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Egypt builds more prisons

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MEMO | January 14, 2016

Instead of fulfilling his promises to improve the country’s deteriorating economy, provide new job opportunities for thousands of unemployed youth and build at least one million housing units to accommodate young couples, Egypt’s President, Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi has only managed to build more prisons and detention centres to accommodate the growing number of opposition activists.

Less than two months after his election in June 2013, Al-Sisi opened the first maximum security prison in the Dakahlia Governorate.

As many as five new prisons have been constructed since 2013.

Yesterday, the president issued a decree to allocate a plot of state-owned land that spreads over more 103.22 acres to construct a new central prison in Giza.

With the new prison, Egypt will have 42 prisons as well as 382 detention centres in police stations.

A report by the Arab Organisation for Human Rights revealed that the cost of building Gamasa prison was 750 million Egyptian pounds ($95.8 million), adding that the interior ministry did not publish the costs incurred during the construction of the other prisons because they probably cost billions of Egyptian pounds.

According to the organisation, Egypt does not need to build more detention centres to solve a capacity crisis; the problem is imprisoning tens of thousands of innocent people without justification.

Authorities have increased arbitrary arrests because of political opinion and the number of detainees has reached more than 41,000 prisoners, the human rights group said.

January 14, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture | , | Leave a comment

Over 700 Shias missing after Nigeria army raids: Shia group

Press TV – January 14, 2016

A Nigerian Shia group says more than 700 of its members are still unaccounted for a month after the deadly attacks by Nigerian forces against Shia Muslims in the northern city of Zaria.

In a statement released on Thursday, Ibrahim Musa, the spokesman for the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN), whose leader Sheikh Ibrahim al-Zakzaky is in police custody, said about 730 people have gone missing since December 12, 2015.

“These missing people were either killed by the army or are in detention” but their “whereabouts are still unknown and undisclosed,” Musa said.

He further noted that some 220 IMN members were in a prison, located in the city of Kaduna, the capital of the state with the same name, while others were in military custody elsewhere across the African state.

On December 12 last year, Nigerian soldiers attacked Shia Muslims attending a ceremony at a religious center in the northern city of Zaria, accusing them of blocking the convoy of the army’s chief of staff and attempting to assassinate him. The Shias have categorically denied the allegations.

The following day, Nigerian forces also raided Zakzaky’s home and arrested him after reportedly killing those attempting to protect him, including one of the IMN’s senior leaders and its spokesman.

Both incidents led to the deaths of hundreds of members of the religious community, including three of Zakzaky’s sons. There has been no official death toll in the violence, but rights activists have put the number at over 1,000.

Musa said no Nigerian family had received a body for burial in the weeks since the Zaria violence.

The Shia cleric is said to have been charged with “criminal conspiracy and inciting public disturbances.”

The IMN has called for Zakzaky’s unconditional release and for Abuja to respond to the “unjustifiable atrocities committed by the army.”

January 14, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

Netanyahu to downgrade diplomatic representation in Brazil

MEMO | January 14, 2016

benjamin-netanyahu-large-4Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday decided to downgrade diplomatic representation in Brazil over the latter’s refusal to approve settler leader Dani Dayan as Israeli ambassador, local media reported.

The Jerusalem Post newspaper reported Netanyahu saying: “If Brazil won’t approve former settler leader Dani Dayan as its ambassador, Israel won’t offer another diplomat.”

The Israeli PM’s decision came one week after reports surfaced that Netanyahu would withdraw Dayan’s name as an ambassador to Brazil and give him another diplomatic position in the US.

Arabic news website Arab48.com reported officials from the Israeli foreign ministry accusing Brazil of a “personal boycott” of Dayan; however, a group of 40 retired Brazilian diplomats signed a statement against the appointment of Dayan.

Dayan has previously said: “To be an ambassador or not, it is not the question for me, but if this was not, will 700,000 Israeli [settlers] be banned from working in embassies?”

He added: “As it has objecting to the labelling of Israeli products, Israel must object to the labelling of people.”

January 14, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , , , , | Leave a comment

U.S. “Aid” plan for Central America will Worsen Inequality, Exacerbate Flight

U.S. Alliance for Prosperity plan aims to stem Central American migration, but critics say the plan falls far short of addressing underlying causes

teleSUR | January 13, 2016

The United States’ plan to more than double its aid package to Central America in the name of increasing security and boosting development is likely to open up the region to U.S. corporate interests without tackling underlying problems of poverty and inequality, CISPES Executive Director Alexis Stoumbelis told teleSUR on Wednesday.

U.S. Congress approved over US$750 million at the end of December to roll out President Barack Obama’s strategy for Central America. The package supports the controversial Alliance for Prosperity, a plan touted as a strategy to stem the massive wave of undocumented migrants from the Northern Triangle of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, but slammed by critics for exacerbating key drivers of the crisis.

According to Stoumbelis, the new increased funding plan continues the same development model based on White House priorities of free trade and foreign direct investment that the U.S. has long promoted in the region.

“The U.S. has had an aggressive neoliberal agenda in Central America for the last 20 years, so this doesn’t really come as a surprise,” Stoumbelis told teleSUR by phone, citing the Central America Free Trade Agreement as an example of the U.S.-backed free trade model that has proven to worsen insecurity and inequality in Central American countries.

“The plan continues to push an agenda much more in line with neoliberal economics than programs proven to improve quality of life,” said Stoumbelis.

While the new aid package has been promoted as a bid to address longstanding issues of poverty, insecurity, and violence, the main pillars of the plan pave the way for increased foreign investment, natural resource extraction, privatization, and militarization while raising serious concerns about human rights and inequality, Stoumbelis added.

“The funding provides backing for governments that have proven time and time against putting human rights at the top of the agenda,” said Stoumbelis, adding that the plan ignores calls from many social movements and advocacy groups to cut security aid to the region instead of rewarding human rights-abusing administrations with more funding.

Although the U.S. funding for Central America includes conditions aimed at addressing human rights concerns raised by social movements and advocates, many remain skeptical that the measures will do enough to counteract dismal human rights records and rampant corruption, especially in Honduras and Guatemala.

“It was a victory to condition the aid … and to convince (U.S.) Congress that its support for human rights-abusing governments needs to be addressed,” said Stoumbelis. He went on to say that even if the aid is subject to human rights guarantees, it is ultimately up to the State Department to sign off on whether Central American countries fulfill the conditions.

Many expect that the new plan will uphold the State Department’s historically inadequate standard on human rights, which in the past has seen human rights approval issued despite evidence of systematic and chronic human rights abuses on the ground in Central America.

The US$750-million aid package will spike funding levels from US$120 million to US$300 million for development, from US$160 million to US$405 million for security, and from US$33 million to over US$66 million for the war on drugs. Funds will be administered by the State Department and by USAID, which have proven to support privatization and the interests of U.S. corporations in the region.

The security funding includes doubling the budget for the Central American Security Initiative, a regional plan that has dramatically increased militarization of security forces in the region and in turn raised concerns about increasing human rights abuses, impunity, and corruption without fulfilling its state’s objectives of tackling insecurity.

According to Stoumbelis, militarization in the name of the war on drugs has largely been a “war on the people,” as poor people are the most vulnerable in the face of insecurity and have largely been the victims of rising levels of violence under CARSI and the security initiative for Mexico, Plan Merida.

The plan is expected to pave the way for increased militarization in the name of “stabilization” and border security, which critics fear will result in increased human rights violations and exacerbate the problems underlying social and economic inequality.

Militarization also tends to result in criminalization of protest movements against neoliberal mega-projects that displace communities, rob indigenous peoples of land, destroy the environment, and undermine food security—a development strategy only set to ramp up under the new regional aid plan.

Despite the challenges, Stoumbelis predicts that such resistance movements will redouble their fight against the model the U.S. aid package proposes to push harder.

“There has been a tremendous challenge to the model,” said Stoumbelis, emphasizing the role of cross-border resistance in the region and the importance of international solidarity.

For Stoumbelis, in the face of increased U.S. aid, solidarity with Central American movements is now more than ever key to resisting the “U.S.-backed corporate onslaught in the region.”

January 14, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

US drowning in blood of innocent people proving its hegemony: ‘Twas ever thus’

By John Wight | RT | January 13, 2016

As the US grows desperate to re-establish credibility in the Middle East, having failed to stem the rise of terrorism across the region, and in response to Russia’s intervention in Syria, Washington is now clearly in danger of losing the plot.

Evidence for this comes on the back of the recent airstrike carried out by US jets over Mosul, targeting an ISIS facility allegedly containing a huge amount of cash intended to pay its fighters and finance future military operations. According to a CNN report on the Mosul airstrike, “US commanders had been willing to consider up to 50 civilian casualties from the airstrike due to the importance of the target. But the initial post-attack assessment indicated that perhaps five to seven people were killed.”

This is an astounding statement, cynical in its disregard for civilian lives and dripping in hypocrisy when we consider the efforts that have been made by Western ideologues and their governments to demonize Russia over its intervention in Syria, accusing it of striking civilian targets with blithe disregard for the consequences.

Imagine if a Russian military commander made a statement such as this, openly acknowledging that civilians would be killed in future Russian airstrikes. The uproar across Western media platforms would be off the scale. There would likely even be attempts to convene an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council in order to censure the Russian government, along with a concerted attempt to isolate Moscow and reduce it to pariah status.

Yet, when US officials make such statements it’s reported as if it was just another day in the Empire.

In the same CNN news report, we are informed that, “In recent weeks, the US has said it will assess all targets on a case-by-case basis and may be more willing to tolerate civilians casualties for more significant targets.”

Though undeniably shocking in its callousness, for those familiar with the history of US military operations it will come as no surprise. In Korea and Vietnam in the 1950s and 60s, for example, the US waged total war against civilians. They carpet bombed both countries until the landscape was utterly devastated, in addition to using napalm and chemical weapons such as Agent Orange to destroy crops, rice paddies and, with it, the means of survival for millions of human beings.

In his 1970 expose of the notorious massacre of My Lai in Vietnam, US investigative reporter Seymour Hersh reveals how, “they [US soldiers] were setting fire to the hootches [villagers homes] and huts and waiting for people to come out and then shooting them…they were going into the hootches and shooting them up…they were gathering people in groups and shooting them. The whole thing was so deliberate. It was point blank murder…”

Towards the end of Hersh’s report we learn that army investigators, visiting My Lai afterwards, “found mass graves at three sites, as well as a ditch full of bodies. It was estimated that between 450 and 500 people – most of them women, children and old men – had been slain and buried there.”

Another US war crime, connected to the Vietnam War, was the carpet bombing of Cambodia across the Vietnamese border. Many consider this to have been genocidal in its destruction of the country and the sheer number of people slaughtered. Even worse it created the conditions in the country out of which the Khmer Rouge emerged, offering a striking parallel with the Middle East today considering the role the war in Iraq played in destabilizing the region with the emergence of ISIS the result.

Australian journalist and filmmaker John Pilger visited Cambodia in the 1970s, after the toppling of Pol Pot, reporting on the horror and suffering its people had endured under his perverse regime. Pilger writes, “During one six-month period in 1973, B-52s dropped more bombs in 3,695 raids on the populated heartland of Cambodia than were dropped on Japan during all of the Second World War: the equivalent, in tons of bombs, of five Hiroshimas.”

Not content with bombing Cambodia into the arms of Pol Pot and his ‘Year Zero’ genocidal project, the US went on to support and aid the Khmer Rouge after the country was liberated by the Vietnamese in 1979, during which the group was chased across the border into neighboring Thailand. Pilger reveals that the “reason for this [US support for the Khmer Rouge] stemmed from the fact that Cambodia’s liberators had come from the wrong side of the Cold War. The Vietnamese, who had driven the Americans from their homeland, were not to be acknowledged in any way as liberators, and they and the Khmer people would suffer accordingly.”

In reality the history of the US when it comes to slaughtering civilians, or aiding their slaughter and suffering, provides enough material for a thousand articles never mind one. The image of itself it tries to promote to the gullible and guileless, mostly its own people, is of a nation that stands for the highest standards of moral rectitude, decency, and honor in its dealings with the rest of the world. The truth is exactly the opposite. The truth is that Washington is verily drowning in the blood of innocent people, deemed surplus to the requirements of US hegemony.

Syria today is no different, which is why nobody should be surprised at such open and naked disregard for innocent civilians, revealed in the words of US officials vis-à-vis future US airstrikes.

John Wight has written for newspapers and websites across the world, including the Independent, Morning Star, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, London Progressive Journal, and Foreign Policy Journal. He is also a regular commentator on RT and BBC Radio. He wrote a memoir of the five years he spent in Hollywood, where he worked in the movie industry prior to becoming a full time activist and organizer with the US antiwar movement post-9/11. The book is titled Dreams That Die and is published by Zero Books. John is currently working on a book exploring the role of the West in the Arab Spring. You can follow him on Twitter @JohnWight1

January 14, 2016 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | 1 Comment

Are Terrorist Attacks in Turkey State-Sponsored?

By Stephen Lendman | January 14, 2016

Blaming recent terrorist attacks in Turkish cities on ISIS (or other non-state actors) is dubious at best. Erdogan supports Daesh. Why would it target a valued ally?

The latest incidents happened this week following earlier ones. An alleged suicide bomber killed 10 tourists in Istanbul’s historic district, mostly German nationals. At least 15 others were injured.

Erdogan’s “condemn(ation)” of what happened rang hollow. Angela Merkel blamed “international terrorism.”

Former Obama State Department counterterrorism coordinator Daniel Benjamin claimed ISIS is “determined to target more soft targets outside their areas… in Syria and Iraq” – without explaining what it could hope to gain strategically.

On Thursday, a huge blast largely destroyed a police headquarters building in Turkey’s Diyarbakir province. At least five deaths were reported, dozens injured.

Kurdish PKK militants were blamed despite no evidence proving it. Reports claimed eight “terrorists” were killed in clashes with police following the bombing.

What’s going on? Is Turkey especially vulnerable to terrorist attacks given their frequency in recent months? Or does responsibility lie elsewhere?

Were high-profile attacks in its cities state-sponsored? Erdogan supports terrorist groups while claiming to combat them.

He heads a fascist police state. He’s an international criminal with megalomaniacal aims, wanting political opponents eliminated, waging war on freedom, tolerating no internal critics, charging them with treason.

Putin calls him an “accomplice of terrorists” – aiding ISIS, Al Qaeda and other groups complicit with Washington, waging war without mercy on Turkish Kurds, hugely responsible for regional violence and instability.

He seeks unchallenged tyrannical powers under the mantle of presidential rule, wanting Ankara’s constitution rewritten to oblige him.

Turkey has enjoyed nearly 140 years of parliamentary governance – despite four military coups and execution of a prime minister. It has never taken steps to shift to iron-fisted one-man presidential rule.

Fear-mongering is longstanding US policy. Erdogan appears to be following the same strategy, aiming to overcome parliamentary opposition to his power-grabbing scheme – using alleged terrorist attacks to enlist support for iron-fisted presidential rule on the pretext of protecting national security.

As long as Erdogan remains Turkey’s leader, tyranny will substitute for democratic freedoms. His next moves to solidify power remain to be seen.

Stephen Lendman can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

January 14, 2016 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Pyongyang Lawyers Condemn Washington for Refusal to Sign Peace Deal

Sputnik — 14.01.2016

A committee of North Korean lawyers classified Washington’s unwillingness to sign a peace deal with Pyongyang as “an international crime,” local media reported Thursday.

The committee added that the peace deal was essential to peace and security both in North Korea and in the whole world. However, it warned that if Washington did not change its approach to Pyongyang, North Korea would ensure its safety by producing nuclear weapons.

“US policy aimed at persistent refusal to sign [North] Korean-US peace treaty and at military suppression of us is extremely dangerous international crime and wrongful act, which contradicts the establishment of peace,” Yonhap news agency reported, citing the North Korean committee.

The Korean War of 1950-1953 ended with an armistice agreement, signed by the United States and North Korea. The agreement was meant to ensure a cessation of hostilities on the Korean Peninsula until a final peace deal had been reached.

January 14, 2016 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | 1 Comment

Hillary Clinton flip flops, attacks Sanders on healthcare

RT | January 13, 2016

Former first daughter Chelsea Clinton joined her mother, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, on the campaign trail this week to attack the single-payer healthcare plan proposed by opponent Bernie Sanders.

Even though Hillary asked “since when do Democrats attack one another on universal health care?” during a 2008 speech in response to a mailer from her opponent at the time, Barack Obama, she called the Sanders plan to cover everyone regardless of their ability to pay as a “risky deal”.

The Sanders plan would destroy private insurance and drug companies, who have donated millions of dollars to Hillary’s campaigns for senate and president.

Clinton famously told candidate Obama “shame on you” in 2008, but now she’s defending his legacy healthcare program dubbed Obamacare, which delivered millions of new customers to for-profit insurance companies through its mandatory coverage clause.

Mother Jones described the new attacks as “an abrupt shift” with just a few weeks before the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary.

Chelsea falsely claimed that millions of people would lose coverage under the Sanders plan during a campaign stop on Tuesday in New Hampshire, where Sanders is now leading in the polls.

“Senator Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the CHIP program, dismantle Medicare, and dismantle private insurance,” she said. “I worry if we give Republicans Democratic permission to do that, we’ll go back to an era – before we had the Affordable Care Act – that would strip millions and millions and millions of people off their health insurance.”

In fact, not only would those Americans currently covered by Obamacare continue to be protected by the Sanders plan, but it would also cover the millions of Americans who still can’t afford insurance under the so-called “Affordable Care Act”.

Sanders believes healthcare should be a human right and available to all, regardless of wealth or income.

Chelsea, on the other hand, married a former Goldman Sachs investment banker, lives in an expensive New York City condo, serves on several boards including her father’s controversial Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative, and previously worked at a hedge fund.

Sanders voted for Obamacare, but believes it has not gone far enough to provide adequate care for all.

“Deductibles remain much too high for people,” Sanders explained on the MSNBC program Morning Joe. “The question we have to ask is, why are we paying almost three times more per capita than the folks in the UK, 50 percent more than the French, and they guarantee health care to all of their people?”

Sanders proposes Medicare for all, which he says will save taxpayers about $500 billion per year including the initial costs of transitioning from Obamacare.

He also wants to tackle pharmaceutical companies who have been accused by doctors of letting patients die for the sake of profit and donated more money to Clinton’s campaign than any other candidate from either party.

READ MORE:

Bernie gains double-digit lead on Hillary in New Hampshire – poll

Clinton Conflicts: Bill cashes in on Hillary’s diplomacy

January 13, 2016 Posted by | Corruption, Economics | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Turkey blockades Syrian Kurdish areas surrounded by ISIS

RT – January 13, 2016

Turkey has established a strict blockade of the Kurdish regions in Syria surrounded by Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), depriving Syrian Kurds of essential supplies and shooting people trying to enter Turkey from Syria, RT’s Murad Gazdiev reports.

The Turkish border with the Kurdish territories in the northern Syria, which stretches for 750 kilometers, has been fitted with two layers of barbed wire, a huge minefield, and sniper towers at regular intervals. It has only two border crossings that are closed most of the time.

“They [Turks] do not let anything across: neither food, nor humanitarian aid, nor medicine. They only let returning refugees cross,” Hadir Mustafa, the head of one of the border crossings on the Syrian side, told RT.

“The Turkish soldiers do not cooperate, they are aggressive and hostile. They push, hit people and tell them to never come back,” he added.

Murad Gazdiev reported from the border that Turkish border guards had refused to let an ambulance cross the border that was transporting a man critically injured in a terrorist act in a nearby Syrian Kurdish town, saying they needed to receive permission from Turkish provincial authorities first.

Apart from maintaining the blockade, Turkish snipers on towers also target civilians on the Syrian side. They recently shot and killed a Kurdish schoolboy, who was trying to cross the border in order to find work in Turkey.

“The Turks shot him 70 meters from the border, on the Syrian side. I saw the place myself,” the boy’s father told RT.

On Sunday, a 16-year-old girl was also shot dead as she was trying to get to Turkey from Kurdish territories in Syria, while others from her group were injured and had to be treated for gunshot wounds.

The Turkish blockade of Syrian Kurdistan is “total,” Gazdiev reports citing the locals.

“The large part of what we grow here we throw away because we can’t sell it outside,” a Kurdish fruit and vegetable seller named Beze told RT, adding that it is easier to smuggle goods through IS-controlled territories than to transport them through the Turkish border.

“Things that do not grow here also have to be smuggled in. By the time they get here they cost ten times as much,” Beze added.

At the same time, the Turkish border with jihadist-controlled territories in Syria remains open. Weapons, fighters and goods flow freely through checkpoints manned by Islamic militants.

January 13, 2016 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , | 1 Comment

‘Trump is blaming Bill Clinton for 9/11, that’s partly true, the full truth is that bin Laden was a US asset’

Press TV – January 13, 2016

American scholar Dr. Kevin Barrett says the full truth about the 9/11 Zionist coup d’état in the United States is probably too politically explosive for Donald Trump to ever tell since it would destabilize the US political system.

Dr. Barrett, a founding member of the Scientific Panel for the Investigation of 9/11, told Press TV on Wednesday that if the Republican presidential front-runner did that he would be immediately shut down and taken out physically or attacked quite brutally in the media.

The author of Questioning the War on Terror made the remarks when asked to comment on Trump’s recent statement in which he blamed former US President Bill Clinton for the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The New York billionaire said Clinton could have prevented the death of thousands of American people had he authorized Osama bin Laden’s assassination.

“Donald Trump started a big controversy in the Republican Party when he blamed George W. Bush for 9/11 – quite correctly. He didn’t go so far as to point out that the Bush administration itself was actually complicit in the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which it was, but he implied that perhaps Bush allowed 9/11 to happen through incompetence,” Dr. Barrett said.

“Now he is blaming Bill Clinton for 9/11, and that’s partly true too. Of course, Trump is basically seeking political gains from these remarks. I don’t think that Donald trump is a truth teller by any means, but he is letting a little bit of truth to seep out as he seeks political gains,” he added.

“He did gain enormously by blaming Bush for 9/11. He essentially destroyed the candidacy of Bush’s brother, Jeb. And now he is doing what many Republicans and Conservatives have been telling him to do which is shift the blame toward Clinton. And that’s not entirely wrong.”

CIA had 10 opportunities to capture or kill bin Laden

Dr. Barrett said, “We do know that according to Michel Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA’s ‘Get bin Laden Unit’, that Scheuer and his unit had ten opportunities to capture or kill bin Laden during the run-up to 9/11, and every single one of them was nixed by higher-ups. So clearly bin Laden was a protected asset of the United States, or whoever is really in charge of the United States, from 1996 to 1999, when Scheuer was the head of that unit.”

“We also have a number of other indications suggesting that bin Laden was under protection not only during the Clinton administration but also during the early days of the Bush administration prior to 9/11, and perhaps even thereafter,” he stated.

Bin Laden was treated in American Hospital in Dubai

Dr. Barrett said that” bin Laden met with the CIA station chief when bin Laden was being treated in the American Hospital in Dubai in July 2001. He was treated there by Dr. Terry Callaway, an American kidney specialist. And of course bin Laden had fatal kidney disease.”

“He was apparently such a valuable asset that the CIA – the real CIA, not the division that Scheuer headed, because they apparently were not in the loop – was keeping bin Laden alive and protecting him for a reason, and that reason became clear on the night of 9/11 itself when bin Laden was under treatment once again for his fatal kidney disease in the military hospital in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, under the watchful eyes of the Pakistan military and intelligence people who themselves were very closely linked to American military intelligence,” he noted.

“So the upshot here is that Donald Trump is getting at little bits and pieces of truth, but the full truth probably is too politically explosive for Donald Trump to ever tell – not that it would help him politically to tell it, because he would be immediately shut down and taken out—whether physically, by being killed, which certainly could happen, or by being attacked quite brutally in the media.”

Full truth about 9/11

The American analyst said, “The full truth is that bin Laden was a US asset, an undeniable American asset, since the days he was recruited by the CIA and the Saudi leadership to fight the Russians in Afghanistan, and he continued to play that role right up until his death in 2001.”

“He almost certainly died in December 2001, but the American neoconservative faction that engineered the 9/11 Zionist coup d’état in America needed bin Laden to play the role of a pasty, the big bad wolf, the villain with which they were trying to scare the American people into submission to their plans for perpetual war for Israel and the shredding of their constitutional rights,” he argued.

“So they kept bin Laden, blew him up into a myth, and the myth of Osama bin Laden lived on. We have also these stories about how Obama finally killed him and threw him in the ocean according to Islamic custom, the story which had been completely proven ridiculous and false by none other than Seymour Hersh among others,” he stated.

“I don’t know that Donald Trump even would consider telling this full horrible truth, but it would be nice if somebody would, because the American people are being taken for a ride – we’re losing our rights, we’re losing our economy, and we’re dragged into this endless cycle of wars to destroy Middle Eastern countries for the benefit of Israel,” the scholar concluded.

January 13, 2016 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Wars for Israel | , , , , | 1 Comment

Venezuela’s Upcoming Double-Confrontation

By Gregory Wilpert | teleSUR | January 13, 2016

Venezuela is heading for two confrontations, each reinforcing the other – a political and an economic one. The future is very uncertain.

Following the Venezuelan opposition’s recent electoral victory in the Dec. 6 parliamentary elections, the opposition seems to be more determined than ever to steer towards an outright confrontation with the president. The goal is to destabilize the government as much as possible, with the aim of achieving his ouster before the end of the year.

The new National Assembly president said that his aim is to have a plan in place for president Maduro’s ouster within the first six months of 2016. Ramos Allup furthered this confrontation Jan. 6, when he swore in three opposition members as representatives, whose election the Supreme Court had previously put on hold due to electoral irregularities. On Monday, January 11, the Supreme Court thus declared that the National Assembly president had acted in defiance of the Court and that from now on all laws that the National Assembly passes are null and void, since the assembly had incorporated members into its body that should not be there.

The political confrontation between the legislature and the executive is thus programmed. The next conflict will be about the amnesty law, by which the opposition intends to free all so-called political prisoners, that is, all opposition figures who have been involved in violent protest of one kind or another, many of whom have been held responsible for deaths of innocent bystanders. Ramos Allup already warned Maduro that if he and the Supreme Court do not implement the amnesty law, he will begin removing ministers from Maduro’s cabinet: “Whether or not he accepts [the amnesty law] will not matter, to which we will say, ‘We do not accept his naming of ministers.’”

The options for the new opposition-dominated National Assembly to get rid of Maduro are several. As mentioned above, it can remove not only the ministers and the vice-president (though this could lead to new National Assembly elections if the vice president is removed three times in a row), remove the heads of other branches of government, such as the Supreme Court, the attorney general, or the National Electoral Council (with prior approval from either the Supreme Court or the attorney general), amend or reform the constitution (which then has to be submitted to a referendum), or call for a constitutional assembly (followed by a referendum).

Also, there is a lot of speculation that the opposition might try to organize a recall referendum against Maduro, but doing so would require the collection of 20 percent of registered voters’ signatures, which amounts over 3.8 million signatures. This latter course is a difficult undertaking. In comparison, when the opposition organized the recall referendum against president Chávez in 2004, it had to collect only 2.5 million signatures because the electorate was substantially smaller.

Aside from the project to remove Maduro and to give amnesty to its law-breaking supporters, the oppositional National Assembly also plans to introduce a number of laws that could undermine the Maduro presidency. A populist measure that the opposition has wanted to pass for a long time is to give ownership titles to the beneficiaries of the housing mission. Over the past five years the government has constructed one million public homes, which it has essentially leased to families in perpetuity, but without giving them a title that can be bought and sold. The reasoning behind this is to avoid the development of a speculative housing market of homes built with public funds. The opposition is betting that most public housing beneficiaries would prefer a saleable ownership title, so that they can sell the home and thereby possibly make a profit from it.

Another law that would probably get the president into trouble is a rumored project to dollarize the economy. It is obvious to everyone in Venezuela that the current economic situation of high inflation, frequent shortages of basic goods, long lines at supermarkets, and a massive black market for price-controlled products, is not sustainable. One “solution” to these problems that some opposition leaders have favored it to simply get rid of the local currency, the bolivar, and base the entire economy on dollars, just as Ecuador did in 2001. Aside from undermining the country’s economic sovereignty, such a move would also almost definitely mean major painful displacements for economy, leading to increased inequality and unemployment. No doubt the opposition would then try to blame Maduro for this, but it is possible of course that they themselves would end up carrying a large part of the blame, which is why the opposition will enter into this project neither unambiguously nor unanimously.

Other major projects on the opposition docket include the repeal of a wide variety of progressive laws that were passed during the Chavez and Maduro presidencies, beginning with the land reform, re-privatization of key industries, and the dismantling of price controls, among other things.

Finally, the opposition has also announced that it will convoke special investigation commissions. Among these are commissions to investigate corruption within the executive and another to investigate the credentials of newly appointed Supreme Court judges. The investigation of the judges could lead to the removal of several of these because the Supreme Court law allows for the removal of judges who do not meet the fairly tough requirements for appointment.

On the Chavista side of the confrontation the options for maneuvering are even tougher. Here the foremost issue for the government is how to deal with the on-going economic crisis, which is bound to get worse especially since the price of oil is tumbling. While the price of an average Venezuelan barrel of oil reached a high of US$55 per barrel in early 2015, the most recent figures point to half that amount, at US$27 per barrel. Unless this price recovers, this could be devastating for Venezuela, especially since 95 percent of the country’s export earnings and 50 percent of its fiscal budget come from the sale of oil.

The 50 percent collapse in the price of oil over the past eight months, however, means a far larger collapse in revenues because a large proportion of Venezuela’s oil is extra-heavy oil that is expensive to extract, reaching a high of around US$20-$25 per barrel, leaving relatively little to no profit at such low prices. In other words, a 50 percent drop in the price of oil represents a far larger than 50 percent drop in revenues for the state.

Maduro recently named a new cabinet, reshuffling many positions, but in the key position of vice president for the economic area, Luis Salas, Maduro appointed someone considered to be a proponent of the same policies as before, who says that price controls and the currency control must be maintained and that the government’s main weakness has been in the area of enforcement of existing policies. In other words, even though the country is now waiting for the announcement of a promised “economic emergency plan,” it seems doubtful that this plan will signal a significant departure from the economic policies so far.

The drop in revenues, combined with an inflationary spiral that the economic war of smuggling, hoarding, and speculation and that the black market for dollars have inflicted on Venezuela, signal a very difficult near-term future for Venezuela’s economy and everyone in it. Some economists warn of possible hyperinflation and of an inability to pay its foreign bills (balance of payments crisis).

In short, Venezuela is heading towards two confrontations simultaneously, where each threatens to exacerbate the other: one economic and the other political. What the prospects are for overcoming these confrontations is impossible to predict at this moment. Within the chavistasocial movements and the governing party, the PSUV (United Socialist Party of Venezuela), more and more voices are calling on the government to organize a massive consultation process with the grassroots, which is something that Maduro has endorsed, but it remains an open question whether these will happen in time and if it does, whether it will be able to provide solutions that will allow the Bolivarian Revolution to move forwards, despite the reinvigorated opposition in parliament.

January 13, 2016 Posted by | Economics | , | Leave a comment

Eight Problems With Police “Threat Scores”

By Jay Stanley | ACLU | January 13, 2016

The Washington Post Monday had a piece about the use of “threat scores” by law enforcement in Fresno, California. This story follows release of information about this predictive-policing program obtained through an open-records request by my colleagues at the ACLU of Northern California.

The scores are generated by software called “Beware,” made by a company called Intrado. According to a promotional pamphlet obtained by the NorCal ACLU, the software’s purpose is “searching, sorting and scoring billions of commercial records” about individuals. It scours the internet for social media posts and web site hits and combines it with other information such as public records and “key data elements from commercial providers.” Intrado claims that its product is “based on significant amounts of historical work in mathematical science, decisioning science and link analysis,” and “uses a comprehensive set of patent-pending algorithms that search, sort and score vast amounts of commercial records from the largest and most reputable data mining companies in the industry.”

Intrado boasts that its software can target an address, a person, a caller, or a vehicle. If there’s a disturbance in your neighborhood and you have to call 911, the company would have the police use a product called “Beware Caller” to “create an information brief” about you. Police can also target an area: a product called “Beware Nearby” “searches, sorts and scores potential threats within a specified proximity of a specific location in order to create an information profile about surrounding addresses.” So the police may be generating a score on you under this system not only if you call the police but if one of your neighbors calls the police.

The prospect of a democratic government making unregulated, data-driven judgments about its own citizens outside the protections of the justice system raises some fundamental and profound questions about the relationship between the individual and the state. Citizens in a democratic society need to be able to monitor their government, and make judgments about how it is performing. Is it healthy for the government to begin to do the same to its citizens? At what point does that begin to resemble China’s incipient “citizen scoring” system, which threatens to draw on social media postings and include “political compliance” in its credit-score-like measurements?

The governmental scoring of citizens is an imperative we have seen before, not just in the context of policing—for example in Chicago’s “Heat List”— but in other security contexts as well. The TSA, for example, pushed hard under President Bush for a program known as CAPPS II, under which the government would have tapped into commercial data sources to perform background checks on the 100 million Americans who fly each year, and build a profile of those individuals in order to determine their “risk” to airline safety. As with this Beware software, it was originally envisioned as giving a red, yellow, or green light to each subject. CAPPS II was highly controversial from the start, and after a battle that lasted approximately five years the government abandoned the concept (though it does threaten to come creeping back).

There are numerous problems with this or any system for generating “threat scores” on citizens:

  • Scoring Americans in secret. Like the TSA before it, Intrado says that its methods for generating risk assessments will be secret. This is a cutting-edge technology being used for a novel and highly sensitive purpose. Given the vast uncertainties that surround the making of automated predictive judgments about individuals, especially in a law enforcement context, public transparency is vital so that we as a society can begin to evaluate such approaches. We are a democracy after all, and the highly fraught value judgments about what if any uses of “big data” to make in policing must be made publicly.
  • Inaccurate data. We do know that the source data used for such judgments is likely to include many errors and inaccuracies. Anyone who has looked at their credit report knows how frequently those reports get basic facts wrong, confuse different individuals with similar names, etc. The contracts among commercial data brokers and their clients “include few provisions regarding the accuracy of their products,” the FTC has found. For private data companies, accuracy levels beyond a certain point are simply not worth the cost. But the FBI too felt compelled to exempt its primary criminal database from a legal requirement that the agency maintain its records with sufficient accuracy to “assure fairness to the individual” — and damage to people’s lives has been the predictable result. With the Beware software’s scoring formula kept secret, there will be little check against such errors.
  • Questionable effectiveness. Without public scrutiny, the public will not know what data sources are used to generate the scores, how reliable that source data is, how the different variables are weighed and interpreted, and how valid the assumptions behind the inclusion and relative weight of each variable are. Those are highly methodologically and sociologically complex questions, and robust, valid, broadly acceptable answers are unlikely to emerge from the corporate suite of a small company that sells software to police, no matter how much “mathematical science” it brings to the task. Even if the project of rating citizens were acceptable, it could never be done properly without the broad public and expert scrutiny that transparency to “a million eyeballs” brings. Another effectiveness problem comes from the limited ability of key word-based evaluation systems to understand human communications. Scary-sounding language used in private almost always consists of sarcasm, irony, hyperbole, jokey boasting, quotations of others, references to works of fiction, or other innocuous things. Despite many advances, computers are still far away from understanding human social life with enough sophistication to tease out such contexts.
  • Unfairness and bias. Without transparency a major question about secret risk scores is whether and to what extent they will have intentional or unintentional racial, ethnic, religious, or other biases, or whether they include elements that are just downright unfair (such as guilt-by-association credit ratings that penalize people for shopping at stores where other customers have bad credit). There is nothing magical about taking a lot of data and creating a score; the algorithm by which that is done will do no more than reflect its creators’ understanding of the world and how it works (at least if it is not based on machine learning—which I doubt this system is, and which in any case has other problems of its own). Ultimately the danger is that existing societal prejudices and biases will be institutionalized within algorithmic processes, which just hide, harden, and amplify the effects of those biases.
  • Potentially dangerous results. The consequences of inaccurate and biased data may be dangerous and even deadly if it leads police officers, many of whom are already far too prone to use force, to come into an encounter already frightened and predisposed to believe that a subject is dangerous. And officers who do use unnecessary force will inevitably cite the scores as evidence that their actions were subjectively reasonable.
  • An unjustified government intrusion. These risk assessments are being built out of two sources of data that we should not want our government to access: citizens’ social media conversations, and the dossiers that the data broker industry is compiling on virtually all Americans. While public social media postings, unlike private online conversations, are not protected by the Fourth Amendment, as a policy matter we do not want our law enforcement troweling through our online conversations. This would largely waste the time of the public officials we are paying to keep us safe, and create chilling effects on our raucous online discourse. We don’t want secret police in America, or their computerized equivalent, circulating among law abiding citizens as they exercise their constitutional rights—online or off—just to monitor what they are doing. We don’t want Americans to have to pause before they speak to ask, “will this be misinterpreted by a computer?” Nor should the authorities be buying information, directly or indirectly, from the privacy-invading data broker industry, which builds dossiers on virtually all Americans without their consent. While it does this for commercial reasons, the result is nonetheless comparable to what we’ve seen in totalitarian states. The questionable benefits of these invasions of privacy are not worth the chilling effects and danger of abuse they bring.
  • First Amendment questions. Other First Amendment problems stem from the fact that our law enforcement unfortunately has a long history of antagonism toward even peaceful political activists and protesters seeking to make the world a better place—a history that has continued right up to the present. This alone provides ample reason to worry that a ratings system will hurt and chill political activists. The problem is only confirmed by the inclusion (as my colleague Matt Cagle describes) of hashtags such as #Blacklivesmatter, #Mikebrown, #Weorganize, and #wewantjustice on a police social media monitoring list of key words touted as “extremely effective in pro-active policing.” A timid citizen considering tweeting about a political protest could be seriously chilled from expressing himself by the prospect that doing so might make him a “yellow light” in the eyes of the authorities.
  • Mission creep. If this system is sold, snuck, or forced into American policing, it will, once entrenched, inevitably expand. First, in the data that it draws upon as companies and agencies seek ever-more data in a futile quest to improve their inevitably crude assessments of individuals’ risk. Second, the purposes for which it is used may expand as police departments go beyond using them for individual police calls to other uses (force deployment decisions, perhaps, and who-knows-what-else). Risk assessments may be created not just on an individual basis for police calls, but on a wholesale basis for entire populations. And of course the scores may be shared with and adopted by other agencies for use in a wide variety of governmental purposes. They may also spread to the private sector—starting with corporate security forces, perhaps, which often work very closely with police and might use them for anti-union activities, the vetting of customers, or any other corporate goals. In general the danger is that these assessments, once brought into being, could come to reverberate through individuals’ lives in many ways.

Overall there is a lot more easily accessible data floating around about everybody in today’s society. How should the police make use of all that data? How much should be fed to officers in different situations, and in what form? The data revolution raises complex questions for policing that we as a society are going to have to work through—but any law enforcement use of big data needs to be approached carefully and thoughtfully, and hashed out publicly and democratically. That means total transparency. And the risk scoring of individuals should have no part in it.

January 13, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

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