal government of the United States of America has declared war on its own civilians and the majority of those spending time in jail are prisoners of that war. They call this war many things, the war on drugs and the war on terror being the most prevalent, but it is really a war fought against people in order to try to keep a concept hidden from the public consciousness. That concept is the concept of freedom, the concept that individuals own their own bodies, their own labor, their own property and best know how to run their own lives.
The power elite and their political puppets use such emotionally charged terms as "war" to elicit specific responses from the populace. They want people to believe that anyone with a differing or divergent point of view from that of the establishment is a bad person. They want people to believe that anyone with a difference of opinion is a menace to society and a threat to all that is good and just. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most of the people who are spending time in prison are not only ordinary non violent folk who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, they are likely kind, loving individuals with family and friends who care for them and miss them dearly. Many of them were likely hard working, productive members of society until they were caught or reported breaking one of the multitude of "laws" created by control freaks who seem to see us common folk as cash cows meant to be milked for their benefit.
This war has spilled across the borders of the United States and is affecting the population worldwide. The DEA seems to think it has the right to enforce the laws of the United States in whatever country it deems necessary. I don't know that the DEA has the right to do this, but it certainly has the power thanks to your tax dollars. A good example of this is the case of Marc Emery. Mr. Emery is a Canadian. He was simply selling marijuana seeds. This is a practice that is not illegal in Canada. Yet it is illegal in the US, though hardly ever enforced. Mr. Emery was set up by the DEA in a sting operation in which he sold seed across the border. The DEA then used its power as a federal agency of the United States to coerce the federal Canadian government into extraditing Mr. Emery to the United States.
Mr. Emery's business harmed no one. It only maybe hurt the feelings of a few bureaucrats who felt perhaps Mr. Emery's opinions were becoming too popular. You see, Marc Emery not only sold marijuana seeds, he ran a magazine named Cannabis Culture and used the money to fund marijuana legalization activism worldwide. He believes, as I do, that everyone owns their own bodies and can determine for themselves which substances to use and which to avoid. He would likely still be free if he had just pocketed his profits rather than using them to promote his marijuana legalization efforts. It appears as if Marc Emery was targeted not for his illegal activity, but for his political activism. And they had to use an unethical sting setup to make it look legitimate.
The same is true of tax protestors. People fighting the unethical, unconstitutional income tax have been forced into prison despite the obvious unpopularity of this theft. Even though the vast majority of the populace seems to be brainwashed into thinking the federal income tax is legitimate, the arguments against it are intriguing and compelling on both legal and moral grounds. Ed and Elaine Brown were two such protestors who wished to make such arguments during their trail. The federal judge presiding over their trail denied them the opportunity to make over thirty such arguments in their defense. As a result, they realized the court system was rigged in favor of the state and refused to take part in it any longer.
Ed, a contractor, and Elaine, a dentist, gathered together such a following that the Feds determined that the only way to get to them would be to unethically infiltrate their supporters. It appears as if the Feds are worried about their image and don't want to be thought of by the general public as the violent agency they are. They want people to forget such incidents as Waco and Ruby Ridge, but a leopard cannot change its spots. Ed and Elaine Brown were productive members of society until the Feds put them in unproductive prison cells.
People such as Ed and Elaine Brown and Wesley Snipes aren't in jail because they didn't pay their taxes, they're in jail because they refused to obey. They refused to knuckle under to the coercion and threats of the federal government and decided to exercise their rights. They refused to cower in fear before the political gang that runs this nation and decided to show them for what they are, a violent gang of thugs who believe they own us and a portion of our labor. These are arguments the authoritarian power mongers don't want to hear because they're true, and the truth is sometimes hard to face. They would rather do harm to those who have never harmed another than face the reality that they are greedy failures in a coercive monopoly funded by theft and unable to compete in a legitimate marketplace.
What happens when the practices used by the policing agencies are used against them? Barry Cooper is a good example to look at. A former narcotics officer, he created a sting operation to catch the police breaking the law and disobeying the constitution. His police training served him well as he had learned to setup drug dealers. He filmed the police breaking their own laws and streamed it to the web in such a way so that their guilt could not be denied. This angered the cops. As a result, Barry Cooper and his family have been harassed by authorities ever since. Candi, his wife, lost custody of her eight year old son. They have both been arrested and charged with filing a false police report. They await trial on said charges. It seems what's good for the goose is not good for the gander. It seems that the police can setup and harass ordinary folk to catch them breaking laws, but when ordinary folk do the same to the police, the ordinary folk better watch out.
The system is plagued with unfairness. It is set up so that those with authority aren't burdened with any personal responsibility for their decisions. They are not held accountable for their actions even when such actions harm others or are financially unsound. It takes those who rail against it and make honest, sensible arguments and silences them by removing them to cold prison cells. We might not have the cruel and unforgiving gulags the Russians had under communist rule in the last century, but we have prisons populated with political prisoners who don't even know they are political prisoners. Our government has interrupted and ruined the lives of millions for its political power, expediency and agenda.
The war against the people needs to end. The federal government needs to step aside. The common folk need to reestablish their lust for freedom. The bureaucrats need to start respecting the rights of the individual once again. The federal government needs to be recognized for the monstrous mechanism of tyranny it has become. Hopefully, the cogs inside that mechanism will start refusing to allow it to run smoothly. We should be allowed to spend our money as we see fit, to smoke what we want to smoke, to say what we wish to say, and to live our lives as we wish to live them without fear of government intrusion and imprisonment. The disobedience of a few have shown us the ugly truth. The disobedience of many will help set us free.
This was translated from the Spanish website Xfiles. It clearly demonstrates that
Obama was part of the Masonic conspiracy from a young age, and does not represent
the interests of the American people.
The amplification of a picture of President Obama, which was published in Newsweek magazine May 24, 2008, revealed a Masonic emblem in the ring he was wearing on his right hand.
Picture of young Obama at the graduation of Punahou School in Hawaii. Expert observers affirm it is a Masonic handshake. Observe how Obama's hand is practically horizontal, when normally, it would be vertical.
And curiously, a letter G shows up in the image's background.
And here we have another curious image, in this case Barak Obama's wife, Mrs, Michelle Obama. Wearing a typical "peace" symbol, which hippies used to wear as well in the 60s and 70s, and which has been kept in use by the New World Order scammers.
This symbol in reality is a satanic emblem, because it represents a supposed crucified Christ upside down, in a triangular cross as a goose's foot, of special significance to satanists. The figure of the inverted crucified is, in turn, inside a circle, which represents the Devil.
Could it be an innocent pendant of the First Lardy? Of course not.
WASHINGTON — More than 2 million workers who have been laid off for long stretches could get their unemployment benefits restored as early as next week.
The Senate plans to take up a measure Tuesday to restore the extended benefits, right after a new Democratic senator from West Virginia is sworn in, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Thursday.
With the death of Sen. Robert Byrd, Senate Democrats had been a vote short of the 60 needed to overcome a GOP filibuster. West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin has said he could name a temporary replacement to fill Byrd's seat as early as Friday.
The House already has passed a bill to extend the benefits through November, at a cost of about $34 billion. The money would be borrowed, adding to the national debt.
About 2.5 million people have lost their benefits since the last extension ran out at the end of May. The bill would add up to 73 weeks of extra benefits, paid for by the federal government, on top of the 26 weeks typically provided by states.
Reid, D-Nev., said Byrd's replacement will be sworn in Tuesday afternoon, and a bill to extend the jobless benefits will be up for a vote immediately afterward.
Lawmakers have been sparring for weeks over extending the benefits. Some Democrats have argued that lawmakers have a moral obligation to extend the benefits while the unemployment rate hovers above 9 percent. Many Democrats also see the benefits as insurance against the economy sliding back into recession because laid off workers typically spend their payments quickly, stimulating the economy.
Republicans, tapping into voter anger about the growing national debt, said they would support extending the benefits if the bill was paid for. They have proposed using unspent money from President Barack Obama's massive 2009 economic recovery package, a plan Democrats oppose.
IRANIAN NUCLEAR SCIENTIST ACCUSES AMERICAN GOVERNMENT OF TORTURE
An Iranian nuclear scientist claimed today that he suffered extreme mental and physical torture at the hands of US interrogators after disappearing last year, adding to Tehran’s allegations he was abducted by American agents.
The US said he was a willing defector who changed his mind and decided to board a plane home from Washington.
Shahram Amiri was embraced by his family – including his tearful seven-year-old son – after arriving in Tehran in the latest spectacle of a puzzling series of events that left Iran and Washington with starkly different accounts.
Mr Amiri flashed a V-for-victory sign as he stepped into the terminal.
Iran portrayed the return of Mr Amiri as a blow to American intelligence services that were desperate for inside information on Iran’s nuclear programme.
Iran sought maximum propaganda value – allowing journalists to cover Mr Amiri’s return and having a top envoy from Iran’s Foreign Ministry on hand to greet him.
Washington described the 32-year-old Mr Amiri as someone who reached out to US officials, but offered few other details.
Speaking to journalists after a flight via Qatar, Mr Amiri repeated his earlier claims that he was snatched while on a pilgrimage last year in the Saudi holy city of Medina and carried off to the United States.
He claimed he was under intense pressures during the first few months after his alleged kidnapping.
“I was under the harshest mental and physical torture,” he said at Tehran’s international airport, with his young son sitting on his lap.
He also alleged that Israeli agents were present during the interrogations and that CIA officers offered him 50 million US dollars to remain in America.
He gave no further details to back up the claims or shed any new light on his time in the United States, but promised to reveal more later.
“I have some documents proving that I’ve not been free in the United States and have always been under the control of armed agents of US intelligence services,” he told reporters.
He sought to downplay his role in Iran’s nuclear programme – which Washington and allies fear could be used to create atomic weapons. Iran said it only seeks energy-producing reactors.
“I am a simple researcher who was working in the university,” he said. “I’m not involved in any confidential jobs. I had no classified information.”
His case was often raised by Iranian officials in the past year, but Washington offered no public response. It took a higher profile after Iranian authorities decided to pursue charges against three American hikers captured in July 2009 on the Iran-Iraq border.
Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Hassan Qashqavi, said there would be “no link” between Mr Amiri’s return and the case of the three Americans, who claim they inadvertently strayed into Iran while hiking.
Mr Amiri was generally a footnote in the international showdown over Iran’s nuclear ambitions until last month.
Iranian state TV aired a video he purportedly made from an internet cafe in Tucson, Arizona, to claim he was taken captive by US and Saudi “terror and kidnap teams”.
JEFFERSON COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY CHARGES 82 YR OLD BURGLARY VICTIM
The Jefferson County District Attorney Brandon Falls (left) is pursuing charges against an 82 year old man who protected his property, and his life, with a firearm back in February of 2010. Two suspected illegal immigrants, who attempted to steal a trailer from Robert Wallace and run him over with a pickup truck, were finally arrested Friday in connection with the case. Robert Wallace, the 82 year old homeowner, still faces 12 felony charges, including four counts of attempted first degree murder. Furthermore, the two suspected illegal immigrants went months without being charged at all.
Dave Dechant, spokesman for the Jefferson County District Attorney’s office explained that Colorado’s “Make My Day” law only applies to homeowners protecting themselves in their homes. The Wheat Ridge Police Department Public Information officer, Lisa Stigall, echoed that interpretation of the law by saying “it specifically talks about inside your dwelling, inside your home. Not in your front yard, not on the street.” (As if, somehow, having four walls and a roof is a requisite to defending one’s life and property. But I digress.) The 12 felony charges are being pursued after Wallace fired two shots at the alleged burglars when they attempted to steal a trailer on his property and run him over in the process. One of the shots connected, and one suspect was hospitalized.
But the DA’s assessment of Colorado’s “Make My Day” law might not be completely accurate. The law does, in fact, speak specifically about the right to defend property and life within the confines of a dwelling, but it seems disingenuous to assert that the instant a threat or confrontation moves onto the front lawn homeowners have no right to protect themselves. Furthermore, the audacity of criminals is often emboldened by the limitations and restrictions placed upon law abiding citizens to defend themselves. It is appalling and saddening that the honest and hardworking have to fight and pray for freedom, while the criminals and punks commit crimes with near immunity. (The two suspects in this case were finally arrested July 7th, after ICE threatened to deport them on unrelated immigration violations.)
So while the law does specifically address the rights of homeowners to defend themselves with deadly force inside their home, (and omits any stated right to do so outside) the law also lays specific justifications for a law-abiding citizen to utilize deadly force in defense of property and person. Specifically it states the following:
18-1-704 Use of physical force in defense of a person.
(2) Deadly physical force may be used only if a person reasonably believes a lesser degree of force is inadequate and:
(a) The actor has reasonable ground to believe, and does believe, that he or another person is in imminent danger of being killed or of receiving great bodily injury; or
(b) The other person is using or reasonably appears about to use physical force against an occupant of a dwelling or business establishment while committing or attempting to commit burglary as defined in sections 18-4-202 to 18-4-204; or
(c) The other person is committing or reasonably appears about to commit kidnapping as defined in section 18-3-301 or 18-3-302, robbery as defined in section 18-4-301 or 18-4-302, sexual assault as set forth in section 18-3-402, or in section 18-3-403 as it existed prior to July 1, 2000, or assault as defined in sections 18-3-202 and 18-3-203.
In short, Colorado Citizens do not have the right to defend themselves with deadly force only in the confines of a “dwelling,” so long as there is reasonable justification for such action. Our right to self defense, and defense of our property, does not disappear the instant we step outside of our front door. Moreover, what right is it of the government to dictate when, if, and how one can protect their life and limb?
However, setting aside the bastardization of Colorado law, the simple fact that the victim of a robbery is faced with jail time for the rest of his life certainly merits an outrage. It is a bastardization of freedom to take legal action against a homeowner who, in defense of his property and life, took action against two thugs who the system nearly let free.
To what damaging extent has common sense fled our system? George Washington once said that we are a nation of laws, not of men. However, those laws were supposed to be orchestrated to preserve our freedom and defend the innocent against the intentions of the malicious; not used to punish the righteous for defending their property.
As Robert Wallace’s arraignment nears (September 7th, 2010) it will be interesting to see how the District Attorney continues to justify his attack on a Colorado homeowner for resisting victimization. Perhaps not all the facts are being made clear, but from the reported nuances of the event it seems common sense, and preservation of self defense, is under assault in Jefferson County.
The mortgage giant plans to go to court against those who can afford to make their payments
but decide it's not worth it. It also will limit their access to future loans.
Taking aim at homeowners who are able to pay their mortgage but decide it's not worth it, Fannie Mae plans to go after them in court and to limit their access to home loans for seven years.
The government-controlled mortgage giant said Wednesday that it would instruct the companies servicing its loans to recommend when it should pursue a so-called deficiency judgment — a court order requiring a defaulting borrower to pay any remaining unpaid portion of the loan after a seized home is sold.
Lenders rarely employ court proceedings to pursue foreclosures in California, nearly always opting instead for a streamlined procedure involving a trustee's sale of the home. Under state law, however, lenders who opt for court proceedings can obtain a deficiency judgment if the mortgage was used to refinance a home, but not if it was used to finance a purchase.
"It's not a hollow threat," said Alex Creel, chief Sacramento lobbyist for the California Assn. of Realtors, which has called for legislation that would ban deficiency judgments in many cases of refinanced mortgages.
Fannie Mae also said it would make new mortgages harder to obtain for borrowers if it can be proved that they engaged in a "strategic default" — abandoning a home to foreclosure not because the required payments are unaffordable but because the mortgage is larger than the value of the residence. For such a borrower, Fannie said it would not buy or guarantee another home loan for seven years.
Borrowers who worked in good faith with their loan servicers to try to stay in their homes would be barred from Fannie loans for only two or three years, even if they eventually lost their homes after attempts at loan modifications failed.
The ban on getting a new Fannie loan is significant because home buyers have little choice these days for financing except for mortgages bought or backed by Fannie, its sister company Freddie Mac or the Federal Housing Administration. The three government-run entities financed 95% of new U.S. home loans last year.
Freddie Mac, which already blacklists strategic defaulters for five years, said it would study Fannie's changes and "consider additional changes to our polices as needed to responsibly manage risks."
Borrowers who default on FHA loans for any reason currently can't get another loan insured by the agency for three years. Legislation pending in Congress would impose a lifetime ban on FHA loans to borrowers determined to have made a strategic default.
AMERICAN SOLDIER BRADLEY MANNING CHARGED OVER WIKILEAKS VIDEO
An American Soldier confined by the military since May for allegedly providing a website with video showing U.S. helicopters firing on several Iraqis -- including a journalist -- will be charged criminally, an Army spokesman for the U.S. military headquarters in Baghdad confirmed to Military.com this morning.
Pfc. Bradley Manning of Potomac, Md., allegedly gave Wikileaks a 38-minute video from a 2007 AH-64 Apache helicopter attack on a group of men who may have been wrongly identified as insurgents watching American ground troops engaged in combat in a Baghdad neighborhood. One of the men was a journalist for Reuters and another was his driver. Wikileaks labeled the video "Collateral Murder" and uploaded it onto the Web in April.
Manning, 22, was arrested by the Army in May while stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, about 40 miles from Baghdad, according to a report by Wired magazine in June, which said he was then held in confinement in Kuwait.
According to a redacted version of the charge sheet provided to Military.com, the Army says Manning wrongfully placed classified video and documents onto his personal computer and added unauthorized software onto a secret government network computer. The Army also alleges that Manning then transferred video and documents, including more than 50 classified U.S. State Department cables, to unauthorized sources.
Manning is assigned to the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division.
The Army reportedly eyed Manning as a suspect after he boasted to a former computer hacker that he was the source of the Wikileaks video.
On the gun camera video, the helicopter crew with the 227th Aviation Regiment mistakenly identified a camera held by the Reuters photographer as a rocket-propelled grenade. The video also showed the Apache crew firing on wounded individuals and a van that stopped to help the injured. Several people in the van were killed and two children were injured.
The Army eventually cleared the Soldiers involved in the attack.
Since the video was put online, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange had reportedly gone into hiding as stories circulated that the Pentagon was hunting for him and that his whistleblowing website had been crumbling.
Wired, which has closely followed Assange's operation, recently reported that the site's secure submission page -- which has permitted sources to send documents to Wikileaks -- "stopped working after the site failed to renew its SSL certificate, a basic web protection that costs less than $30 a year and takes only hours to set up," the magazine said.
Earlier reports indicated Assange was preparing to release thousands of classified State Department cables that Manning also had reportedly sent him. The release never occurred. But one of the counts against Manning is that he pulled from a secret government network computer more than 150,000 diplomatic cables.
He faces a separate count of accessing a State Department cable entitled "Reykjavik 13." The charge sheet does not explain "Reykjavik 13," though a New York Times article speculates it is one from a January 13 conversation between U.S. deputy chief of mission in Iraq, Sam Watson, and Iceland's leadership over financial losses in the banking industry.
In all, Manning faces 12 counts of illegally accessing or passing on information to unauthorized sources, according to the Army. All the allegations occurred between November 2009 and May 2010.
In a statement, the Army said the criminal investigation remains open.
MORE AND MORE AMERICANS PREPARING FOR SOCIAL UNREST
From the outside, Jerry Erwin's home in the northwestern US state of Oregon is a nondescript house with a manicured front lawn and little to differentiate it from those of his neighbors.
But tucked away out of sight in his backyard are the signs of his preparations for doomsday, a catastrophic societal collapse that Erwin, 45, now believes is likely within his lifetime.
"I've got, under an awning, stacks of firewood, rain catching in barrels, I've got a shed with barbed concertina wire, like the military uses," he told AFP.
He and his wife also have also stockpiled thousands of rounds of ammunition and enough food for about six months.
"Several years ago I worked on paying off the house, replacing all the windows, and just very recently, I'm proud to say, we've replaced all our exterior doors with more energy-efficient ones, with as much built-in security features as I could get," he told AFP.
"Plus I'm going to be adding some more structural improvements to the door frames to make it hopefully virtually impossible to take a battering ram to them."
Erwin and others like him in the United States and elsewhere see political upheaval and natural disasters as clear signs that civilization is doomed.
"We're hitting on all cylinders as far as symptoms that have led other great powers to decline or collapse: resource depletion, damage to the environment, climate change, those are the same things that affected other great societies," he said.
For Erwin, the decline is irreversible and the best approach is to prepare for the inevitable.
His pessimism is shared by a wide range of people, from left-wing environmentalists who believe climate change and capitalist greed will doom human society to Christian fundamentalists who think sin will do the same.
They label themselves "preppers," "doomers," and "survivalists," and take a variety of different approaches to the same question: How best to prepare for the coming apocalypse?
Jim Rawles, who Erwin describes as "the patron saint of survivalism," prefers an isolationist, Christian-influenced approach.
He homeschooled his children, declines to say where he lives, and advises readers of his website survivalblog.com to "relocate to a safe area and live there year-round."
"When planning your retreat house, think: medieval castle," he adds, extolling the benefits of using sandbags to protect any new home.
Rawles, like many on the most conservative end of the survivalist spectrum, is also anti-tax, pro-gun rights, and suspicious of anything that smacks of socialism.
But the survivalist movement also includes left-wing community activists, who are devoted to living off the land and have never fired a weapon, and people like Chris Martenson, who quit a job with a six-figure salary that he felt was "an unnecessary diversion from the real tasks at hand."
He began growing his own food and developed a "Crash Course" that urges people to better prepare for societal instability. He also took over management of his investments and boasts of a 166 percent return on his portfolio.
For Martenson, the wake-up call was the September 11, 2001 attacks, when he felt gripped by uncertainty and totally unprepared.
Erwin had always felt that society would eventually disintegrate, but he and many other US survivalists say the dysfunctional response to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina was what spurred them to action.
"I thought, okay, things are not going to get better... maybe this society, our civilization, the American empire, will collapse during my lifetime," Erwin said.
For John Milandred, no single event pushed him to leave his suburban home and set up a farm in Oklahoma.
"We just got fed up of working all the time to pay bills and not accomplishing anything," he said.
A member of the American Preppers Network, Milandred said he and his wife aspired to "grow our own foods and be self sufficient... to live like the pioneers, like our great-grandparents."
It is unclear how many people subscribe to the lifestyle, but there are hundreds of websites devoted to the movement, and Erwin's surburban-self-reliance.com attracts visitors from around the world.
The global financial crisis has increased interest in survivalism "bigtime," Erwin said, but he feels sorry for latecomers to the movement.
"We'll help them if we can," he said. "But a lot of people are climbing on board at the last minute and its going to be hard for them."
BIGGEST DEFAULTERS ON AMERICAN MORTGAGES ARE THE RICH
Foreclosed homes in Los Altos, California where five such homes were recently set for an auction.
LOS ALTOS, Calif. — No need for tears, but the well-off are losing their master suites and saying goodbye to their wine cellars.
The housing bust that began among the working class in remote subdivisions and quickly progressed to the suburban middle class is striking the upper class in privileged enclaves like this one in Silicon Valley.
Whether it is their residence, a second home or a house bought as an investment, the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population.
More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic.
By contrast, homeowners with less lavish housing are much more likely to keep writing checks to their lender. About one in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent.
Though it is hard to prove, the CoreLogic data suggest that many of the well-to-do are purposely dumping their financially draining properties, just as they would any sour investment.
“The rich are different: they are more ruthless,” said Sam Khater, CoreLogic’s senior economist.
Five properties here in Los Altos were scheduled for foreclosure auctions in a recent issue of The Los Altos Town Crier, the weekly newspaper where local legal notices are posted. Four have unpaid mortgage debt of more than $1 million, with the highest amount $2.8 million.
Not so long ago, said Chris Redden, the paper’s advertising services director, “it was a surprise if we had one foreclosure a month.”
The sheriff in Cook County, Ill., is increasingly in demand to evict foreclosed owners in the upscale suburbs to the north and west of Chicago — like Wilmette, La Grange and Glencoe. The occupants are always gone by the time a deputy gets there, a spokesman said, but just barely.
In Las Vegas, Ken Lowman, a longtime agent for luxury properties, said four of the 11 sales he brokered in June were distressed properties.
“I’ve never seen the wealthy hit like this before,” Mr. Lowman said. “They made their plans based on the best of all possible scenarios — that their incomes would continue to grow, that real estate would never drop. Not many had a plan B.”
The defaulting owners, he said, often remain as long as they can. “They’re in denial,” he said.
Here in Los Altos, where the median home price of $1.5 million makes it one of the most exclusive towns in the country, several houses scheduled for auction were still occupied this week. The people who answered the door were reluctant to explain their circumstances in any detail.
At one house, where the lender was owed $1.3 million, there was a couch out front wrapped in plastic. A woman said she and her husband had lost their jobs and were moving in with relatives. At another house, the family said they were renters. A third family, whose mortgage is $1.6 million, said they would be moving this weekend.
At a vacant house with a pool, where the lender was seeking $1.27 million, a raft and a water gun lay abandoned on the entryway floor.
Lenders are fearful that many of the 11 million or so homeowners who owe more than their house is worth will walk away from them, especially if the real estate market begins to weaken again. The so-called strategic defaults have become a matter of intense debate in recent months.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two quasi-governmental mortgage finance companies that own most of the mortgages in America with a value of less than $500,000, are alternately pleading with distressed homeowners not to be bad citizens and brandishing a stick at them.
In a recent column on Freddie Mac’s Web site, the company’s executive vice president, Don Bisenius, acknowledged that walking away “might well be a good decision for certain borrowers” but argues that those who do it are trashing their communities.
The CoreLogic data suggest that the rich do not seem to have concerns about the civic good uppermost in their mind, especially when it comes to investment and second homes. Nor do they appear to be particularly worried about being sued by their lender or frozen out of future loans by Fannie Mae, possible consequences of default.
The delinquency rate on investment homes where the original mortgage was more than $1 million is now 23 percent. For cheaper investment homes, it is about 10 percent.
With second homes, the delinquency rate for both types of owners was rising in concert until the stock market crashed in September 2008. That sent the percentage of troubled million-dollar loans spiraling up much faster than the smaller loans.
“Those with high net worth have other resources to lean on if they get in trouble,” said Mr. Khater, the analyst. “If they’re going delinquent faster than anyone else, that tells me they are doing so willingly.”
Willingly, but not necessarily publicly. The rapper Chamillionaire is a plain-talking exception. He recently walked away from a $2 million house he bought in Houston in 2006.
“I just decided to let it go, give it back to the bank,” he told the celebrity gossip TV show “TMZ.” “I just didn’t feel like it was a good investment.”
The rich and successful often come naturally to this sort of attitude, said Brent T. White, a law professor at the University of Arizona who has studied strategic defaults.
“They may be less susceptible to the shame and fear-mongering used by the government and the mortgage banking industry to keep underwater homeowners from acting in their financial best interest,” Mr. White said.
The CoreLogic data measures serious delinquencies, which means the borrower has missed at least three payments in a row. At that point, lenders traditionally file a notice of default and the house enters the official foreclosure process.
In the current environment, however, notices of default are down for all types of loans as lenders work with owners in various modification programs. Even so, owners in some of the more expensive neighborhoods in and around San Francisco are beginning to head for the exit, according to data compiled by MDA DataQuick.
In Los Altos, Los Altos Hills and the most expensive neighborhood in adjoining Mountain View, defaults in the first five months of this year edged up to 16, from 15 in the same period in 2009 and four in 2008.
The East Bay suburb of Orinda had eight notices of default for million-dollar properties, up from five in the same period last year. On Nob Hill in San Francisco, there were four, up from one. The Marina neighborhood had four, up from two.
The vast majority of owners in these upscale communities are still paying the mortgage, of course. But they appear to be cutting back in other ways. The once-thriving Los Altos downtown is pocked with more than a dozen empty storefronts in a six-block stretch.
But this is still Silicon Valley, where failure can always be considered a prelude to success.
In the middle of a workday, one troubled homeowner here leaned over his laptop at the kitchen table, trying to maneuver his way out from under his debt and figure out the next big thing.
His five-bedroom house, drained of hundreds of thousands of dollars of equity over the last 13 years, is scheduled for auction July 20. Nine months ago, after his latest business (he has had several) failed in what he called “the global meltdown,” the man, a technology entrepreneur, said he quit making his $9,000 monthly payments.
“I’m going to be downsizing,” he said.
The man spoke on the condition of anonymity because, he said, he did not want his current problems to interfere with his coming reinvention. “I’m a businessman,” he explained. “I have to be upbeat.”
FEMME FATALES HELD OVER RUSSIAN SPY NETWORK IN AMERICA
Two alleged femmes fatales are among a group of 10 people arrested in the US over their involvement in a suspected Russian spying operation, it emerged today.
One was a redhead called Anna Chapman who worked in the financial district of Manhattan. The other, known as Tracey Lee Ann Foley, allegedly held a fake British passport, forged by Russian intelligence, to help her travel to and from Russia without attracting suspicion.
Chapman was among those accused of being a spy today after she allegedly passed information to her handlers at locations around Manhattan.
As they appeared in court, assistant US attorney Michael Farbiarz singled out Chapman, saying: “This is a Russian agent.”
The 28-year-old lived in a luxury financial district apartment and ran a $2 million online real-estate business.
An 11th man was today arrested in Cyprus as he tried to travel to Budapest.
US authorities claim Chapman's real goal was to infiltrate political circles and channel information back to Russia, according to reports. It is claimed she engaged in clandestine communication tactics fit for a Cold War era spy film. On one occasion, Chapman is accused of sharing computer files from a Barnes & Noble bookshop in New York.
She allegedly transmitted the data over a secret wireless network to another spy who was parked in a van outside, according to the complaint.
The 11th suspect, named as Christopher R Metsos, was arrested at Larnaca airport. He was released on bail pending US extradition proceedings.
The other 10 suspects, who were detained on Sunday, all appeared in court last night, five in Manhattan and the others elsewhere, charged with conspiring to act as unlawful agents of a foreign government. Some have also been charged with money laundering.
The US justice department said that the “deep cover” espionage was aimed at obtaining information about US nuclear policy and other inside information on the orders of Russian intelligence chiefs.
But Russia's foreign minister Sergei Lavrov demanded an explanation from the US government, claiming the details about the arrests were “contradictory”.
American prosecutors say the suspects posed as US couples living ordinary suburban lives — two described themselves as Mr and Mrs Murphy of New Jersey — while secretly gathering information for their masters in Russian intelligence.
This afternoon details emerged of how secret money drops, invisible ink and messages hidden in pictures on the internet were used by the alleged Russian spy ring arrested at the weekend.
Margo Sokolow, the Murhpys' astonished neighbour in Marquette Road, said: “I didn't realise Russia still did that. With a name like Murphy who's going to think they're Russian spies?”
The suspects were detained after a massive FBI investigation dating back to the Clinton administration which used hidden microphones and video surveillance and covertly searched their homes.
The arrests, carried out in Boston, New York, New Jersey and Virginia, followed a fake “drop” the day before in Arlington County, during which one of the suspects left $5,000 in an envelope hidden inside a newspaper.
The 10 arrested appeared in court charged with conspiring to act as unlawful agents of a foreign government, with nine of them also accused of money laundering.
The US department of justice said those responsible had been instructed by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.
Although Russian officials claimed the information about the suspects was “contradictory”, US investigators provided extensive details about the alleged spying in revelations which revived memories of the Cold War.
Documents described how the suspects had used methods such as burying money next to a beer bottle marker and “brush pasts” in parks, where agents swap identical bags as they pass each other.
According to the US department of justice, the group, dubbed the “Illegals”, were to become sufficiently Americanised so that they could gather information about the US for Russia.
The FBI decrypted a coded message last year which instructed them to “search and develop ties in policymaking circles in US and send intels” back to Moscow, according to court papers.
The individuals were accused of collecting information ranging from research programmes on nuclear warheads and the global gold market to trying to obtain background information about people who applied for jobs at the CIA.
Two of those arrested, a couple from New Jersey known as “Richard Murphy” and “Cynthia Murphy”, had been told to obtain information about America's policy on a new strategic arms reduction treaty and Iran's nuclear programme before President Obama's visit to Russia last year.
Metsos was accused of receiving and distributing money to the group, including payments from a Russian official affiliated with the Russian Mission to the UN in New York.
One, whose alias was “Donald Howard Heathfield”, is said in court documents to have made contact with a government official at a seminar and discussed “research programs on small yield, high penetration nuclear warheads”, although there was no indication that any data he obtained was secret or classified.
Others were told to obtain jobs with think-tanks so that they could obtain inside information. It is not yet known what, if any, useful information was passed on.
As well as Foley, Chapman, Metsos, the Murphys and Heathfield, the others were Michael Zottoli, Patricia Mills, Juan Lazaro, Vicky Pelaez and Mikhail Semenko.
She has a Victoria's Secret' body and gave her address as 99 Fake Street
The glamorous redhead at the centre of the alleged Russian spy scandal poses racily on her Facebook page.
Anna Chapman, 28, who has a masters degree in economics, was today revealed as one of 11 suspects and described by prosecutors as a “highly trained agent” and “practised deceiver”.
She is said to have her own property business and to have used her high-level contacts to pass on information every week to a Russian handler.
Described as having “a Victoria's Secret” body, she was detained at the weekend after an undercover FBI officer posing as a Russian agent met her at a New York restaurant and asked her to deliver a fake passport to another female agent.
“Are you ready for this step?” he asked, to which she replied: “Shit yes.” She was told that the agent who would meet her would ask: “Haven't we met in California last summer?” and that she should reply: “No, I think it was the Hamptons.”
Her handler said she should then place a stamp on a wall map after completing her mission to confirm that she had succeeded.
Prosecutors also allege that Chapman was once seen going into a shop in Brooklyn to buy a mobile phone using the name Irine Kutsov, giving her address as 99 Fake Street.
Chapman lived in a luxury financial district apartment and ran a $2million online
real-estate business.
Ten people have been arrested in the US for allegedly spying for the Russian government.
The US Department of Justice said they were held for allegedly carrying out "long-term, 'deep-cover' assignments" on US soil.
They have been charged with conspiracy to act as unlawful agents of a foreign government, a crime which carries up to five years in prison.
An 11th suspect remains at large, according to justice officials.
The alleged agents were trained by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and sent to the US to infiltrate policy-making circles and collect information, according to court papers filed in US District Court for the southern district of New York.
The defendants... would and did act in the United States as agents of a foreign government
It is a story of Cold War era espionage with the tools and technology of the 21st Century.
Some of them had been living in the country under false identities since the early 1990s, using codes and and engaging in advanced computer operations, including posting apparently innocent pictures on the internet which contained detailed texts, investigators say.
The FBI also reported observing older techniques, such as money being buried next to a beer-bottle marker and "brush pasts" in parks.
"You were sent to USA for long-term service trip," says one purported message to two of the suspects that was intercepted by US intelligence. "Your education, bank accounts, car, house etc - all these serve one goal: fulfil your main mission, ie to search and develop ties in policymaking circles in US and send intels."
Russian intelligence allegedly asked them for information on Washington's perception of Russian foreign policy, Iran's nuclear programme and Obama's intentions at a summit last year
They allegedly got close to a scientist involved in designing bunker-busting bombs and a top former intelligence official.
Five of the suspects will appear later in a Manhattan federal court - a couple known as "Richard Murphy" and "Cynthia Murphy", who were arrested in Montclair, New Jersey; Vicky Pelaez and a man known as "Juan Lazaro," who were arrested in Yonkers, New York state; and Anna Chapman, who was arrested in Manhattan, New York City.
Another three - Mikhail Semenko and a couple known as "Michael Zottoli" and "Patricia Mills" - will appear in a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, after being arrested in Arlington, Virginia.
The final two people - a couple known as "Donald Howard Heathfield" and "Tracey Lee Ann Foley" - were arrested in Boston, Massachusetts, and will appear in a federal court in the city.
A suspect known as "Christopher R Metsos" remains at large.
All of the arrested suspects, except Ms Chapman and Mr Semenko, have also been charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.
The arrests will come as quite a surprise, as relations between Washington and Moscow have warmed considerably in recent months. Just last week, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was in Washington having lunch with President Barack Obama.
It is still unclear how the White House will react or how Russia will explain this, she adds.
AMERICA DONT BELIEVE THE HYPE OF YOUR COMPLICIT MEDIA. YOUR PEOPLE WILL NEVER HAVE
FREEDOMS WHILE SO MANY ARE LINING YOUR STREETS.
Unreported World meets the USA's new middle-class homeless: families struggling to hold down jobs that pay so little they're forced to live in tent cities or their cars and receive little help from the government.
Reporter Ramita Navai and producer Clancy Chassay begin their journey in Chicago, one of the country's manufacturing centres, which has been hit hard by the effects of the worst financial crisis in decades. St Columbanus church is one of 600 charities across the city that gives out emergency food rations.
Across America, many working people from all sectors have taken as much as 40% in pay cuts in desperation to hold on to their jobs. Their motivation is clear: if you are a temporary, part-time or self-employed worker you don't qualify for government help. The result is that many can't make ends meet and afford to feed themselves and their families.
Father Matt Eyerman tells Navai that the number of families receiving help from his church has leapt from 240 to 498 over the last two years, even though many of them still have jobs.
Today, more than 37 million Americans receive either state or private food assistance. More than three million were made homeless in 2009 despite holding down jobs. More than half of those living in shelters have had their homes repossessed by banks.
The team travels south to the state of Tennessee. They've been told that thousands of homeless people are taking refuge in temporary encampments. The City of Nashville, which has only only one emergency shelter for families, has more than 40 of these 'tent cities'.
Navai meets Michael and Stacey Farley, who have been living in the tent city for six months. Stacey tells Navai that she has been forced to leave her son and daughter with relatives while they both look for work.
Navai and Chassay move on to California, where more and more people are ending up on the streets. California has the highest debt in the USA and many essential services have been cut, including emergency housing assistance. 'Skid Row', which is one square mile of Los Angeles, has as many as 2,000 people sleeping rough every night. It has a reputation for drugs and crime and Navai talks to homeless people who are forced to walk all day to avoid being picked up by the police for loitering.
The US economy is in recovery but many experts believe the most damaging effects have yet to be felt. It's predicted that another 1.5 million people will be forced into homelessness within two years, and in a country with few safety nets, many more people could fall through the cracks.
Channel 4 7:30pm-8:00pm (30 minutes) Fri 25 Jun 2010
Venezuela's government said Wednesday it plans to seize control and nationalize 11 oil drilling rigs operated by U.S. firm Helmerich & Payne, which it says were purposely not being utilized as part of a plot against President Hugo Chavez.
State oil company Petroleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA, said in a statement that once the drills were nationalized by the government, PDVSA will be using the them to "impulse" oil production and strengthen the country's sovereignty over the oil sector.
The announcement was made by PDVSA President Rafael Ramirez, who is also Venezuela's energy minister, during a press conference in the oil-rich state of Zulia, according to the statement.
Ramirez said the idled drills were going to be used by the U.S. firm as a "launching pad" for a broader plan by elements in the private sector to "boycott" oil production in order to destabilize the economy and cause problems for the Chavez government.
"There is a sector of drill owners that have rejected discussing rates and service plans with PDVSA and have preferred to store their equipment for one year in Anaco, in the state of Anzoategui," Ramirez said. "The case is specifically about Helmerich & Payne."
As such, the PDVSA chief said the government has requested approval from legislators to declare the company's drilling rigs public property.
"We aren't going to allow them (the opposition) to sabotage our operations like they did in late 2002," Ramirez said.
The Chavez government, in power since 1999, was hit by a crippling oil strike in late 2002 and early 2003 in which PDVSA, then largely controlled by the opposition, completely halted production in an effort to push out Chavez.
Many workers eventually returned to their posts, while thousands of others were fired. PDVSA is now fully controlled by the Chavez government, and its workers take an oath of commitment to "Commander Chavez" and his socialist movement.
In recent years, Chavez has stepped up the nationalization of major parts of the oil industry, which is Venezuela's lifeline. Venezuela is one of the world's largest oil exporters and oil accounts for 96 percent of all its exports.
Officials at Helmerich & Payne were not immediately available for comment.
SENATORS INTRODUCE BILL THAT WOULD ALLOW OBAMA TO DISCONNECT THE INTERNET
Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), along with one Republican and Democratic senator, introduced a bill late last week that would allow the President to effectively disconnect the internet by emergency decree.
The Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act would allow the President to disconnect Internet networks and force private websites to comply with broad cybersecurity measures.
Future US presidents would have their Internet "kill switch" powers renewed indefinitely.
The bill was introduced by Lieberman, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE). A parallel bill was drafted last year by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) which would allow the federal government to unilaterally "order the disconnection" of certain websites.
“For all of its ‘user-friendly’ allure, the Internet can also be a dangerous place with electronic pipelines that run directly into everything from our personal bank accounts to key infrastructure to government and industrial secrets," Lieberman said in a release announcing his bill. "Our economic security, national security and public safety are now all at risk from new kinds of enemies -- cyber-warriors, cyber-spies, cyber-terrorists and cyber-criminals.
“The need for this legislation is obvious and urgent,” the Connecticut senator added.
"We cannot afford to wait for a cyber 9/11 before our government realises the importance of protecting our cyber resources," Sen. Collins said.
One news site notes:
The bill would give a newly-formed National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications the authority to monitor the "security status" of private websites, ISPs and other net-related business within the U.S. as well as critical internet components in other countries. Companies would be required to take part in "information sharing" with the government and certify to the NCCC that they have implemented approved security measures. Furthermore, any company that "relies on" the internet, telephone system or any other part of the U.S. "information infrastructure" would also be "subject to command" by the NCCC under the proposed new law.
Lieberman's bill would also create a cadre of cybersecurity agencies and order strategy planning with private firms. The legislation is supported by anti-virus giant Symantec.
“The Internet may have started out as a communications oddity some 40 years ago but it is now a necessity of modern life, and sadly one that is under constant attack,” Lieberman added in his release. “It must be secured... The Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010 is designed to bring together the disjointed efforts of multiple federal agencies and departments to prevent cyber theft, intrusions, and attacks across the federal government and the private sector. The bill would establish a clear organizational structure to lead federal efforts in safeguarding cyber networks. And it would build a public/private partnership to increase the preparedness and resiliency of those private critical infrastructure cyber networks upon which our way of life depends."
Sometime after midnight Friday, Ronnie Lee Gardner is to be strapped into a chair in the execution chamber at the state prison in Draper, Utah. A black hood is to be slipped over the bald head of the 49-year-old convicted killer, if he wishes. A small circular target will be pinned over his heart.
Utah death row inmate Ronnie Lee Gardner may die in old-fashioned execution.
After a reprieve was denied by Gov. Gary Herbert late Thursday, Gardner is all but guaranteed to become the third person to die before a firing squad in Utah or anywhere else in the nation since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.
It has been 14 years since rifles last were fired in a state execution.
"Upon careful review, there is nothing in the materials provided this morning that has not already been considered and decided by the Board of Pardons and Parole or numerous courts," Herbert said in a written statement released through his office.
Utah is the last state that still conducts executions by firing squad.
The simple mechanics of an old fashioned execution by firing squad are cold blooded, efficient and have just a hint of consideration for the person living his last moments.
In his final hours, a fasting Gardner was seen reading a book called "Divine Justice" by David Baldacci and watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy. He had been visited by family members, his attorney and a clergyman. The prison was locked down at 4 p.m. MT.
UTAH'S FIRING SQAUD TO EXECUTE RONNIE LEE GARDNER TONIGHT
Ronnie Lee Gardner, a 49-year-old convicted killer, is scheduled to be executed by firing squad in Utah shortly after midnight tonight. The execution method is rare and considered barbaric by some, but Gardner chose the firing squad over lethal injection when asked by a judge in April which he preferred. Though firing squads have now been outlawed in Utah, the law was not retroactive, allowing Gardner to choose it for his own death.
The last person to be executed by firing squad in the United States was John Albert Taylor, who was shot to death in Utah in 1996. Taylor was convicted of raping and strangling an 11-year-old girl in 1989. Ironically, he reportedly chose the firing squad to make a statement about Utah sanctioning murder.
Before Taylor, no one had been shot by firing squad since Gary Gilmore who was put to death in 1977, also in Utah. Gilmore, who had been convicted of murdering two men after robbing them separately, was the first criminal to be executed in the U.S. following a moratorium on the death penalty put in place in 1972. In 1979, Norman Mailer published a book about Gilmore, "The Executioner's Song," which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980.
Tonight, if the courts don't stay the execution, Gardner will be strapped to a chair in the execution chamber, a black hood will be put over his head, and a circular target will be pinned over his heart. A five-man firing squad, drawn from anonymous volunteers from state law enforcement, will be stationed behind a brick wall, armed with .30 caliber rifles. One of the rifles will be loaded with blanks, so that none of the shooters will know if they shot one of the deadly shells. After Gardner speaks his final words, the firing squad will do its job.
WIKILEAKS TO RELEASE VIDEO OF DEADLY US AFGHAN ATTACK
Whistleblowing website says it is still working to prepare the film of the bombing of the Afghan village of Garani in May 2009
The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks says it plans to release a secret military video of one of the deadliest US air strikes in Afghanistan in which scores of children are believed to have been killed.
WikiLeaks announced the move in an email to supporters. It said it fears it is under attack after the US authorities said they were searching for the site's founder, Julian Assange, following the arrest of a US soldier accused of leaking the Afghanistan video and another of a US attack in Baghdad in which civilians were killed.
WikiLeaks released the Baghdad video in April, prompting considerable criticism of the US military. It says it is still working to prepare the film of the bombing of the Afghan village of Garani in May 2009.
The Afghan government said about 140 civilians were killed in Garani, including 92 children. The US military initially said that up to 95 people died, of which about 65 were insurgents. However, American officials have since wavered on that claim and a subsequent investigation admitted mistakes were made during the attack.
The video could prove to be extremely embarrassing to the US military and risks weakening Afghan support. The US said it was targeting Taliban positions when it used weapons that create casualties over a wide area, including one-tonne bombs and others that burst in the air. But two US military officials told a newspaper last year that no one checked to see whether there were women and children in the buildings.
The US commander, General David Petraeus, said a year ago that the military's video of the attack would be made public as evidence that the US assault on Garani was justified. But it was not released.
In an email to supporters, Assange said WikiLeaks has the Garani video and "a lot of other material that exposes human rights abuses by the US government".
Last week, it was revealed that US authorities are trying to make contact with Assange to press him not to publish information the Pentagon says could endanger national security. Assange cancelled an appearance in Las Vegas last Friday.
In his email, Assange also calls on supporters to protect the website from "attack" by the authorities following the detention of a US soldier, Bradley Manning, who was arrested in Iraq after admitting to a former hacker that he leaked the Garani and Baghdad videos to WikiLeaks.
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY PLANS FOR HOMEGROWN THREAT QUESTIONED
As the U.S. government mulls ways to stem the rising threat of homegrown terrorism, some Republicans on Capitol Hill have privately raised concerns over new policies and tactics being considered. But counterterrorism officials say such resistance is undermining national security and can only be explained by a "misunderstanding" of the facts or political gamesmanship.
"We support the development of counter-radicalization policies that will protect our communities," four House Republicans recently told Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano in a letter obtained by Fox News. "However, we are concerned about the development of policy that is based on poor research, flawed assumptions and insufficient inquiry. A flawed policy could ... worsen our radicalization problem."
Specifically, the letter expresses concern that counterterrorism officials could act prematurely and rely too heavily on a community-based approach, which embraces grassroots-level relationships and outreach programs to produce intelligence and steer vulnerable populations away from extremist rhetoric.
According to the June 3 letter, Napolitano has already sent officials to the United Kingdom to learn about the British government's "Preventing Violent Extremism" program, whose website describes local government and local communities as "the heart" of stopping radicalization.
"Supporters of the [program] are more readily found in Washington, D.C., than in the U.K.," said the letter, signed by two members of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Tex., and Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. "We are concerned DHS [Department of Homeland Security] officials may be giving disproportionate focus to the U.K.'s model at the expense of other historical and contemporary counter-radicalization models."
Counterterrorism officials insist they're analyzing several models from around the world, adding that such "political attacks" impede potentially life-saving efforts to address a "new phase in the threat."
"While the federal government has put resources into threats originating from outside the country, [recent] events have shown that we need to build the same capabilities to deal with domestic threats," one law enforcement official who deals with terrorism issues said. "We can't always rely on the idea that a potential threat will be on the radar of the intelligence community or [federal law enforcement]."
In fact, an intelligence bulletin issued by DHS in the wake of the failed Times Square bombing said federal authorities "face an increased challenge in detecting terrorist plots underway" in the United States.
"State, local, tribal and private sector partners play a critical role in identifying suspicious activities and raising the awareness of federal counterterrorism officials," the May 21 bulletin said. "For example, purchases of possible operational materials, such as those made by ... [alleged Times Square bomber Faisal] Shahzad, are unlikely to come to the attention of federal officials unless reported by private sector and state, local and tribal partners."
A spokesman for McCaul said there is "nothing political" about the letter sent to Napolitano, describing it as "four members of [Congress] who are legitimately concerned about the approach DHS is taking."
The back-and-forth between Republicans and counterterrorism officials comes only weeks after a DHS-sanctioned advisory panel, tasked by Napolitano in February to look at the issue, completed a "working draft" of recommendations for countering homegrown threats, including threats from more than just Islamic extremists.
In its working draft, the Homeland Security Advisory Council advocates using methods that have already "proven effective in reducing and/or preventing" gang violence and other violent crime in parts of the country.
"Information-driven, community based violent crime reduction efforts should be recognized as a critical element of national efforts to protect the homeland from terrorism and other threats," says the 30-page draft of recommendations, which was obtained by Fox News.
The draft identifies "key elements" for applying such violent crime models to "ideological-motivated crime," including bolstering relationships between law enforcement and community members, and increasing the flow of information to community members.
In recent cases of homegrown terrorism, one DHS official said, suspects went through changes that were "very visible to the people around them," such as a "noticeable shift" in their personalities, a more outspoken anger against U.S. policy, or increased visits to "fringe" or "extremist" websites. The official said community members would be more inclined to report a potential threat to law enforcement if there is a stronger relationship between them.
As for sharing more threat-related information with community members, the official pointed to the case of at least 20 Somali-Americans from Minneapolis and elsewhere who were recruited over more than a year to join al-Shabaab, an Al Qaeda-linked group in East Africa. The official suggested some of the recruitment may have been prevented if families were informed earlier.
When federal authorities later met with families of the missing, "They said, 'We did not know that al-Shabaab was trying to recruit our kids over to Somalia until our kids disappeared,'" according to the official.
The council's recommendations also advocate that local police departments hire "more individuals representative of the communities served" and boost enforcement of hate crimes, calling it "one way for law enforcement to build trust with minority communities."
But working with local communities has its risks, which was noted during a House hearing in March titled "Working With Communities to Disrupt Terror Plots." Some Republicans worried authorities could "start giving legitimacy" to organizations that surreptitiously support terrorist groups, and McCaul, one of the four signatories on the recent letter to Napolitano, pointed to the case of Najibullah Zazi, the Colorado airport shuttle bus driver who planned a bomb attack on the New York City subway system.
"Working with a local imam actually backfired on law enforcement when he alerted Zazi that he was under government surveillance," McCaul said during the hearing. Zazi was eventually arrested and pleaded guilty to terrorism-related charges.
While the council's working draft of recommendations does refer to "terrorism" several times, it leaves out mention of any religion, instead referring to "violent extremism" and "ideological-motivated crime," including the "Ft. Hood shooting," in which a Muslim Army major killed 13 in November 2009, and the "Holocaust museum shooting," when an elderly white supremacist killed a security guard in June 2009.
The recent letter to Napolitano, sent weeks after the House members' committees received their own copies of the working draft, asks for information on how the recommendations were developed and how DHS plans to incorporate them into counterterrorism policy.
"Each state across the United States executes community outreach efforts differently, based on the traits of the diverse Muslim communities they serve and protect," the letter said. "It is our belief that a one-size-fits-all program will not work in the U.S. ... We should base such serious policy on fact and informed analysis, not assumptions."
As McCaul spokesman Mike Rosen put it, the issue is "whether DHS is putting all of its eggs in this one U.K. basket."
The letter says that "reports from the U.K. on [the Preventing Violent Extremism program] note that while the concept is sound in theory, in reality it is failing to achieve its goals and is aggravating the U.K.'s radicalization problem."
But McCaul seemed to take a different tone during the House hearing in March.
"Western European nations are ahead of the United States, in my judgment, in community outreach strategies and in disrupting terror plots, because they realize the importance of combating radicalization, and they know they cannot arrest their way out of the problem," McCaul said in his opening statement. "The success of our European allies in engaging local religious, business and community leaders has direct links to reporting and disrupting terrorist attacks."
Rosen, the McCaul spokesman, said there is "no discrepancy" between the letter the congressman signed and his comments in March. McCaul was not referring to the United Kingdom's "Preventing Violent Extremism" program, instead referring to other models in Western Europe, according to Rosen, who did not specify which models McCaul was referencing.
According to a DHS official, the U.K. model was one of several from around the globe that DHS and the Homeland Security Advisory Council have reviewed.
DHS provided the council with reports on programs employed by the Los Angeles Police Department and authorities in Amsterdam, Australia and the United Kingdom, the official said. The U.K. report was accompanied by criticisms of the "Preventing Violent Extremism" program, including the assessment that British efforts focused too specifically on Muslims and subsequently caused a backlash within Muslim communities.
In their letter, the four Republicans -- including Rep. Sue Myrick, R-N.C., and Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va. -- did agree with the Homeland Security Advisory Council on at least one thing: U.S. authorities and others have much to learn about radicalization.
"The current level of understanding regarding the sociology of 'radicalization' and 'extremism' is still immature," according to the council, which is comprised of experts and law enforcement officials from across the country, and counterterrorism officials from the Obama and Bush administrations. Likewise, the letter from the Republicans said there "continues to be differing views in the U.K. and the U.S. over how radicalization occurs and why some people are susceptible to radicalization while others are not."
The Republicans said such a lack of concrete information is why DHS needs to be careful before moving forward, but one DHS official said the lack of understanding is exactly why a community-based approach like the one recommended by the Homeland Security Advisory Council is the best way forward.
"The science is not really mature enough to base a whole policy on," the official said. "So we focus on what we can do: Address it when it's a community issue, before it's a national security issue."
Napolitano is expected to receive a final copy of the council's recommendations sometime in the next two weeks. How she decides to process them will likely shape future counterterrorism policy and inspire new programs, one DHS official said.
Meanwhile, her office is working on a response to the Republicans' letter.
The ecological travesty unfolding as a direct result of the BP Horizon blow-out may well go down in history as the turning point in the relationship between the planet and the Globalist economic addiction to oil. Many people in the oil industry are very well aware that viable, cheaper, cleaner, more efficient energy sources have been developed since the days of Tesla.
Indeed the patents for many of these alternatives are owned by major oil industry stake-holders!
As everyone involved in this ecological outrage appears to be adopting the CYA (Cover Your Ass) posture, some interesting information is working its way through the oilfield grapevine. As a recipient of the Schlumberger dollar for almost 20 years,
I still follow the fortunes of the Company with more than a passing interest. Although it was upsetting to learn that 11 oilfield hands lost their lives in the rig explosion, I was relieved to learn that no SLB personnel were on the rig at the time. However, it has now been formally acknowledged that two Schlumberger Wireline employees were on the BP Horizon rig but departed at 11.00. However, it seems that there are two versions as to exactly what transpired in the hours leading up to their departure.
The official version of events is that the two SLB Engineers were on the rig to run a CBL (Cement Bond Log), the test that ultimately determines the integrity of the cement holding the production casing to the formation. The Cementing operation having been completed by Haliburton.
However, BP's Company Man decided not to run the test (why not?) and told the SLB guys that they could get the next scheduled helicopter off the rig. The Cementing operation completed by Haliburton
However, there is an extremely disturbing rumour that suggests a rather different series of events! The SLB Wireline personnel were called to the rig specifically to run the CBL test.
However, they discovered that the well was still 'kicking; something that should definitely not be occurring at this stage of the proceedings and a pretty good indicator that there was a serious problem with the well-completion process. As a result of this, the SLB Wireline Engineer supposedly advised the Company Man that the well needed to be 'Shut in', either by pumping a heavier density mud (drilling fluid) or activating the BOP (Blow Out Preventer). The word on the vine is that the BP Company Man rejected this advice and the SLB Engineers immediately demanded to be evacuated from the rig. There being no scheduled helicopter, SLB management apparently responded to their Engineers request for immediate evacuation by flying out a charter 'copter. It is agreed by all parties that the SLB Engineers left the rig at 11.00am. The rig exploded six hours later.
If there is any substance to these allegations, the BP Company Man has a lot to answer for ...
including the lives of 11 oilfield hands. The truth is unlikely to be established outside a Court Room as the incestuous oil industry closes ranks.
Meanwhile, who knows exactly how much oil is gushing into the Gulf of Mexico? BP has been spinning events in a pathetic attempt at damage limitation. The impact on the fishing and shrimp industries is enormous; shipping lanes to the Gulf Ports have not been dramatically affected as yet but as the slick expands and deepens, it could ultimately bring shipping to a standstill.
However, the real threat is not yet being discussed. June 1st marked the start of the Hurricane season. Multiple Hurricanes and Tropical storms will make their way through the Gulf over the next four months. Each sucking up enormous quantities of sea water that is now not only polluted by oil but also by the outrageously toxic dispersants being used by BP in an attempt to break up a slick rapidly advancing upon the ecologically sensitive coastline either side of the Mississippi and the beaches of Florida. The most potent dispersant is known as COREXIT 9500, manufactured by NALCO.
Apart from the enormous sums of money now flowing into NALCO's corporate accounts, the real issue is the potential devastation that will be brought about by the toxic rainfall deposited throughout the South-Eastern United States in the coming months. As dispersants find their way into the precipitation and then penetrate the topsoil prior to entering the water table, the potential for the whole are becoming a waste land is a very real possibility.
As the prevailing winds head west, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that see a marked increase in the toxicity of rainfall in Europe over the Winter months!
Some religious fundamentalists are already linking this prognosis to the karmic effect from US depleted uranium poisoning the Iraqi water table and food chain. As the drama continues to unfold and Obama gets another opportunity to demonstrate his total ineffectiveness, the hegemonic psycho-sociopaths are rubbing their hands at the prospect of a very real opportunity to see the process addressed by the first objective listed on the Georgia Guide Stones being initiated ... all thanks to British Petroleum!
RESEARCH MORE
All the above serves to aid and abet the media in keeping and analysis and/or comment of Israel's continued attempts to maintain Gaza as the world's largest concentration camp ... not to mention the recent weekend gathering of the Bilderberger fraternity in the Spanish Mediterranean town of Sitges, where much there was reportedly much discussion about the perceived threat to the globalist agenda from those who have any degree of financial independence.
These sick Bilderberger/CFR/Trilateralist puppies just have no idea what they're up against! As Homo Luminous emerges from the illusion of consumerist materialism, refusing to rise to the bait of manufactured drama, those who delude themselves that they are the rightful rulers of a planetary fiefdom will be left arguing amongst themselves.
TIME FOR AMERICA TO UN-INTERVENE IN ISRAEL v PALESTINE
Washington’s bipartisan groveling to and knee-jerk support for Israeli actions are nearing an epic success. They are shattering the last of the thin veneer of Westernization in Turkey; reminding the Turks they are Muslims; pushing the Turks into the Muslim world; and encouraging Islamism in Turkey. This is a nightmarish achievement of Homeric dimensions and was caused by Israel and its U.S.-citizen friends corrupting, intimidating, and ultimately dictating policy to U.S. politicians and media. With an economy on the rocks, two wars being lost, and Obama’s lynch-law-style chase of BP unfolding, we find the decision about war in the Levant, and whether the United States joins it, is in the hands of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his ability to divine what God wants done to protect His chosen people. This is insane.
The solution to the problem is for America to stop intervening. No U.S. politician should tell the Israelis how to defend themselves. If Israel’s leaders believe their country’s security depends on the IDF boarding and shooting up relief convoys then that needs to be done. Israelis alone are responsible for shaping their security requirements and living with the consequences. On the Palestinian/Arab side, Washington should stop telling Muslims what to do or not do in dealing with Israel. The Israelis and Muslims are locked in a religious war where compromise means turning your back on God. God, Mr. Netanyahu says, gave the Israelis an eternal deed to Palestine, and innumerable Muslim leaders claim God did likewise for Muslims. We should walk away and let them test the validity of their God-given deeds in a war sure to ruin both.
From the U.S. perspective, moreover, non-intervention would allow us to stop saying “yes” to the question: “Are we really obligated to be endlessly damaged politically and diplomatically, put at increasing disadvantage on the battlefield, and drained of financial resources to protect Israel, a nation whose actions in and toward the United States — espionage, technology theft and transfer, political corruption, humiliating and rousing dissent against a sitting president, etc. — can only be seen as an enemy’s behavior?” Once we can answer in the negative, most Americans will see how crazy it is for the world’s greatest power to be involved in the Levant. If we stand aside, what possible impact can an IDF raid on a relief convoy or strafing of Palestinians have on U.S. security? Or what possible impact can a Hamas suicide bomb in Israel have on U.S. security? If Israel goes to war against Syria or vice versa, so what? Israel and its Muslim neighbors want to fight this religious war for their God. Let them. Stability is a much over-valued commodity; in fact, more stability would be found in a post-war period after both sides burned out their lust for religious war.
Israel particularly merits Washington’s cold shoulder because it has bred a fifth column in the United States. I hope many Americans have read or heard the messages delivered by their war-wanting, fellow U.S.-citizens since the IDF raid. In print and on television and radio, Americans have been lectured by Israel-First propagandists like Charles Krauthammer, Eliot Cohen, Mark Steyn, Daniel Pipes, and Steven Rosen on their absolute duty to support Israel, and on how questioning or opposing Israel’s actions weakens U.S. security and connotes anti-Semitism. They argued, in other words, it is the duty of Americans to shut up and feel honored to see their taxes aid Israel’s territorial aggrandizement and have their soldier-children die as Israel’s cannon fodder.
If Americans doubt where the primary loyalty of the Israel Firsters is fixed, I would recommend listening to Steven Rosen’s discussion with Peter Beinart last week on NPR’s “On the Media.” Rosen spoke as if there is a codicil to the 1st Amendment that forbids Americans from even mild criticism of Israel; he left no doubt he would support such a ban on his fellow citizens. Steyn and Pipes, on the other hand, made a strange attempt to paint Turkey as a U.S. enemy because Istanbul took exception to the IDF killing its nationals. Cohen and Krauthammer were more traditional, using the stale but always reliable make-Americans-feel-guilty-about-the-holocaust ruse.
Cohen: “The folly here is to think that leaving the Israelis open to these kinds of diplomatic attacks [from other nations] will buy good will in the Middle East that gets its opinions form Al Jazeera and a venomous media that routinely prints outrageous lies and hate literature that echoes Nazi Germany.”
Krauthammer: “The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, 6 million — that number again — hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide. For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Zionists — Iranian in particular — openly prepare a more final solution.”
Using Cohen’s words more accurately, the “folly here” to think the existence of Israel or Palestine matters to U.S. national security. For forty years, Washington has spent untold time, diplomatic resources, and money promoting peace between Muslims and Israelis who want war. For the effort, Americans have:
1. Earned the undying hatred of many tens of millions of Muslims;
2. Led Israeli politicians to believe we are a rich, militarily powerful automaton they can cynically manipulate by using terms like “holocaust” and “Nazi” and “final solution” whenever their acts bring war near;
3. Convinced Arab tyrants we will intervene at the last second to stop all-out war when their murderous surrogates spur Israel to defend itself; and, worst of all,
4. Allowed the growth of a fifth column of U.S.-citizen Israel Firsters (see above) that corrupts our politics, opposes free speech, and wants to take all Americans to war for their own personal religious beliefs.
This is too high a price for the United States to pay for anything that goes on in a sandpit at the Mediterranean’s eastern end.
America first … and a pox on all in the Levant.
Israel has its intelligence organization, Mossad, carry out false flag operations and deceives others into attacking their enemies. In short they get others to fight their wars for them.
Israel is in the midst of its plan to use the United States military, which it controls, to conquer Iraq and divert Iraqi oil to the Haifa refinery via the Mosul to Haifa pipeline. The U.S. has built airbases at H1, H2 and H3 (which stand for Haifa 1, 2 and 3) to protect this strategic pipeline. The pipeline is used to send oil to Israel. Paid for with the blood of American soldiers that die in Iraq. See: The Reason Bush Is Pushing For Syria's Invasion
Iraq is being turned into another Palestine state for Israel.
This war was fought in order to secure Israel's future. Israel, being a parasite nation, needed to create an income stream that would continue if funding from the United States should dry up. They have been working on the plan to steal Iraqi oil for years. Read Israel's Blitzkrieg on Middle East Oil by Joe Vialls for more on this.
To quote Mr. Vialls article, "... they are already planning to steal 1,825 million barrels of Iraqi oil per annum. Taking a nominal price of US $25.00 per barrel ... the Israeli-Jewish terrorists stand to make a cool US $45,625,000,000.00 each year .... " [Thats over 45 1/2 Billion dollars a year or $125 million each day!!!]
Mr. Vialls claims that the 45 billion a year jackpot is more than just a lot of money, it's a matter of survival for Israel.
The reshaping of the Middle East by America's military will allow Israel to:
(1) Control the strategic oil reserves in this region which will ensure low cost oil to Israel and ensure their economic survival.
(2) Ensure Israel is the dominant military force and the sole nuclear equipped military power in the region for many years to come .
(3) Neutralize Israel's enemies in the region.
(4) Expand borders per "Greater Israel". The Nile forming the border on the West through Egypt, and the Euphrates on the East through Turkey, Syria and Iraq.
(5) Allow even further expansion of borders to encompass surrounding countries.
Israel has become the 3rd largest exporter of weapons in the world , selling everything from Uzis to PHALCON airborne early warning systems. Defense Ministry figures show Israeli weapons export contracts were worth $4.1 billion in 2002. Only the United States with $13.2 billion and Russia with $4.4 billion sold more weapons that year.
Israel's possesses the fourth largest army in the world.
Israel is the only nuclear enabled country in the Middle East. Israel has overtaken England to become the worlds 5th largest nuclear power, roughly equivalent to France and China in the size and sophistication of its nuclear arsenal. Recent reports indicate that Israel has deployed five different nuclear weapons designs. It is estimated to have 2000-5000 conventional nuclear warheads and many micro nuclear devices like the bomb that destroyed the Sari Club in Bali. (These new nuclear devices only emit alpha radiation that is invisible to a standard geiger counter). In addition they have the neutron bombs, (that can kill people and leave the buildings intact) and hydrogen bombs . Hydrogen bombs are currently the most fearsome and intimidating weapon on earth, capable of causing over 60000 times the damage of a nuclear bomb like the one used on Nagasaki. The Hydrogen bomb is so intimidating that most nations vow never to produce it, though it is really not much harder than producing regular nukes. When we are talking WMD, this is the big Kahuna.
Israel has the capability to take out every major city in Europe. Israel refuses to sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) or to allow inspections of its nuclear facilities by International inspectors.
Israel stands in defiance of 69 United Nations Security Council Resolutions. A further 33 resolutions against Israel has not seen the light of day thanks to the United States vetoing power on the Security Council.
Nuclear disarmament must begin with Israel. Until that time, Arab states in the region have an inalienable "right" and "obligation" to develop similar weapons (of mass destruction) to counter this overwhelming threat to their nations and peoples.
Since Israel possess such a large nuclear arsenal, they are able to blackmail the United States into supplying them conventional weapons. They have been known to sell those weapons and technologies to other countries, once they are given to them. The Patriot missile, the Phoenix air-to-air missile, the Lavi fighter, based on the F-16, have all been sold to Beijing. Only direct U.S. intervention prevented Israel from selling Beijing AWACS technology.
Zionist forces are in control of the United States. When Ariel Sharon said:
"Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it."
Ariel Sharon to Shimon Peres, October 3rd, 2001, as reported on Kol Yisrael
-- it was no idle chatter. He was telling the truth. They have gained control through the Federal Reserve System and control of the central banks. The Illuminati and their Zionist agents also employ nuclear blackmail . They are firmly in control of Australia, Germany and England as well as the U.S. Their allies will unite to fight the good fight for the greater good of Israel.
As the right-wing leadership of the organized U.S. Jewish community defends Israel against international condemnation for its deadly seizure of a flotilla bearing humanitarian supplies for Gaza, a familiar clutch of neoconservative hawks is going on the offensive against what they see as the flotilla’s chief defender, Turkey.
Outraged by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip’s Erdogan’s repeated denunciations of the May 31 Israeli raid, as well as his co-sponsorship with Brazil of an agreement with Iran designed to promote renewed negotiations with the West on Tehran’s nuclear program, some neoconservatives are even demanding that the U.S. try to expel Ankara from NATO as one among of several suggested actions aimed at punishing Erdogan’s AKP (Justice and Development Party) government.
"Turkey, as a member of NATO, is privy to intelligence information having to do with terrorism and with Iran," noted the latest report by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a hard-line neoconservative group that promotes U.S.-Israeli military ties and has historically cultivated close ties to Turkey’s military, as well.
"If Turkey finds its best friends to be Iran, Hamas, Syria and Brazil (look for Venezuela in the future) the security of that information (and Western technology in weapons in Turkey’s arsenal) is suspect. The United States should seriously consider suspending military cooperation with Turkey as a prelude to removing it from the organization," suggested the group.
Its board of advisers includes many prominent champions of the 2003 Iraq invasion, including former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director James Woolsey, and former U.N. Amb. John Bolton.
Neoconservative publications, notably the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard and the National Review, have also been firing away at the AKP government since the raid.
"Turkey now represents a major element in the global panorama of radical Islam," declared the Standard’s Stephen Schwartz, while Daniel Pipes, the controversial director of the Likudist Middle East Forum (MEF), echoed JINSA’s call for ousting Ankara from NATO and urged Washington to provide direct support for Turkey’s opposition parties in an article published by the National Review Online.
The Journal has been running editorials and op-eds attacking Turkey on virtually a daily basis since the raid, accusing its government, among other things, of having "an ingrained hostility toward the Jewish state, remarkable sympathies for nearby radical regimes, and an attitude toward extremist groups like the IHH (the Islamist group that sponsored the flotilla’s flagship, the Mavi Marmara) that borders on complicity."
On Monday, it ran an op-ed by long-time hawk Victor Davis Hanson that labeled the IHH "a terrorist organization with ties to al-Qaeda", while an earlier op-ed, by Robert Pollock, its editorial features editor, called Erdogan and his foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, "demagogues appealing to the worst elements in their own country and the broader Middle East."
Meanwhile, in an op-ed published by The Forward, a Jewish weekly, Michael Rubin, a Perle protégé at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), accused Turkey of having "become a conduit for the smuggling of weapons to Israel’s enemies", notably Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
The onslaught is ironic both because of the neo- conservatives’ long cultivation of Turkey and their avowed support for promoting democratic governance — of which they have singled out Turkey for special praise — in the Muslim world.
Neoconservatives were among the most important promoters of the military alliance between Israel and Turkey that began to take shape in the late 1980s and was consolidated by the mid-1990s.
In fact, Perle and another of his protégés, former undersecretary of defense for policy, Douglas Feith, worked as paid lobbyists for Turkey during that period, in major part to persuade the powerful "Israel Lobby" on Capitol Hill to promote Ankara’s interests on Capitol Hill.
In 1996, the two men participated in a task force chaired by Perle that proposed to incoming Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that he work with Turkey and Jordan to remove Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power as part of an alliance designed to transform the strategic balance in the Middle East permanently in favor of Israel.
But the Turkey promoted by Perle and his fellow-neocons in the 1980s and ’90s was one that was dominated by a secular business and political elite carefully monitored by an all- powerful military institution that mounted three coup d’etats between 1960 and 1980 and intervened a fourth time in 1997 to oust an Islamist-led government.
Despite its close links to both the U.S. and Israel, however, the Turkish military badly disappointed the neo- cons in the run-up to Washington’s invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Instead of insisting that the civilian government at the time grant U.S. requests to use Turkish territory as a major launching pad into northern Iraq, the armed forces decided to defer to overwhelming parliamentary and public opposition to the invasion.
"I think for whatever reason they did not play the strong leadership role on that issue that we would have expected," complained then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, a long-time Perle friend and colleague who, despite his lavish praise of Turkey as a model Muslim democracy, headed repeated efforts by the George W. Bush administration to persuade Turkey’s national security council — where the military’s voice was dominant — to effectively overrule its parliament.
Erdogan, who became prime minister just a week before the invasion and whose political and economic reforms have been widely praised in the West, at first sought good relations with Israel. As late as 2007, he arranged for Shimon Peres to become the first Israeli president to address the Turkish parliament.
By then, however, many neocons had become concerned about Erdogan’s efforts to weaken the military’s power, his warm reception of a top Hamas leader in 2005, criticism of Israel’s military campaign against Hezbollah in 2006, and rapprochement with Syria.
When the military not so subtly threatened to intervene against Erdogan and the AKP in 2007, some neocons, notably Perle, suggested that the U.S. should not try to discourage it. Others, including the Standard’s Schwartz and Pipes, encouraged it as the lesser of two evils, even as the Journal defended the AKP as "more democratic than the secularists."
Since Erdogan’s furious denunciation of Israel, and Peres personally, at the Davos World Economic Forum (WEF) of Israel’s Cast Lead operation in Gaza in Jan 2009, however, neocons of virtually all stripes — including those, like the Journal’s editorial writers, who have praised the AKP as a democratizing force — have turned against Ankara. And the flotilla incident, combined with Erdogan’s perceived defense of Iran’s nuclear program, has raised their animus to new heights.
"A combination of Islamist rule, resentment at exclusion from Europe, and a neo-Ottomanist ideology that envisions Turkey as a great power in the Middle East have made Turkey a state that is often plainly hostile not only to Israel but to American aims and interests," wrote Eliot Cohen, professor at Johns Hopkins University, in a Journal op-ed Monday.
We Can Kill Anyone, Anywhere No Reason Needed, We Are Terrorists
Report: Autopsy shows Gaza activists were shot 30 times. Nine Turkish activistskilled in an Israeli raid on a Gaza-bound ship, including one with U.S. citizenship, were shot a total of 30 times and five died of gunshot wounds to the head, Britain’s Guardian newspaper says (Read Original Haaretz Article from Israel)
LATE BREAKING NEWS: ISRAELI “COMMANDOS” EXECUTED PEACE ACTIVISTS, MOSTLY WITH SHOTS TO THE BACK OF THE HEAD AT POINT BLANK RANGE, WHILE PRISONERS WERE KNEELING, ACCORDING TO A REPORT FROM AN ISRAELI PAPER, BASED ON AUTOPSY RESULTS
An American teenager was murdered by Israel commandos, pirates really, this week. He was shot in the abdomen and, instead of being given medical aid, he was held down on the deck of a ship, probably by multiple pairs of combat boots and shot four times in the back of the head at close range. Reports from the Israeli Knesset have Israeli boats approaching the unarmed flotilla, machine guns pouring lead across the decks. These facts won’ t be in any American or British newspaper or on the television news, not the corporate networks anyway. Israel dictates what is reported, even by the BBC, an organization they control entirely.
This isn’t the first time this has happened, an Israeli military force has gone after a ship in the Mediterranean. The most glaring case is the attack on the USS Liberty in 1967. With President Lyndon Johnson agreeing to support the Israeli invasion of Egypt and Syria, a quick land grab started by a Pearl Harbor type sneak attack, it wasn’t certain that the American military would support this kind of cowardly aggression. Thus, the American monitoring ship, the USS Liberty, had to be sunk and its entire crew wiped out to a man. President Johnson approved, Admiral Sidney McCain agreed to cover it up and Israel sent wave after wave of bombers, torpedo boats and fighter aircraft out but the USS Liberty never went down. 34 Americans were murdered by Israel that day.
The USS Liberty incident should have taken down the Johnson presidency, ended the “special relationship” with Israel and opened the 6 Day War to real scrutiny for what it was, Israeli expansionism. If the United States had reacted then, there would have been no 1974 oil embargo, no Ayatollah in Iran, no “war on terror,” no 9/11 and no world economic collapse. A single act of treason 43 years ago changed the world for the worse, erasing our triumphs in World War 2 and erasing the economic boon the collapse of the Soviet Union should have brought the world.
IS IT STILL TREASON WHEN NOBODY KNOWS?
The current attack against the Freedom Flotilla deeply parallels the USS Liberty attack. The attack on the Liberty was an act of war against the United States. This required retaliation. There was none. What it wasn’t was an “accident.” Israel now calls the murder of an American teenager “
Allowing Israel to get away with this, an attack on a US Navy ship in international waters was one of the worst acts of treason and cowardice in American history but it was also a more significant error. America gave up its sovereignty to Israel. Johnson had been bought and paid for long before, years of sexcapades in Hollywood, arranged by studio heads and, at the time of the USS Liberty attack, bedding an Irgun operative, Matilda Krim. Johnson had seen “the outfit” get rid of President Kennedy and knew he had to ”toe the line.” Another Kennedy would die and, after that, no American leader would oppose Israel again, not without a plane crash, sex scandal or being removed from office through a massive deluge of cash.
MURDER
When an American citizen is murdered anywhere in the world, our embassy is involved, the FBI asks to assist in the investigation and the State Department monitors the case from beginning to end. In 1812, we went to war over the kidnapping of Americans from ships at sea. We entered World War I because of a German attack that killed Americans, an attack on a ship carrying arms during a war.
Were a soldier from any army or police force in the world to shoot an unarmed American on their own territory, an apology would be offered immediately, reparations made and still, they would face military retaliation. Such an incident is state terrorism by definition.
The idea of a member of a military group murdering an American, not an accidental shooting but an execution, not within their sovereign borders but during an act of piracy in international waters, America would have an obligation to respond militarily to a terrorist attack. However, not only was nothing done, nothing has been said. America is only admitting that it is no longer a sovereign nation. It can’t, it won’t protect its citizens, it won’t even act in concert with the international community. America is a colony of a police state, a colony of a terrorist evildoer.
NO AMERICAN SAFE, U.S. PASSPORTS NOW WORTHLESS
The message Obama, Biden, Schumer, McCain and Lieberman sent out is clear. If you want to spit on an American soldier in Germany or Italy, we don’t care. If you rape an American woman in a hotel, kidnap an American child anywhere in the world, America isn’t concerned, not unless the child is a Jew. America is obsessed with one thing and one thing only, protecting Jews, Israeli, American, it doesn’t matter. Why is this?
Only a kidnapped Jew gets news exposure. Anyone else “had it coming.” How can a large nation allow racial discrimination against its own majority Christian population? If we didn’t see it, who would believe it. We even allow our own military to be murdered and say nothing. How can such a little country have so much power. Did America really surrender her national sovereignty to Israel so many years ago?
AMERICAN OUTRAGE
It is the American military that is reacting to this latest provocation with the most anger. After years of conditioning to see Muslims as a less than human, years of deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan have mellowed even the most strident “Zionist Evangelical” crusaders bent on killing every Arab they could get their hands on, products of Rumsfeld’s Department of Defense propaganda machine.
The America that only knew of the Middle East from watching villainous “greasy” Arab terrorist and Nordic looking Israeli “freedom fighters” with their blonde hair and aquiline features play out “comic book melodramas’ on television. Each show always ends the same, credits that look like an Anti-Defamation League or AIPAC membership list, producers, directors, writers, editors, even the caterers.
Decade after decade Americans were being fed a constant diet, are being fed a constant diet of race hatred. Now Americans, particularly American soldiers, many of whom have spent years living with tribesmen in Afghanistan or playing with kids on the dusty streets of Iraq, our kids, our soldiers know better. The picture now in their minds is that of an American teenager being executed by a criminal gang, protected by the Israel lobby in the United States, protected by cowards like Barak Hussein Obama, protected by a nation that has lived for decades above any law.
Executing an American on a ship on the high seas is spitting on our flag. This is how we see it. This was a high school student planning a career in medicine, out on international waters, kept safe by the US Navy, traveling with a former crew member of the USS Liberty.
Prior to the terrorist attack on the Freedom Flotilla, a remembrance of the USS Liberty, honoring the American martyrs to this earlier act of terrorism, was held. Rememberance is no longer enough. Years ago Americans were promised that their government would go anywhere in the world to find terrorists who attacked Americans. It is time to keep that promise.
