Internationally acclaimed San Francisco speaker and architect Richard Gage, AIA, will tour 17 cities throughout Canada this March 13 to 31 to present the forensic, eyewitness and photographic evidence that three World Trade Center skyscrapers were destroyed by explosives on September 11, 2001.
Many people are not aware that WTC 7, a massive skyscraper adjacent to the Twin Towers, collapsed suddenly and symmetrically at free-fall acceleration late that afternoon. The official explanation is that “normal office fires” brought this building down, but thousands of architects and engineers disagree, as do 51% of Canadians.
During Gage’s tour, from Vancouver to Halifax, hosted by ReThink911 Canada, the 42% of Canadians who question the overall U.S. Government story of 9/11 will have a rare opportunity to understand first-hand the facts about the three sudden straight-down skyscraper collapses.
Richard Gage is an architect of 26 years and founder of the 18,000-member Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth which includes 2,100 A/E’s calling for new WTC investigation.
Tour Coincides With US Congressional Resolution To Release Classified Evidence of Saudi Government Involvement in the Attacks.
Local 9/11 activists and promoters are welcome to join in the tour. Contact us for details.
Occupied Palestine – Yesterday the Hares Boys, who are being charged with 20 counts of attempted murder with no evidence whatsoever, have been in an Israeli prison for one year. Now is more important than ever to fully understand the circumstances surrounding the unlawful arrest and imprisonment of Mohammad Suleiman, Ammar Souf, Mohammed Kleib, Tamer Souf, and Ali Shamlawi.
The car accident
At around 18:30 on Thursday 14 March 2013, a car crashed into the back of a truck on Road 5 in Salfit Governorate, occupied Palestine. The driver and her 3 daughters were injured, one of them – seriously. The driver, Adva Biton, was going back to the illegal Israeli settler colony of Yakir when the accident occurred. She later claimed the accident was due to Palestinian youth throwing stones at her car. The driver of the truck, having testified immediately after the accident that he had pulled over because of a flat tyre, later changed his mind and said he had seen stones by the road.
There were no witnesses to the car accident. Nobody had seen any children or youth throwing stones that day.
The arrests
In the early hours of Friday 15 March 2013, masked Israeli soldiers, some with attack dogs, stormed the village of Hares, which is close to Road 5. More than 50 soldiers broke the doors of the villagers’ houses, demanding the whereabouts of their teenage sons. Ten boys were arrested that night, blindfolded, handcuffed, and transferred to an unknown location. The families were not informed of their sons’ alleged wrongdoings.
Two days later, a second wave of violent arrests took place. At around 3 o’clock in the morning, the Israeli army, accompanied by the Shabak (the Israeli secret service), entered the homes of 3 Palestinian adolescents. They had a piece of paper with their names in Hebrew. After forcing all the family members into one room, taking away their phones so that they wouldn’t call for help, and interrogating them, the soldiers handcuffed their sons, all aged 16-17.
“Kiss and hug your mother goodbye,” a Shabak agent told one boy. “You may never see her again.”
A week later, Israeli army jeeps again entered the village and arrested several boys, who had just come back home from school. The soldiers lined all of them up, including a 6-year-old, and threatened at gunpoint their uncle who pleaded for the soldiers to at least release the youngest children. The army then randomly chose 3 boys, handcuffed them behind their backs, blindfolded them, and took them away. The families were not informed about either the allegations against their children, or their exact location.
In total, 19 boys from the neighbouring villages of Hares and Kifl Hares were arrested in relation to the settler car accident. None of them had previously had any history of stone-throwing. After violent interrogations, most of the minors were released, except for five, who remain in Megiddo, an Israeli adult prison.
These are the Hares Boys.
The interrogation
The arrested boys were subjected to a series of abuse and ill-treatment that accounts as torture. Upon detention, they were kept in solitary confinement for up to two weeks. One boy, since released, described his cell: a windowless hole 1m wide and 2m long; there was no mattress or blanket to sleep on; toilet facilities were dirty; the six lights were kept on continuously, leading to the boy losing track of the time of the day; the food made him feel ill. The boy was denied lawyer; he was interrogated violently three times during three days, and eventually released after found not guilty at the trial.
Other boys have also told their lawyers of very similar treatment. They “confessed” of stone-throwing after being repeatedly abused in prison and during interrogations.
The charges
The five boys from Hares are charged with 25 counts of attempted murder each, apparently 1 count for every alleged stone thrown at passing cars. The Israeli military prosecution insists that the boys consciously “intended to kill”; the boys can face the maximum punishment for attempted murder: 25 years to life imprisonment.
The prosecution’s case relies on the boys’ “confessions”, which have been obtained under torture, and 61 “witnesses,” some of which claim that their cars have been damaged by stones on that same day on Road 5. The latter only appeared after the car accident got a lot of media coverage as a “terrorist act”, and the Israeli prime minister Benyamin Natanyahu announced, after the boys’ arrest, that he “caught the terrorists that did it”. Other “witnesses” include the police and the Shabak, who were not even present at that location at the time. It is not clear whether the 61 “witnesses” have been properly questioned and their claims verified with, for example, hospital admission data, or even if the alleged damage to their vehicles has been photographed or otherwise documented. Such information is not even available to the boys’ attorneys.
The implications
If the boys are convicted, this case would set a legal precedent which would allow the Israeli military to convict any Palestinian child or youngster for attempted murder in cases of stone-throwing.
The boys are now 16-17 years old. If the Israeli military get their way, the boys would only return to their homes and their families at the age of 41 – at best. Five young lives ruined with no evidence of their guilt is a spit in the face to our common principles of justice as human beings.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS?
Almost every stage of this case that could go wrong, did. Local and international law has been mostly dismissed; principles of justice barely fading in the horizon; respect for human beings non-existent.
Consider this:
The Hares Boys, as well as thousands of other Palestinian youngsters, are treated in the Israeli military court system as adults. According to international human rights law in general, and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in particular, adults are people over 18 years of age. Israel treats even 9-year-olds as adults.
The racist system of “justice”: no matter the alleged crime, Palestinians are forced to go through the military courts and are tried under military law, while Israelis fall into the civil court system for the same crimes.
Violently arresting children at night without giving any explanation to their families about the reasons behind it, nor informing them about their children’s whereabouts goes against Israel’s own laws which state that minors are to be accompanied by an adult family member when detained or arrested.
The denial of lawyer for several days (in some cases weeks) after detention also accounts as a major violation of Israel’s own rules.
Children being put into solitary confinement for days on end is a form of torture; It is a severe punishment before the verdict.
Abusive interrogations of scared minors is considered torture.
The boys were arrested despite a total lack of evidence against them and condemned by the Israeli media as “terrorists”, which goes against the universal presumption of innocence (innocent until found guilty) and delivers a guilty verdict in the highly bombastic public trial, putting pressure on the judges to do likewise.
For more detailed accounts of the initial arrests and interrogations, please see IWPS Human Rights Reports from the ground:
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has treated mortgage fraud cases as a low priority, even though President Barack Obama promised to crack down on such crimes in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
DOJ also greatly exaggerated its success in prosecuting mortgage fraud, according to an investigation by the department’s Office of the Inspector General (IG).
Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. declared four years ago that mortgage fraud crimes had “reached crisis proportions,” and promised his agency would be “fighting back” in response.
But the IG’s report (pdf) shows the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) put mortgage fraud at the bottom of its criminal priority list—after receiving extra funding ($196 million from the 2009 to 2011) to address this problem. In some major cities, mortgage fraud wasn’t even on the FBI’s radar as any kind of a priority.
“Despite receiving significant additional funding from Congress to pursue mortgage fraud cases, the FBI in adding new staff did not always use these new positions to exclusively investigate mortgage fraud,” the report states.
A “significant backlog of unaddressed and pending mortgage fraud investigations” was disclosed by supervisors interviewed by IG investigators. In fact, important fraud cases were completely shut down by the FBI, not due to a lack of resources, but because the Bureau’s resources were diverted to other operations that were given higher priority, according to the report.
Just as disturbing was the fact that Justice inflated its numbers to make it appear prosecutors were doing more than they actually were.
In 2012, Holder announced his lawyers had charged 530 people during the previous year with mortgage fraud that had cost homeowners more than $1 billion.
In truth, the numbers were more like 107 people charged in cases totaling only $95 million, the IG found. Even after the figures were proven to be incorrect, the DOJ continued to cite the false statistics for nearly a year.
“The inspector general’s report sheds light on what looks like an attempt by the Justice Department to pull the wool over the public’s eyes with respect to its efforts to go after the wrongdoers involved in mortgage fraud,” Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “According to the inspector general, the department wasted time cooking the numbers about the cases it pursued, when it should have been prosecuting cases.”
The IG offered numerous recommendations to the department, most of which involved fixes to DOJ’s recordkeeping system that had produced such inaccurate figures.
The Justice Department objected to the IG’s conclusions, citing prosecutors doubling the number of mortgage fraud indictments from 2009 to 2011.
“The facts regarding the department’s work on mortgage fraud tell a much different story than this report,” Ellen Canale, a department spokeswoman, told The New York Times. “As the report itself notes, even at a time of constrained budget resources, the department has dedicated significant manpower and funding to combating mortgage fraud.”
Mortgage fraud—through falsification of documents by lenders and brokers—was one of the catalysts of the 2008 financial collapse. Fraud involving mortgage-backed securities, said to be larger in scope and also a contributing factor to the collapse, is considered by the FBI to be securities fraud and was not addressed by the IG report.
Though One Plausible Scenario, Consistent with Known Facts, Might Explain Mystery
By Doug E. Steil | Aletho News | March 17, 2014
Even though, the recent disappearance of Malaysian Flight MH370 continues to be a mystery, numerous scenarios that have been circulating in the past week can essentially be discounted, in particular technical failure.
The on-board hijacker scenario that media came up with over the weekend is highly implausible for at least five reasons because a putative hijacker would have to have (a) swiftly incapacitated the pilots without forewarning, so as to prevent the triggering of a hijack alert, (b) at exactly the correct and narrow time window, of approximately two minutes, after the co-pilot’s last voice sign-off but before entering Vietnamese air space, (c) known precisely how to fly and (d) disable the communications systems, and (e) surviving heights above the aircraft’s suggested operating limit as well as rapid descents of 40,000 feet per minute, equivalent a vertical speed of 444 knots per hour.
It has already been shown and asserted years ago, in the context of the government “Home Run” program, that an airplane can be commandeered from afar, intended back then to “counteract hijacking” situations. Last year at a hacker conference in Amsterdam, it was demonstrated, as a proof of concept, that an outside intruder could also manipulate the cockpit data visible to the pilot and take control of multiple functions and insert a flight path, essentially flying the simulated aircraft by remote control. This is something that has recently been acknowledged, as a possibility, but the media prefer not to dwell on this aspect, for obvious reasons. By contrast, staging a tacit vilification campaign by simply blaming one of the experienced pilots for the aircraft’s elusive behavior, due to some previously unexpected suicidal bent or spur of the moment inclination (which entails committing mass murder), though highly unlikely, is easier to suggest because it cannot be technically dis-proven and diverts attention away from a more plausible scenario, namely that of a “false flag” operation that was aborted.
Repeatedly we have been bombarded by the high-pitched and vociferous demands by Israeli politicians pertaining to the ongoing high-level negotiations with Iran regarding its nuclear program, directed at European and US political leaders, to take on an uncompromising stance and keep up the pressure. The main points the Zionist propagandists make on this topic are:
* Iran must not be allowed to enrich uranium and has to dismantle its reactors;
* Uranium enriched to 20% is just a few steps away from making a nuclear bomb;
* Iran has an aggressive weapons program, and its missiles threaten Israel;
* Iran is a major sponsor of international terrorism in Gaza, Syria, and elsewhere;
* Iran is a threat to the Arab world in the Gulf, as well as other Muslim countries;
* The new leader’s “charm offensive” is dishonest and deceptive; don’t be fooled!
However, these ongoing messages have tended to fall on deaf ears. Israeli prime minister Netanyahu is widely seen as both semi-comical and fanatical, the proverbial boy who cried “wolf” too often and discredited himself. What better method, then, to reinforce these anti-Iranian propaganda points more compellingly and convince the leaders of the western world to fall in line with the Israeli agenda, than to stage another spectacular “false flag” event, amplified in its effects by a scripted media follow-up campaign?
In light of the evidence surrounding the Malaysian Flight MH370, it now appears that exactly such an event almost occurred a week ago, but was apparently aborted at the last moment. Using the now ingrained imagery of jets flying into the World Trade towers more than a dozen years ago as an example, an attack on the Petronas twin towers in Kuala Lumpur would provide the requisite symbolic significance. Occurring in the middle of the night, when most people wouldn’t be able to witness it live, such an attack wouldn’t have required a dual attack, featuring two aircraft, or even for at least one the towers to ultimately collapse through timed explosions of thermite, in order to have been effective in achieving the primary goal. It would have been sufficient for the Malaysian airliner to have been guided to hit the spire near the top of one of the towers and temporarily create a huge fireball of kerosene, lighting up the sky and captured on a few closed circuit cameras, and played back endlessly afterwards.
The key ingredient this time would have been some uranium-235 (enriched to 20%) on board, ideally stolen from assassinated nuclear scientists working in the Iranian nuclear research program (so as to be authentic), then placed in the luggage of two young Iranians (surely also “shy with women”) traveling together on one-way tickets along a circuitous route to Europe, using stolen passports to board the flight. In the aftermath of the attack the media would quickly have elevated them to the status of probable hijackers, who had somehow managed to commandeer the plane. By virtue of their having used stolen passports, it would be evident that they had made contact to the underworld of international criminals and terrorists, who must have somehow prepared them to carry out a mission to deliver a “dirty bomb”.
Even with the Petronas Towers remaining intact after an aircraft attack, the radioactivity from the enriched uranium would have been highly disruptive to the economy of Malaysia. The world would have seen how damaging and crippling a few kilograms of enriched uranium could be if it came into the “wrong hands”, and therefore Iran, which the media will have convinced the public was undoubtedly responsible — and was purportedly also responsible for the bombing of PanAm 103 — must not be allowed to maintain a nuclear program. If two experienced and outgoing pilots in good standing can be vilified and denigrated in just a few days, just image how easily these two Iranian kids and their alleged handlers behind the scenes would have been transformed into mass murderers. The supporting narrative would have been far different from what was announced this week.
The point where the masterminds of this “false flag” operation had to decide whether to proceed with, or abort, the attack was as the remote controlled Flight MH370 approached the island of Penang in the Strait of Malacca. For whatever reason the operators decided to call off the operation. Perhaps not all the technical aspects of such an endeavor were confirmed to be in place for the complex operation to withstand scrutiny.
Aborting a planned mission like this, assuming the radioactive material on board, necessitated getting rid of the aircraft, during the middle of a weekend night with no moon, in a very remote location, deep underneath the southern Indian Ocean, where it may not be found for years and subsequent recovery would ultimately be extremely difficult. Once the westbound jet had safely circumvented Indonesian air space near the northwestern tip of Sumatra it could fly south and needed only evade airport ground radar at the atolls of Diego Garcia and the Cocos Islands by flying at a lower altitude above the length of the underwater East Indian Ridge, in some areas of which the depth exceeds 6,000 meters, where the nearest inhabited island is Île Amsterdam.
Since this particular “false flag” operation was apparently abandoned, will the perpetrators be brazen enough to attempt a different one in the near future?
On April 4, 2010 – Malaysia’s internationally known politician, Anwar Ibrahim (born 1947), country’s former Deputy Prime Minister (1993-98) and Finance Minister (1991-98) and currently the Opposition leader – claimed that Israeli intelligence agents (Mossad) have infiltrated into Malaysia’s Bukit Aman (Federal Police headquarter in Kuala Lumpur). The espionage link to Israel is the company named Asiasoft Global Pte Ltd. (Singapore), which has worked as a sub-contractor to upgrade the telecommunication systems for the police. Two of the directors of the firm, Izhak David Nakar and Ido Schechter, are reportedly Israeli citizens.
However, this is not the first time the ‘Israeli connection’ has been raised. In 2008, the Malaysian Home Minister told Parliament: “Then between November and December, a police report was lodged by the responsible police officers and investigated by one ASP Sairah. Then Sairah was transferred to Taiping and there was no news after that,”reported The Malaysian Insider.
How reliable is Anwar Ibrahim? Well, he is known for his good connections with the Jewish Lobby in the US through personal friendship and links to CIA-funded think tanks. In 2000, Malaysian politician Lim Kit Siang asked former prime minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad to declare the outcome of a three year police investigation into whether Anwar Ibrahim was a CIA operative. Anwar Ibrahim had been a good friend of the former US Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton administration, William S. Cohen (1997-2001), son of a Russian Jewish immigrant Reuben Cohen.
No other Malaysian politician has forged such a relationship with individuals of the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, the former US Under Secretary of Defence and ex- President of the World Bank, who fervently believes that Israeli military dominance and power in the Middle East serves US interests. One of the principal advocates of the invasion and occupation of Iraq in furtherance of Israeli goals in the region, Wolfowitz was described by Anwar Ibrahim as his “great friend,” a person in whom he has “faith,” in a speech in the US on 19 June 2006.
It seems that now, Anwar Ibrahim may be trying to turn the tables on his old Zionist friends after being betrayed by Washington-based Zionist PR firm apco Worldwide, whose several directors are not only former Israeli high officials such as Shimon Shein, former Tel Aviv ambassador in Bonn, Itamar Rabinovich and former Tel Aviv ambassador in Washington. Its CEO in Israel Gad Ben-Ari was a personal adviser to former PM Rabin.
Speaking at the 2003 Organization of Islamic Countries summit meeting in Malaysia in October 2003 – Malaysian prime minister Muhathir Mohamad, while urging Muslim youth to abandon suicide attacks and apply their faith to strive in science and technology – blamed Israel and its western allies for creating most of world’s crises and wars.
Malaysia is a multicultural, multiracial and multi-religion society ruled by a secular democratic government in which Muslims make a slight majority (60%). This makes easy for the Judeo-Christian foreign agents to incite communal clashes in Malaysia. Malaysia doesn’t recognize Israel. Israeli professor Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi in his book, The Israeli Connection, wrote about Zionists’ hatred toward the Muslim world and their support for anti-Muslim insurgencies and covert military and intelligence operations to destabilize Muslim countries especially those which don’t recognize the European Jewish occupation of Palestine. The book documents Tel Aviv’s involvement in the Iran-Contra fiasco, French genocide of Algerian Muslims, aiding Idi Amin and Ferdinand Marcos against Moro Muslim resistance, as well as collaboration with Chinese and Burmese genocide of Muslims in those countries. Currently the Israeli Mossad is very active in India where it carried out the 2008 Mumbai terrorist false-flag operation; in Afghanistan, in Lebanon, in Pakistan, in Indonesia, in Pakistan, in Iran, in Nigeria, in Somalia, in Malaysia and many other Muslim countries.
William Black is an associate professor of economics and law at UMKC. He has held many prestigious positions, including executive director for Fraud Prevention. He recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for OFHEO in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae’s former senior management. He is a criminologist and former financial regulator.
“Formula For Fraud” with William K. Black from the first Italian economic Summit on Modern Money Theory in Rimini, Italy. How to become a billionaire – the four necessary ingredients in the recipe for fraud; the three sure consequences of banking control fraud; gutting of the underwriting process; Gresham’s Law; The Business Roundtable; hyperinflation of a bubble. – link
“The Greatest Bank Robbery Ever” with William K. Black. Banks, intensifying financial crises; money manager capitalism; sovereign currency; crony capitalism; theoclassical economists; control fraud, Commodities Future Modernization Act of 2000; S&L Liars’ Loan Crisis of 1990-91; Reinventing Government Movement; deregulation, desupervision and defacto decriminalization; fraud incentives; looting; subprime; Enron; Parmalat; BofA; Citigroup; Ameriquest; Washington Mutual; systemically dangerous institutions; Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB); faux stress tests; European austerity crisis; Mario Draghi, President of the ECB. – link
Today’s report from the New York Times trashes the government for “combative tactics” and “cracking down” on protesters, but if you watch the accompanying video, all you see are protesters attacking police, and the police – without venturing forward, defending themselves with water cannon and tear gas.
One can criticize the decision of the government to block the march from going to hostile territory, but given the continuous presence of violent elements among the protestors, and that Venezuela is a country with a very high homicide rate and many armed civilians, it could have been the prudent thing to do. The government also believes, with some justification, that these protests seek to provoke violence in order to de-legitimize the government. Their stated goal is to overthrow the democratically elected government, and given that the vast majority of the country is against the protests, this really is their only chance of getting anywhere. And the government also knows that the media (both national private and international) will generally blame them for any violence.
In the United States, and especially here in Washington DC, you have to get a permit for marches like this, and they are often denied or re-routed; and if you try to defy this the police will generally beat you and throw you in jail. And these are actually peaceful protests here.
As for the violence so far associated with the protests since they started on February 12, the statistics show that more people have died at the hands of protesters than security forces:
— 3 appear to be protesters allegedly killed by security forces; 1 other was killed by security forces but it’s not clear if he was a protester.
— 3 appear to be protesters allegedly killed by civilians (the opposition always alleges that these civilians are somehow taking orders from the government, but there has not been any evidence linking the government to any killings by armed civilians; and in a country where there are on average more than 65 homicides per day, it is most likely that these armed civilians are acting on their own).
— 11 civilians appear to have died at the hands of protestors: three of them shot, and the rest killed by various barricades or other obstructions (e.g. motorcyclist beheaded by wire allegedly strung by protesters).
— 3 national guard appear to have been killed by protesters
— 1 pro-government activist appears to have been killed by security forces
— 6 have died in circumstances that are too unclear to determine if they were really related to protests, but they are often included in press reports.
At least 14 security officers have been arrested and remain in jail for alleged violence against protesters, including the incidents described above.
Senator Dianne Feinstein’s blistering attack on the CIA’s conduct in searching the computers used by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was deemed a remarkable salvo. The search was engendered by the Committee’s official request for a final version of the named “Internal Panetta Review”. The Review had been created for internal use by the CIA as a record of assessing what documents should be turned over to the Committee in connection with its investigation of the torture program. Once the CIA got wind that their precious internal documentation was finding its way into the hands of the committee, the hackers got itchy.
Senator Feinstein herself charged the CIA with violating the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and Executive Order 12333. This raises the first problem. The CFAA is a legislative creation that exempts authorised law enforcement and intelligence activities. Legal commentary from former Chief Counsel for the House Permanent Select Committee for Intelligence, Chris Donesa at Lawfare (March 12) puts the question as whether “the CIA’s investigation and search was in fact ‘lawfully authorised’ or merely a pretext for deliberate efforts to obstruct or interfere with the SSCI investigation.”
The point is valid – after all, the CIA may well have been doing what it is empowered to do – snoop, hack and conduct “counter” intelligence activities, even against a Congressional committee. A gray area exists in the CFAA as to the rights of access set by the owner and operator of the necessary computers. The Washington political establishment have only themselves to blame if that was the case. The demon is merely consuming its creators.
One thing Donesa is willing concede is that the agreement and understanding between the CIA and the SSCI was significant in its violation. In so doing, it has raised questions touching on the separation of powers “and, more importantly, the budget and authorities of any Agency that dares to breach it.” He is concerned, in fact, that the SSCI was also rather cheeky, scurrying off with documents at points befitting the CIA’s own conduct. A subpoena might have been sought, but was conspicuously lacking. Feinstein herself alluded to such behaviour, largely because the CIA had shown form in destroying evidence, notably videotapes.
There have been occasional remarks that the CIA would have been justified in chasing down the source of leaks in the event that a confidential document had found its way into “unauthorised” channels. Sometime in 2010, Feinstein claims that SSCI staff accessed documents connected with the Panetta Review. Feverish speculation is making its way around the intelligence traps as to whether that access was warranted, the result of intentional disclosure by the CIA, or an illicit revelation of a whistleblower.
Given the CIA’s well established reputation for gold medal incompetence, it might very well be that the agency enabled, quite unwittingly, the Committee access to the Review documents. The jury may well be out on that one for some time to come. In either case, be it the whistleblower thesis, or that of unwitting disclosure, the episode has brushed up, if not scraped, a good deal of constitutional gunk. James Madison would not so much be turning as standing up in his grave.
Not all have warmed to Feinstein’s agitated response. A split has developed in Senate ranks. Republicans are concerned, but many would prefer to await the findings of a full investigation into the matter. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was particularly concerned. “If what they’re saying is true about the CIA this is Richard Nixon stuff. This is dangerous to democracy. Heads should roll. People should go to jail, if it’s true.” Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) was less certain. “Right now we don’t know what the facts are” (NPR, March 11).
Neither Feinstein, nor the CIA, can claim much of a high ground in this debate. The SSCI was the subject of a hacking enterprise, a snooping venture that would have been appropriate for the Senator in other cases. In fact, the rationale employed by the CIA was the very one that she has been defending with almost manic determination. If classified documents find their way into certain hands (that is, the likes of Edward Snowden), revealing the extent of state abuse, the messenger is the one at fault.
Given Feinstein’s legislative efforts to shore up the surveillance state, and her inflexible stance in limiting reform to the intelligence community, this would have come as a rude, yet richly deserved rebuke. In Snowden’s own words on the episode, this involved “an elected official [who] does not care at all that the rights of millions of ordinary citizens are violated by our spies” only to be scandalized “when a politician finds out the same thing happens to them.”
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne and can be reached at: bkampmark@gmail.com.
Wherever I heard that hackneyed phrase, “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging,” it applies more today than anytime I can remember. What I don’t understand is, when our government has spent billions on bank bailouts (not a good idea) on bailing out the stupidity of the automobile executives (a better idea because it saves jobs for working people), why are members of Congress and the drug and insurance lobbies feeding this fairy tale that we cannot afford single payer health care.
Virtually every industrialized country in the world has a health care system that is paid for by tax revenues, making sure that it is available to everyone. Even Syria, which is not a rich country, sends medical students to medical school, then requires them, upon graduation, to serve in a village clinic at a very low salary. Medical care is provided for every Syrian citizen, although there is a private medical system for those who want to pay.
Neither, we are told, can we afford a national passenger rail system that would do a great deal to decrease pollution, cut down on the use of oil, and that would move people to every part of our country, just like it’s done in Europe and in Japan.
But we can’t afford either of these common sense projects, even though we are digging our financial hole deeper and deeper with other projects that we should bring to a close.
Israel. We are still shoveling money out of the door of our national treasury giving Israel all the money they need to finance their brutal occupation of the Palestinians, plus giving them one of the highest living standards in the world. The last time I checked with the Library of Congress, Israel had drained our treasury (money from American taxpayers) to well over 100 billion dollars.
And what have we received in return? Well, I am currently reading Attack on the Liberty, written by James Scott, a journalist whose father was an ensign on board the Liberty when Israel tried to destroy the U.S. Navy ship during the 1967 Middle East War. Whenever I feel like having my blood boil, I pick up the book and read another chapter describing the deliberate attack on our ship, which killed over 30 American sailors and wounded another 170. As bad as the attack was, the continuing cover up both by Israel and the U.S. government is an ongoing outrage.
Add to that, the unknown number of Israeli spies who are burrowing into our government to learn our secrets. Jonathan Pollard, for example, was paid by Israel to unload what authorities have described as “a truckload of secret documents” to Israel’s agents in this country. The latest episode of Israeli spying is notable for the speed with which the U.S. Justice Department dismissed the charges against the two pro-Israeli spies, despite the finding of guilty and a 12 year sentence to the U.S. official–Larry Franklin–who handed over the documents to the spies.
Other things we can do without include the manned space program. The shuttle program, which costs American taxpayers several billion dollars a year, would look better viewing it from the rear view mirror. Several Nobel laureate scientists, as well as this writer, have advocated an unmanned program for space exploration instead of the much costlier manned program. First of all, the manned program cannot go as far into space as an unmanned program can, and secondly, it is vastly cheaper while being more rewarding. But it’s difficult to stop the bleeding of taxpayers’ money once it starts
We have the same trouble financing our NATO involvement. Now, NATO was designed during the Cold War to protect Europe from the nasty Soviets. Now that the Soviets are no longer around, who does NATO protect? Only the arms manufacturers who benefit from weapons sales both to the U.S. and to NATO members.
I don’t think a lot of explanation is needed for reasons to get the U.S. out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yes, I include Afghanistan in my exit strategy, mostly for the reason that we shouldn’t need the second kick of a mule to learn to stay away from the mule. We all witnessed the Soviets who were almost destroyed by their adventure in Afghanistan, and we should have learned that American troops are a natural target in places like that country. The only logical conclusion is to get our troops out of there, leaving it to the Taliban and the warlords and the Pakistanis to deal with that quagmire.
Although the pro-Israeli Zionists do not like to hear it, but a lot of our Middle East woes derive from the brutality of the continuing occupation of Palestine by the Israelis. What is unfortunate is that the American press spends its time and its talents trying to avoid discussing what Israel is doing in the Middle East.
I saw NBC’s David Gregory interviewing Bibi Netanyahu on Meet the Press. Discussing Iran, Netanyahu said that true democracies such as Israel would never commit violence against protesters. Gregory let that one go right past him, going on to the next puffball question to Bibi, which again he knocked over the fence. If I recall, it was another bit of hypocrisy meted out by the slick talking Prime Minister.
But that’s the state of our media today. There is 40 times the coverage of Michael Jackson’s heart attack than there was of the slaughter of 1,200 Gazans during Israel’s invasion last year. At times I feel sad about the death of America’s newspapers, but after seeing how they behave, and how they fail in their job of watching the government for the rest of us, maybe it’s for the best to let them all go under. They contribute little more than crossword puzzles and sports scores (which are for the betting public anyway).
We’ve reached the place in the hole we’re digging which might make us think about stopping.
James G. Abourezk is a lawyer practicing in South Dakota. He is a former United States senator and the author of two books, Advise and Dissent, and a co-author of Through Different Eyes. This article also runs in the current issue of Washington Report For Middle East Affairs. Abourezk can be reached atgeorgepatton45@gmail.com Source
A federal judge has told the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other federal offices to continue looking for records pertaining to the disappearance of four transport planes in 1980.
The case was brought before Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly by plaintiff Stephen Whitaker, who has attempted to obtain information about four DC-3 aircraft, one of which was flown by his father, Harold William Whitaker.
Stephen Whitaker filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the CIA, as well as the Department of Defense and the State Department, to learn if they possessed records that might explain what happened to the DC-3s.
The CIA refused to tell Whitaker if its archives held any relevant documents pertaining to his search. The agency cited various exemptions under federal law, including the CIA Act of 1949 (pdf), which allow it to avoid responding to certain FOIA inquiries.
Whitaker argued in his lawsuit that the CIA improperly invoked FOIA Exemption (b) (3) (pdf), which authorizes the agency to keep from revealing information on agency “functions” and “intelligence sources and methods.”
Kollar-Kotelly sided with Whitaker, ruling (pdf) that “the CIA has too broadly applied the CIA Act to withhold information pursuant to Exemption (b) (3).” However, she agreed with two other exemptions cited by the CIA that pertain to attorney-client privilege and the withholding of personnel and medical records.
The plaintiff’s search for information seems to be both personal and more.
He said the plane piloted by his father disappeared somewhere over Spain in October 1980. It had been purchased at auction from the Spanish Air Force and was being flown to Germany to become part of a museum.
A report from Spain’s Civil Aviation Commission on Accidents says the aircraft’s instruments may not have been fully functional, and that the radio may only have been capable of sending messages but not receiving them.
The report added that there was no record of a distress call from the pilot, or co-pilot Lawrence Eckmann, a major in the U.S. Army.
Stephen Whitaker also sought records from the government about Eckmann. The State Department claimed its search turned up nothing on Eckmann. The plaintiff challenged this assertion, and Kollar-Kotelly agreed that Eckmann had been excluded from the search, which was found to be “inadequate and should have been revised….”
The plaintiff seems to suspect that some of the DC-3s he has sought information on were used by the CIA in its covert operations.
His FOIA request to the spy agency asked for any information that would reveal whether “any of these persons or aircraft were later found to be employed or contracted by the CIA for service in Central America or elsewhere.”
The CIA has a long history of using DC-3s that ranges from the Vietnam War to the recent conflict in Libya that ousted the Gaddafi regime.
More documents have been uncovered (via FOI requests) that show local law enforcement agencies in California have been operating cell phone tower spoofers (stingray devices) in complete secrecy and wholly unregulated.
Sacramento News10 has obtained documents from agencies in San Jose, Oakland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento and Alameda County — all of which point to stingray deployment. As has been the case in the past, the devices are acquired with DHS grants and put into use without oversight or guidelines to ensure privacy protections. The stingrays in use are mainly limited to collecting data, but as the ACLU points out, many manufacturers offer devices that also capture content.
Some of these agencies have had these devices for several years now. Documents obtained from the Oakland Police Dept. show the agency has had stingrays in use since at least 2007, citing 21 “stingray arrests” during that year. This is hardly a surprising development as the city has been pushing for a total surveillance network for years now, something that (until very recently) seemed to be more slowed by contractor ineptitude than growing public outrage.
The device manufacturer’s (Harris) troubling non-disclosure agreement (which has been used to keep evidence of stingray usage out of court cases as well as has been deployed as an excuse for not securing warrants) rears its misshapen head again, mentioned both in one obtained document as well as by a spokesperson reached for comment. One document states:
“The Harris (REDACTED) equipment is proprietary and used for surveillance missions,” the agreement reads. “Its capabilities can only be discussed with sworn law enforcement officers, the military or federal government. This equipment’s capabilities are not for public knowledge and are protected under non-disclosure agreements as well as Title 18 USC 2512.”
The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Dept. had this to (not) say when asked about its stingray usage:
“While I am not familiar with what San Jose has said, my understanding is that the acquisition or use of this technology comes with a strict non-disclosure requirement,” said Under sheriff James Lewis in an emailed statement. “Therefore it would be inappropriate for us to comment about any agency that may be using the technology.”
Law enforcement agencies are conveniently choosing to believe a manufacturer’s non-disclosure agreement trumps public interest or even their own protection of citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights.
The devices aren’t cheap, either. Taxpayers are shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars for these cell tower spoofers, and the agencies acquiring them are doing very little to ensure the money is spent wisely. ACLU’s examination of the documents shows that many of the agencies purchased devices without soliciting bids.
It’s hard to know whether San José or any of the other agencies that have purchased stingray devices are getting good value for their money because the contract was “sole source,” in other words, not put out to competitive bidding. The justification for skirting ordinary bidding processes is that Harris Corporation is the only manufacturer of this kind of device. (We are aware of othersurveillancevendors that manufacture these devices, though a separate Freedom of Information Request we submitted to the Federal Communications Commission suggests that, as of June 2013, the only company to have obtained an equipment authorization from the FCC for this kind of device is Harris.)
With Harris effectively locking the market down, buyers are pretty much ensured prices far higher than the market would bear if opened to competition. (Not that I’m advocating for a robust surveillance device marketplace, but if you’re going to spend taxpayers’ money on products to spy on them, the least you can do is try to get the best value for their money… ) Using federal grants also allows these departments to further avoid public scrutiny of the purchase and use by circumventing the normal acquisition process.
Beyond the obvious Fourth Amendment concerns looms the very real threat of mission creep. These agencies cite combating terrorism when applying for federal funds, but put the devices to use for ordinary law enforcement purposes. The documents cite stingray-related arrests, but since so little is known about the purchase, much less the deployment, there’s really no way to tell how much data and content totally unrelated to criminal investigations has been collected (and held) by these agencies.
The Pentagon’s current leadership and most on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees in Congress describe President Obama’s 2015 defense budget request as painfully austere, if not dangerously inadequate. The defense trade press is full of statements from generals, admirals and the other politicians from both political parties that there is not nearly enough money available to buy adequate amounts of new hardware, maintain current pay and benefits or provide even low amounts of training and equipment maintenance. As a result, they are looking for ways to relieve the Pentagon from its penury.
Scarcity of money is not their problem. Pentagon costs, taken together with other known national security expenses for 2015, will exceed $1 Trillion. How can that be? The trade press is full of statements about the Pentagon’s $495.6 billion budget and how low that is.
There is much more than $495.6 billion in the budget for the Pentagon, and there are piles of national security spending outside the Pentagon-all of it as elemental for national security as any new aircraft and ships and the morale and well-being of our troops.
The table below details what a careful observer will find in President Obama’s 2015 budget presentation materials. The amounts for the Pentagon are well above the advertised $495.6 billion, and there are several non-Pentagon accounts that are clearly relevant.
(The relevant data for 2014 is also presented for comparison, and the notations in the “Comments” column help explain the data. The table is also available on line here.)
The “base” budget purportedly contains all routine, peacetime expenses; however, DOD and Congress have loaded tens of billions of such “base” spending into the Overseas Contingency Operations fund for declared wartime expenses. See below.
DOD Base Budget (Mandatory)
5.7
6.2
DOD often does not count this “mandatory” spending in its budget presentations to the public; however, being for military retirement and other DOD-only spending, it is as much a part of the DOD budget as military pay and acquisition.
DOD Base Budget (Total)
501.7
501.8
“Total” spending is discretionary and mandatory combined.
Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO)
85.2
79.4
The $85.2 billion in 2014 contains at least $30 billion in “base” budget spending; read here and here. The $79.4 billion for 2015 is a “place holder” pending a decision on the actual amount to be requested, which may take months. The ultimate 2015 OCO request may be smaller, but that is not certain–given past behavior.
DOD Subtotal (Total)
586.9
581.2
DOE/Nuclear (Total)
18.6
19.4
For nuclear weapons activities.
“Defense-related activities” (Total)
8.2
36.0
This spending is usually just for international FBI activities, Selective Service, the National Defense Stockpile and other miscellaneous defense-related activities. For 2015 OMB added a $27.7 billion “Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative” that includes readiness and “wish list” DOD spending-the latter described here..
National Defense (Total)
613.6
636.6
This is the OMB budget function “National Defense” (also known as “050″) which is sometimes confused as Pentagon-only spending.
Military Retirement Costs Not Scored to DOD
35.8
37.8
This category shows funds paid by the Treasury for military retirement programs, minus interest and contributions from the DOD military personnel budget. The data for the amounts shown here are in functions 600, 900 and 950. As DOD-unique spending they should be displayed as part of the DOD budget, but they are not by either DOD or OMB.
DOD Retiree Health Care Fund Costs
1.1
0.1
Shown are nets costs to the Treasury for this DOD health care program. See functions 550 and 950. As DOD-unique spending, they should be displayed as part of the DOD budget, but they are not by either DOD or OMB.
Veterans Affairs (Total)
151.3
161.2
These costs are projected to increase to $238.1 billion in 2024 as the human costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to grow.
International Affairs (Total)
38.5
39.0
The amount for the International Affairs budget function (150) do not include its share of the yet to be determined request for OCO funding in this budget function for 2015.
Homeland Security (Total)
51.0
52.1
Includes Homeland Security spending in DHS for federal agencies not shown on this table (thereby excluding DOD, DOE, State and VA).
Note the various ways the Pentagon augments its own budget well above the $495.6 billion that is frequently cited by the people seeking more money.
* There is the additional “placeholder” amount for the wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere ($79.4 billion), which may or may not turn out to be smaller once the formal request for this spending is compiled and Congress is finished fiddling with it: adding huge amounts of non-war (or “base”) spending to this account by both DOD and Congress is routine.
* There is also the $6.2 billion in “mandatory” (or entitlement) spending the Pentagon’s complete budget must include for military retirement and other DOD-only programs.
* There is the Pentagon’s $26 billion dollar portion of the “Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative” (a slush fund if ever there were one) that OMB and Secretary of Defense Hagel have dreamed up–to the applause of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
* While some in the press have caught most of the above additions, they virtually never spot the additional money the Treasury pays out for additional military retirement ($37.8 billion in 2015) and DOD healthcare (just $100 million in 2015 but more in other years).
In all, the Pentagon’s budget for all of its own expenses in 2015 is not $495.6 billion, it is $645.1 billion, or $149.5 billion (30 percent) more. If one were to add the nuclear weapons’ costs borne by the Department of Energy, the amount would be $664.5 billion, or 34 percent more. (Don’t add the four score billions of dollars for intelligence and snooping; the budgets for CIA, NSA and all the rest are embedded in the DOD budget.)
Consider also the substantial costs that are properly outside of the Pentagon’s budget but that are central to US national security:
$52.1 billion in non-DOD spending in the Department of Homeland Security,
$161.2 billion for the human consequences of past and ongoing wars in the Department of Veterans Affairs, and
$39 billion for the activities of the Department of State and related agencies-for international security and the exercise of US power abroad.
With the addition of an equitable share of the interest on the national debt that is attributable to this spending, it all adds up to $1.0095 trillion. It is that amount, not $495.6 billion, that US taxpayers are being asked to pay out in 2015 for “defense,” defined generically. However, you will not find that number in the talking points of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary Hagel, or most Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. They are arguing that times are tough and if still more money can be found, it should go to these accounts.
There is another perspective to measure defense spending in 2015. We can compare just the amounts formally requested for the Pentagon (the “base” budget plus the “placeholder” amount for Overseas Contingency Operations) to what has been spent historically. By converting annual Pentagon spending to “constant” (inflation adjusted) dollars adjusted to their 2015 value, and by using the economy-wide GDP measure of inflation for doing so (not the Pentagon’s own hopelessly self-serving measure of inflation), we can compare the 2015 Pentagon budget to its post-World War Two history. See the figure below.
This graph tells us that the 2015 level of Pentagon spending would return us to the same overall level as 2005 when Donald Rumsfeld was secretary of defense and the DOD budget was generally considered flush with money and supporting substantial fighting in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Note also that this is a level of spending that matches the peak of the Ronald Reagan years that was thought by its advocates to be a US build up so massive it was intimidating the Soviet Union into collapse. The 2015 level is also an amount that significantly exceeds the peaks of the Korea and Vietnam wars-both of them higher intensity conflicts with hundreds of thousands more US troops deployed than are currently in Afghanistan.
To repeat, the problem is not scarcity of money. The problem is how it is being spent. We are getting very little defense–training, maintenance, hardware, and troops–for a gigantic amount of money. By virtue of how they characterize $1 trillion dollars as penury, our national security leaders in the Pentagon and Congress are clearly incapable of dealing with the problem.
Our equipment is outrageously expensive and yet too much of it is a step backwards in effectiveness. Since the mid-1990s Congress has bulldozed money into across-the-board pay raises, double pensions for many military retirees, significantly increased benefits for the survivors of World War Two veterans and much else that has much more to do with placating constituencies than addressing 21st century security problems. In addition, the Pentagon’s civilian and military leadership has bloated itself to historically unprecedented levels of overhead. Worse yet, none of them have even bothered to fundamentally understand the dimension of the problems because, under their tutelage, the Pentagon remains unaudited and un-auditable, which will remain the case even after it meets its decades overdue, and embarrassingly modest, financial management goals-which, by the way, it will do no time soon.
One more time: the problem is not scarcity of money.
Winslow T. Wheeler is the Director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Project on Government Oversight. He spent 31 years working for the Government Accountability Office and both Republican and Democratic Senators on national security issues.
Silver was medicine. Not alternative medicine. Not folk medicine. Medicine. In surgery. In obstetrics. In the burn ward. In water treatment. In the household medicine chest. Every physician before 1938 knew this.
By the 1870s, silver nitrate was standard in surgical wound care across the leading hospitals of Britain, Germany, and the United States. Colloidal silver preparations — Collargol, Argyrol, Protargol — entered European and American practice through the 1890s and early 1900s and became standard antiseptics in military field medicine. By the time Fleming grew his first penicillin mould in 1928, silver was the first-line antimicrobial of the Western pharmacopoeia. The Lancet and the British Medical Journal carried the clinical reports in volume. The practice ran continuously through the Victorian era, the Edwardian era, the First World War, the interwar period. By 1980, almost all of it was gone.
What has not been treated at book length, until now, is how a four-thousand-year clinical record disappeared from mainstream medicine within four decades of the Flexner Report — and what the honest account of silver looks like once that record is reassembled.
Colloidal Silver reconstructs the pre-1938 record from The Lancet, the British Medical Journal, and the primary literature of the era; recovers Robert Becker’s bioelectric framework from the regeneration research the pharmaceutical model buried; and places silver inside a practical terrain-paradigm guide to its current place — in water, on the body, inside the body, and in the chronic conditions where antibiotics have failed. … continue
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