On the Wednesday November 30 edition of the Alex Jones Show, Alex talks
with retired Pakistani Army three-star general Hamid Gul about the
situation in Pakistan following NATO airstrikes that killed 24 Pakistani
soldiers. Pakistan has also issued a demand that the U.S. stop running
drone strikes out of the Shamsi airbase located in the Balochistan
province. Gul served as the Director General of the Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI).
It was just recently revealed that the UN Human Rights Council report regarding Syrian "crimes against humanity" was actually co-authored by Karen Koning AbuZayd, a director of the US Washington-based corporate think-tank,
Middle East Policy Council, that includes Exxon men, CIA agents, US
military and government representatives, and even the president of the
US-Qatar Business Council, which includes amongst its membership, AlJazeera, Chevron, Exxon, munitions manufacturer Raytheon (who supplied the opening salvos during NATO's operations against Libya),
and Boeing. The conflict of interest is so monumental it is only
outdone by the corporate media's eager acceptance of the report and
their complete negligence in airing the compromised backgrounds of those
responsible for compiling it.
The UN report itself (.pdf)
contained no verifiable evidence, but rather hearsay accounts recorded
in Geneva by alleged "victims" "witnesses," and "defectors," put forth
by "all interested persons and organizations." In other words, it was an
open invitation for Syria's enemies to paint whatever image of the
ruling government they pleased. While critics claim this is due to the
Syrian government's lack of cooperation with the UN, it is more likely
that the UN itself, with a proven track record of doing so in Iraq, the
Ivory Coast, and most recently Libya, is merely complicit in providing
"window dressing" for Wall Street and London's otherwise naked military
conquests.
How to Start the War
And
it is through this purposefully distorted lens that calls for military
intervention are being made. After months of denying the opposition was
armed, the Wall Street-funded think-tank Council on Foreign Relations now openly claims that not only are the "protesters" armed, but there is a resistance army of "15,000." The CFR claims this "Free Syrian Army" is requesting weapons and air support. It has already been revealed that weapons are freely flowing over Syria's borders from foreign-supporters, most notably, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, and now even as far as Libya.
The CFR report then goes on to explore the options available to NATO
for facilitating "regime change" including the use of "overhead
surveillance assets, logistical enablers, peacekeepers, armed drones,
combat aircraft, ground troops," and "smuggled weapons."
Of
course the number of Syrian defectors are as baseless as the UN human
rights report. However, even the claim of a large, armed militant force
operating inside of Syria directly contradicts the West's concurrent
narrative that Syria's military is running rampant over defenseless
civilians. With an army of "15,000 defectors" attempting to seize the
nation by force with the help of foreign money, weapons, and diplomatic
support, one finds it difficult to believe the Syrian government would
instead be spending its time "massacring civilians." Just as in Libya,
or any number of nations where foreign-backed "revolutions" have been
attempted or achieved, Western-enabled violence is always a
predetermined part of the equation, fully provisioned ahead of time with
the subsequent violence cloaked behind tales of one-sided brutality
aimed at the targeted regime.
In this week’s conversation with regular guest Bob Chapman of The International Forecaster,
we discuss: rumours of the Fed’s new QE3 are sending the DOW higher,
even as the printing press threaten to devalue the dollar even more; the
Eurozone crisis continues apace, with nothing likely to help but a
complete reset of the banking system; Chavez repatriates Venezuela’s
gold, and much more.
The Transportation Security Administration has found itself embroiled in
yet another scandal after a TSA whistleblower accused the federal
agency of covering up her sexual assault at the hands of a TSA
investigator by forcing her to sign a false disavowal.
“Nilda C. Marugame, a TSA worker at Lihue airport, sued
the TSA’s governmental parent, the Department of Homeland Security, in
Federal Court. Marugame claims a TSA investigator (TSI) “sexually
assaulted her” on Aug. 26, 2009,” reports Courthouse News Service.
When Marugame subsequently attempted to notify the
Assistant Federal Security Director about the incident, she was
immediately suspended for three days and then coerced into signing a
statement that erroneously characterized the sexual advances as being
consensual.
“She says she is “at least the third woman to report
unwelcome sexual advances” from the same man, and that all of his
victims were retaliated against with suspension or threats of
termination,” states the report.
While all three women were punished for complaining
about the assaults, no action was taken against the perpetrator,
according to the case.
Marugame is currently trying to sue the TSA in federal
court for lost wages resulting from her suspension and damages
pertaining to the sexual assault.
Of course, the fact that the agency tasked with fondling
travelers, including children, is constantly embroiled in sexual
assault and rape cases, illustrates perfectly why it should be
abolished.
According to the Department of Justice’s Inspector General (via AP),
the FBI spied on an anti-war rally in Pittsburgh sponsored by a
nonviolent anti-war and anti-discrimination group, pretending it was
preventing terrorism:
The FBI gave inaccurate information to Congress and the
public when it claimed a possible terrorism link to justify surveilling
an anti-war rally in Pittsburgh, the Justice Department’s inspector
general said Monday in a report on the bureau’s scrutiny of domestic
activist groups.
Inspector General Glenn Fine said the FBI had no reason to expect
that anyone of interest in a terrorism investigation would be present at
the 2002 event sponsored by the Thomas Merton Center, a nonviolent
anti-war and anti-discrimination group.
The surveillance was “an ill-conceived project on a slow work day,”
the IG stated in a study of several FBI domestic terrorism probes of
people affiliated with organizations such as Greenpeace and the Catholic
Worker.
Earlier, in statements to Congress and in a press release, the FBI
had described the surveillance as related to a terrorism investigation.
***
The FBI has broad definitions that enable it to classify matters as
domestic terrorism that actually are trespassing or vandalism, the
inspector general said.
Regarding the Pittsburgh rally, controversy erupted in 2006 over
whether the FBI had spied on protesters at the event several years
earlier because of their anti-war views.
The Inspector General’s report confirms that – at least in some instances – anti-war views were specifically targeted:
The report concluded that, while the FBI probes were not generally predicated simply on the views of the targets, at least one FBI field office was focused on a group “as a result of its anti-war views.”
It also found that “FBI agents and supervisors sometimes provided the
[Office of the Inspector General] with speculative, after-the-fact
rationalizations for their prior decisions to open investigations that
we did not find persuasive.”
An Android app developer has published what he says is conclusive
proof that millions of smartphones are secretly monitoring the key
presses, geographic locations, and received messages of its users.
In a YouTube video posted on Monday, Trevor Eckhart showed how
software from a Silicon Valley company known as Carrier IQ recorded in
real time the keys he pressed into a stock EVO handset, which he had
reset to factory settings just prior to the demonstration. Using a
packet sniffer while his device was in airplane mode, he demonstrated
how each numeric tap and every received text message is logged by the
software.
Ironically, he says, the Carrier IQ software recorded the “hello world” dispatch even before it was displayed on his handset.
Eckhart then connected the device to a Wi-Fi network and pointed his
browser at Google. Even though he denied the search giant's request that
he share his physical location, the Carrier IQ software recorded it.
The secret app then recorded the precise input of his search query –
again, “hello world” – even though he typed it into a page that uses the
SSL, or secure sockets layer, protocol to encrypt data sent between the
device and the servers.
“We can see that Carrier IQ is querying these strings over my
wireless network [with] no 3G connectivity and it is reading HTTPS,” the
25-year-old Eckhart says.
“To
some people, the European Central Bank seems like a fire department
that is letting the house burn down to teach the children not to play
with matches.”
So wrote Jack Ewing in the New York Times last week.He went on:
“The E.C.B. has a fire hose — its ability to print money. But the bank is refusing to train it on the euro zone’s debt crisis.
“The
flames climbed higher Friday after the Italian Treasury had to pay an
interest rate of 6.5 percent on a new issue of six-month bills . . . the
highest interest rate Italy has had to pay to sell such debt since August 1997 . . . .
“But there is no sign the E.C.B. plans a major response, like buying large quantities of the country’s bonds to bring down its borrowing costs.”
Why not? According to the November 28th Wall Street Journal,
“The ECB has long worried that buying government bonds in big enough
amounts to bring down countries' borrowing costs would make it easier
for national politicians to delay the budget austerity and economic
overhauls that are needed.”
As with the manufactured debt ceiling crisis in the United States,
the E.C.B. is withholding relief in order to extort austerity measures
from member governments—and the threat seems to be working.The same authors write:
“Euro-zone
leaders are negotiating a potentially groundbreaking fiscal pact . . .
[that] would make budget discipline legally binding and enforceable by
European authorities. . . . European officials hope a new agreement,
which would aim to shrink the excessive public debt that helped spark
the crisis, would persuade the European Central Bank to undertake more
drastic action to reverse the recent selloff in euro-zone debt markets.”
The Eurozone appears to be in the process of being “structurally readjusted” – the same process imposed earlier by the IMF on Third World countries.Structural
demands routinely include harsh austerity measures, government
cutbacks, privatization, and the disempowerment of national central
banks, so that there is no national entity capable of creating and
controlling the money supply on behalf of the people.The
latter result has officially been achieved in the Eurozone, which is
now dependent on the E.C.B. as the sole lender of last resort and
printer of new euros.
MARKETS SURGE AS FED/ECB/BOJ/BOE/SNB/BOC ANNOUNCE COORDINATED INTERVENTION
All the world's central banks have just announced a big coordinated intervention to lower swap rates.
What does that mean?
Basically this: European banks have been parched for liquidity, and
need access to dollars. The ECB can't supply them dollars unless it
borrows them from the Fed.
Essentially today's action makes it easier for the ECB and thus European banks to borrow dollars.
It's not a solution to the euro crisis by any means; it just means
that the most acute liquidity problems will be mitigated for now.
The market is loving the news.
US futures had been down by 0.5% at one point this morning, and now the Dow is up 400 points.
Note that there are some other bullish things going on today. China
lowered its Reserve Requirement Ratio also this morning, and we got a
strong ADP jobs report.
Dan Dicks of PressForTruth.ca joins us once again to discuss a new report from the CBC, “G20 case reveals ‘largest ever’ police spy operation“,
which reveals some of the newly-released documents proving that the
RCMP were involved in spying, surveillance and undercover skullduggery
in the run-up and the aftermath of the Toronto G20 in what is being
described as one of the largest domestic intelligence operations in
Candian history. We discuss Dicks’ own documentary about the G20, Into The Fire, and how these documents confirm what we already knew about the encroaching Canadian police state.
The United States has condemned the storming of the British embassy in Iran. Obama’s press secretary issued the following statement:
The United States condemns in the strongest terms the storming of
the British Embassy in Tehran. Iran has a responsibility to protect the
diplomatic missions present in its country and the personnel stationed
at them. We urge Iran to fully respect its international obligations, to
condemn the incident, to prosecute the offenders, and to ensure that no
further such incidents take place either at the British Embassy or any
other mission in Iran. Our State Department is in close contact with the
British government and we stand ready to support our allies at this
difficult time.
Iran has reportedly reacted to the storming of the embassy in Tehran by arresting a number of protesters.
The Iran foreign ministry has issued a statement saying it regrets the
attack and that it is committed to the safety of diplomats.
British officials had earlier talked with the Iranian charge in
London and urged Iranian authorities to “act with utmost urgency to
ensure the situation is brought under control and to protect our
diplomatic compound, as they are obliged to do under international law,”
according to a report posted on The Telegraph website.
International law, however, is only followed by Britain and the United States when politically advantageous.
For instance, the U.S. violated international law in 2007 when it raided the Iranian Liaison Office in Arbil, Iraq, which was at the time in the process of becoming accredited as an officially recognized consulate.
The U.S. insisted the office was being used by Iranian Revolutionary
Guards as a local headquarters. However, both Iranian and Kurdish
Autonomous Region officials said it was a diplomatic mission in the city
of Arbil located in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Following the raid, the U.S. illegally detained a number of Iranian
diplomats for a period of two and a half years. It had kidnapped the
officials after failing to grab the deputy head of the Iranian Supreme
National Security Council, Mohammed Jafari, and chief of intelligence of
the IRGC, General Manuchehr Frouzandeh. Both were on an official visit
to Iraq in an effort to improve bilateral security. They met the Iraqi
president Jalal Talabani.
The austerity measures imposed on Greece by the EU will lead to a
disintegration of social guarantees and the clearance sale of public
property, argues filmmaker Aris Hatzistefanou, the director of
Debtocracy documentary on the Greek debt crisis.
The director of the documentary says “We wanted to explain that what happened in Greece is actually the same with what happened in Portugal, in Ireland or in Spain.”
“We are not lazy people who spend more than we earn,” he says.
“It is a structural problem of the world’s financial system and at the same time a structural problem of the Eurozone,” the filmmaker shares.
“The
Eurozone is a system that creates deficit and debt on the European
periphery while at the same time creating surpluses to the European
core,” Hatzistefanou says.
The filmmaker claims that if
several years ago nobody talked about this, now about 35 per cent of
Greeks want to leave the Eurozone.
Greece is aware it is just
impossible to pay a €360 billion debt so it is going to default,
believes Aris Hatzistefanou, and in order to prevent the capital to
leave the country the banking system should be nationalized, he says.
The
few families that own the Greek economy and media have realized that
foreign banks might come and take control of the country so these
families do not want the IMF to come to Athens rescue, the filmmaker
states.
In turn, the people of Greece have realized that the
government has been lying to them and the austerity measures already
taken cannot save the situation because deeper reforms and more radical
measures are needed.
Aris Hatzistefanou stresses that Greek
nationals are being blackmailed on a daily basis, being told if they do
not accept the EU and the IMF conditions and austerity measures – “there will be hell”.
Greece has become a tax haven for a few [rich] and a tax hell for the majority of the population,” he says.
“The Greek people are losing the rights gained in the 20th century.”
The
humanitarian organizations that used to work in Africa are now coming
to Athens to help people because a humanitarian crisis is on its way and
that fact gives the right idea about the ongoing situation in Greece.
The
next step for living under economic occupation Greece will be a massive
privatization of public property and complete destruction of the social
system, all this imposed by Brussels, Berlin and the Greek government,
Aris Hatzistefanou states.
“They will try to sell off everything.”
“The Eurozone is on the brink of collapse either way so Greece should leave Eurozone,” argues Hatzistefanou.
“AT first we believed that the EU will be not only an economic and monetary union, but also a political union of the people,” says
filmmaker, recalling the dictatorship period Greece passed and the
Greek dream of peace and security within the EU. But it turned out later
that “The EU and especially the Eurozone, is just a monetary union,
a tool in the hands of foreign banks and corporations to ease their
work and help to take control over the population of the European
periphery.”
In the past few days, those and similarly poignant Twitter posts have
appealed to fundamental American values in objecting to the notorious
U.C. Davis event, where police pepper-sprayed seated protesters,
and to cities generally cracking down on the Occupy movement. The
crackdowns have brought a military level of combativeness to what many
Americans -- even those not in sympathy with the protesters -- would
normally see as a police, not a military matter.
Police, not military. The distinction may seem academic, even absurd,
when police are bringing rifles, helmets, armor, and helicopters to
evict unarmed protesters. But it's an old and critical distinction in
American law and ideology and in republican thought as a whole. The
17th-century English liberty writers, on whose ideas much of America's
founding ethos was based, believed that turning the armed might of the
state, (necessary in waging war against foreign enemies), to domestic
policing of local communities tends to concentrate power in top-down
executive action and vitiate treasured things like judiciary process,
individual liberty, representative government, and free speech.
Constabulary and judiciary matters, high Whigs came
to think, should never be handled by what they condemned as "standing
armies." It's true, on the other hand, that keeping public order, not
just aiding in prosecutions, is a duty of local police. When concerted
crowd violence occurs against people and property, policing may be
expected to be pretty violent too, and distinctions between combat and
policing sometimes naturally blur.
But where protest is peaceful -- maybe loud, maybe deliberately
annoying, combative in its rhetoric, even possibly illegal, yet not
actually violent or dangerous -- treating it the way a state normally
treats an outside military threat will give many Americans, across a
broad political spectrum, a gut problem.
We've seen military hardware and tactics used in the Occupy crackdowns.
We've seen them in post-9/11 federal funding in the states and
municipalities for homeland security. We've seen them in the aptly named
"war on drugs." And anyone who has watched shows like "Cops" has seen
-- and may by now take for granted -- techniques and technologies of
military-style police raids on homes, raids that in more upscale
neighborhoods might amount to nothing more than knocking on a door and
serving a warrant. A Twitter post from Joy Reid, of the blog the Reid
Report, put it this way last week: "Disconnect: liberals see a suddenly
'militarized,' possibly federalized police force. Black people see 'the
usual.'"
General Wesley Clark … said the aim of this plot [to "destroy the governments in ... Iraq, ... Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran”]
was this: “They wanted us to destabilize the Middle East, turn it
upside down, make it under our control.” He then recounted a
conversation he had had ten years earlier with Paul Wolfowitz — back in 1991
— in which the then-number-3-Pentagon-official, after criticizing Bush
41 for not toppling Saddam, told Clark: “But one thing we did learn
[from the Persian Gulf War] is that we can use our military in the
region – in the Middle East – and the Soviets won’t stop us. And we’ve
got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet regimes – Syria, Iran [sic], Iraq –
before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us.” Clark said
he was shocked by Wolfowitz’s desires because, as Clark put it: “the
purpose of the military is to start wars and change governments? It’s
not to deter conflicts?”
[I]n the aftermath of military-caused regime change in Iraq and Libya
… with concerted regime change efforts now underway aimed at Syria and
Iran, with active and escalating proxy fighting in Somalia, with a modest military deployment to South Sudan, and the active use of drones in six — count ‘em: six
— different Muslim countries, it is worth asking whether the neocon
dream as laid out by Clark is dead or is being actively pursued and
fulfilled, albeit with means more subtle and multilateral than full-on
military invasions (it’s worth remembering that neocons specialized in
dressing up their wars in humanitarian packaging: Saddam’s rape rooms! Gassed his own people!). As Jonathan Schwarz … put it about the supposedly contentious national security factions:
As far as I can tell, there’s barely any difference in
goals within the foreign policy establishment. They just disagree on the
best methods to achieve the goals. My guess is that everyone agrees we
have to continue defending the mideast from outside interference (I love
that Hillary line), and the [Democrats] just think that best path is
four overt wars and three covert actions, while the neocons want to jump
straight to seven wars.
***
The neocon end as Clark reported them — regime change in those seven
countries — seems as vibrant as ever. It’s just striking to listen to
Clark describe those 7 countries in which the neocons plotted to have
regime change back in 2001, and then compare that to what the U.S.
Government did and continues to do since then with regard to those
precise countries.
It's thought the U.S. has redeployed its newest aircraft carrier from
the Persian Gulf to the Syrian coast. Washington is also urging American
citizens to leave Syria immediately. Patrick Henningsen, a political
analyst from America's 'Infowar.com' online magazine, says we are seeing
initial steps of a repeat of what we saw in Libya.
Source: Prison Planet Paul Joseph Watson, Alex Jones
Desperate to derail Ron Paul’s momentum in New Hampshire, the key early
primary state in which polls show Paul has a very real chance of
winning, the establishment has thrown its weight behind Newt Gingrich,
the ultimate RINO globalist who in reality is about as conservative as
Mao Tse-tung.
With the campaigns of Mitt Romney and Rick Perry collapsing, the
editorial board of the New Hampshire Union Leader chose to endorse
Gingrich on Sunday, a move that the mainstream press immediately hailed
as all-important, attempting to bestow kingmaker status on a relatively
irrelevant newspaper in the grand scheme of things.
The anointment of Gingrich as Republican frontrunner is
just the latest desperate bid to fool voters into supporting anyone
other than Ron Paul. From Perry, to Romney, to Cain – the establishment
has attempted to crown all of them as top dog – failing every time as
each campaign subsequently crashes and burns.
Gingrich will inevitably follow suit because he has more
skeletons in the closet than a halloween costume shop. Newt Gingrich is
Mr. New World Order – a committed globalist who has publicly made clear
his contempt for American sovereignty and freedom on a plethora of
occasions, not least when he joined forces with Nancy Pelosi to push the Obama administration’s cap and trade agenda that would have completely bankrupted the country.
“I think if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with
a trading system, much like we did with sulfur, and if you have a
tax-incentive program for investing in the solutions, that there’s a
package there that’s very, very good,” Gingrich told PBS Frontline in February 2007.
And if you think that doesn’t sound bad enough, just
wait until you read what Gingrich had to say about mandatory health
insurance.
“The Humanitarian War” is a film about the demonization of Gaddafi in
the run-up to the war in Libya. In this carefully researched
documentary, Julien Teil examines the documents and interrogates the
NGOs behind the campaign to oust Gaddafi, and shows the lack of evidence
for the alleged war crimes that supposedly justified UN intervention.
Join us for this week’s GRTV Feature Interview with documentary
filmmaker Julien Teil as we discuss the lead-up to the war on Libya, and
whether it can happen again in Syria.
Ampon Tangnoppakul was sentenced to 20 years in prison for computer
crimes and lese majeste violations. While on the surface these seems
like an extension of the Wall Street London creeping Orwellian dystopia,
it is in fact an ugly reaction to it.
Ampon was convicted of
sending offensive messages to a government representative during a
violent Wall Street-backed pro-Thaksin Shinawatra rally in May of 2010.
Ampon was arrested in August and just recently received his sentence,
which may be pardoned as soon as next month.
However, to
understand the full scope of this, at first, seemingly unreasonable
sentence for an allegedly sickly old man, a great deal about Thai
politics must be understood – a back-story the disingenuous
propagandists at the BBC, CNN, and throughout the US government funded
propaganda fronts inside of Thailand, like Prachatai, depend on you not knowing.
A Background
The 2010 Thai Protests:
The particular rally Ampon was attending in May of 2010 when he sent
his SMSs, began a month earlier. It was an attempt by Wall Street and
London corporate fascist interests to reinstall their ousted proxy
Thaksin Shinawatra. In mid April, after days of trying to goad Thai
security forces into a violent crackdown on Thaksin's red shirts, protest leaders literally called on their own rank and file to donate blood to be spilled on key government buildings
throughout Thailand's capital of Bangkok. This grisly display would
foreshadow protest leaders' plans, unbeknown to even their own
followers. On April 10, 2010, after the Thai military shut down
Thaksin's nationwide propaganda network, protest leaders brought 200 men to the gates of Bangkok's 1st Army Region base and tried to storm the facility.
The leaders must have realized that storming a military facility had a
universally high probability of provoking the use of deadly force. The
Thai military however, dispersed the protesters with water cannons and
rubber bullets.
The
decision was made to disperse the protesters at Bangkok's "Democracy
Monument" that night. After nightfall, riot troops and protesters faced
off in close quarters before troops began to advance while firing blanks
into the air. A similar operation a year earlier led by the same
commanding officer, Colonel Romklao, dispersed protesters without fatalities
(the only fatalities were two civilians gunned down by protesters).
This time around, intent on a bloodbath, a group of mysterious gunmen
intervened with a combination of grenade attacks and sniper fire that
killed Colonel Romklao and 6 other soldiers. Troops immediately fell
back in disarray while protesters were divided in confusion and
adulation. The mystery gunmen weaved through the protesters firing
sporadically at Thai troops who returned fire. In total, 23 would die.
Despite all calls for peaceful negotiations, rockets and violence are
part of life on the Israeli-Gaza border. As civilians bear the brunt of
the conflict, Faisal Malaka from Gaza told RT’s Nadezhda Kevorkova how
it feels to live there.
“Why do you always come after the war and destruction? Why don’t you want to stop them, before they start?” says local farmer Faisal Malaka, aged 22. He is reluctant to talk because he doesn’t think “they” do much good.
By ‘them’ he means the Israeli army officers, who are just a few hundred meters away. The border is demarcated with an electric fence and towers. Faisal says the fence is lethal. His house is closest to the border.
“Europeans have been writing about us in their newspapers since
1948. But nothing is changing. You are the fourth or the seventh to have
come here since the war of 2008. Journalists can’t stop them,” Faisal
tells the children to go inside the house and not to look out of the
windows. He allows me, though, to take some pictures of the dents on the
house walls and the steel shutters on the windows that are meant to
protect his family. We had seen the dents and shutters from a distance.
But children will be children: they sit in a corner for a while, then come and hang around the adults again.
Faisal is a manager. A graduate of Gaza’s Islamic University, he has a Master’s degree with honors.
“The Israelis say, you are illiterate and ignorant peasants and you don’t know how to read or write.”
“We are the most educated people in the Middle East. The more
they take from us, the more we learn. Before, I could work in the
garden. The only thing I can do now is to learn. There’s nothing funny
about it,” Faisal says in response to my forced smile.
His family used to have orchards, but not anymore.
“Since 2000, Israeli bulldozers have destroyed all the trees
here. They’ve cut down all the orange, lemon, almond and olive trees.
They’ve destroyed our hen-house. They buried our house in sand twice –
in 2000 and 2009. On the 22nd of January, they came and buried our house
in snow up to the roof?” Faisal tells me twice about the bulldozer as my mind refuses to take it all in.
The December 5th, 2011 cover of Time Magazine
represents a disturbing truth: the American corporate-controlled
establishment media presents a picture of the world that is meant to
placate and pacify the people of the United States in favor of presenting reality as it is.
While the covers of the European, Asian, and South Pacific editions have an image of chaos in the streets in Egypt with “Revolution Redux” in bold white letters in the center, the American edition is a cartoon with the headline “Why Anxiety is Good for You.”
Is this just a meaningless marketing tactic or does it exemplify the
greater trend in how the American corporate media presents the world to
the people of the United States?
I tend towards the latter, given the fact that this
is something that is inescapable when consuming media marketed to
people in the United States.
When I have the unfortunate pleasure of turning on the radio and listening to National Public Radio, I never cease to be amazed by the topics they choose to cover.
While much of the economies of the world are in shambles, uprisings both real and manufactured are occurring around the globe, brutal police crackdowns are taking place in the United States and the federal government is attempting to legalize indefinite military detention of civilians, even American citizens, without trial or charge, they opt for fluff stories with little-to-no meaning whatsoever.
This is the unfortunate nature of the “infotainment” industry that
appeals to the lowest common denominator instead of attempting to inform
and educate their audience.
The debatable aspect of this grim fact is if it is simply a result of
sacrificing information and content in favor of ratings or if it is a
calculated agenda to dumb down the American people.
I tend to fall into the camp of people who believe that this has been
too pervasive and relentless to be the product of just doing whatever
it takes to get ratings.
Take, for instance, the recent study that found that viewers of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News were actually less informed about current events than people who watched no news at all.
While this probably seems like a somewhat obvious conclusion to anyone
who has sat down and watched Fox News, the fact that it was actually
shown in a study is quite surprising.
In August Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez announced that he would
be repatriating the foreign-held gold reserves in American and European
banks and they received the first shipment of gold from European
countries on Friday.
The Venezuelan central bank reports that about $300 million in gold was brought in to Caracas by plane and they plan to bring 160 tons held abroad back to Venezuela.
The president of the central bank, Nelson Merentes said that the
first shipment came from “various European countries” by way of France
and called the arrival of the gold bullion a “historic” moment for his country, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Hugo Chavez said, “Now [the gold] will go to a place from which it
should have never left: the central bank vaults [in Caracas]; not those
in London or in Europe, but our own land.”
This is likely quite a good move as Western banks are becoming
increasingly exposed to massive amounts of derivatives and sovereign debt crises that are wracking several economies.
These crises very well might be engineered by central banks and their
“too big to fail” cronies just as the crash in 2008 was, and Chavez
might preempting a possible gold run by demanding physical delivery of his gold now before there is no gold to deliver.
While Merentes would not give the specific number of tons of gold
brought shipped to Venezuela on Friday, he said that the shipment was
worth roughly $300 million.
This comes as U.S. stocks see the worst Thanksgiving drop since 1932 and all indicators show the European sovereign debt crisis continuing to worsen.
Marijuana was a popular botanical medicine in the 19th and 20th centuries, common in U.S. pharmacies of the time.
Yet, in 1970, the herb was declared a Schedule 1 controlled substance
and labeled as a drug with a “high potential for abuse” and “no
accepted medical use.”
Three years later the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was formed to
enforce the newly created drug schedules, and the fight against
marijuana use began.
The Huffington Post
has a concise history of marijuana prohibition, and the struggle for
legalization, that is well worth reading — but the most successful
movement to date, and the one that is set to produce the first legal
marijuana market in decades, is the medical marijuana movement.
Unfortunately, the feds have recently announced a blatant reversal on
their previous pro-medical marijuana stance — a move that is
threatening to stop the industry cold.
Why are the Feds So Concerned About Medical Marijuana?
Fifteen states plus the District of Columbia have laws allowing medical marijuana.
In other words, in those states it is considered legal to consume, possess or distribute marijuana for medical use.
But despite marijuana’s legal status at the state level, historically
it was common for the DEA to raid medical marijuana suppliers and even
arrest patients.
This is because federal law overrides state law, defining the possession or distribution of marijuana as a criminal offense.
According to The State of the Medical Marijuana Markets 2011,
the national market for medical marijuana is now worth $1.7 billion —
and could grow to close to $9 billion in the next five years — if not
for a stunning reversal by the Obama administration. In October 2011,
the Obama administration released a letter to clarify their earlier
position, which, as Seattle Weekly reports,
indicates, “The only people safe from arrest were the “seriously ill”
patients and their caregivers… Everyone else? Be forewarned.”
The Obama administration has long been supportive of the medical marijuana movement, even stating during the presidential campaign that, “The basic concept of using medical marijuana… [is] entirely appropriate.”
However the Feds now appear to be launching a full-fledged attack
against this legitimate industry, not only by threatening prosecution
and arrest, but also by intimidating and coercing banks, land and store
owners, as well as other business entities, that help keep the medical
marijuana industry alive.
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) would
ruin so much of what’s best about the Internet: They will give the government
and corporations new powers to block Americans’ access to sites that
are accused of copyright infringement, force sites like YouTube to go to
new lengths to police users’ contributions, and put people in prison
for streaming certain content online.
There’s a good chance this legislation will pass — but Senator Ron
Wyden is a steadfast opponent, and he says he’ll try to block it by
filibustering if it comes up for a vote.
Sometimes filibusters last hours — or days — leaving Senators reading
out of the dictionary or cookbooks to pass the time. But we’ve got a
better idea:
Millions of Americans support Internet freedom. What better way to
demonstrate our strength than to ask Senator Wyden to read our names
into the record during his filibuster? He’s agreed to read as many names as possible, and to enter the rest into the Congressional Record.
In Episode 209
we looked at the mysterious death of Danny Casolaro, the journalist who
was about to crack the political conspiracy of the century, a plot that
he called “the octopus.” This week we go in search of the octopus that
was Casolaro was hunting.
A NATO air strike on an army checkpoint in northwest Pakistan has killed
up to 25 soldiers, according to the country's military officials.
Islamabad has now blocked the alliance's vital supply lines into
Afghanistan in response. The incident threatens to put more pressure on
relations between Pakistan and the military alliance, already strained
by continued U.S. drone attacks. Ahmed Quraishi, President of Pakistan's
biggest lobbying group - the PakNationalists forum, thinks this
accident was a deliberate act of punishment.
The Senate is set to vote on a bill next week that would
define the whole of the United States as a “battlefield” and allow the
U.S. Military to arrest American citizens in their own back yard without
charge or trial.
“The Senate is going to vote on whether Congress will
give this president—and every future president — the power to order the
military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians
anywhere in the world. The power is so broad that even U.S. citizens
could be swept up by the military and the military could be used far
from any battlefield, even within the United States itself,” writes Chris Anders of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office.
Under the ‘worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial’ provision of S.1867, the National Defense Authorization Act bill,
which is set to be up for a vote on the Senate floor Monday, the
legislation will “basically say in law for the first time that the
homeland is part of the battlefield,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.),
who supports the bill.
The bill was drafted in secret by Senators Carl Levin
(D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), before being passed in a
closed-door committee meeting without any kind of hearing. The language
appears in sections 1031 and 1032 of the NDAA bill.
“I would also point out that these provisions raise
serious questions as to who we are as a society and what our
Constitution seeks to protect,” Colorado Senator Mark Udall said in a speech last week.
One section of these provisions, section 1031, would be interpreted as
allowing the military to capture and indefinitely detain American
citizens on U.S. soil. Section 1031 essentially repeals the Posse
Comitatus Act of 1878 by authorizing the U.S. military to perform law
enforcement functions on American soil. That alone should alarm my
colleagues on both sides of the aisle, but there are other problems with
these provisions that must be resolved.”
This means Americans could be declared domestic
terrorists and thrown in a military brig with no recourse whatsoever.
Given that the Department of Homeland Security has characterized behavior such
as buying gold, owning guns, using a watch or binoculars, donating to
charity, using the telephone or email to find information, using cash,
and all manner of mundane behaviors as potential indicators of domestic
terrorism, such a provision would be wide open to abuse.
UPDATE: An addendum to my earlier post about the Daily Mail smear on David Icke – Pete Samson has written an almost identical hit piece in ‘The Sun’
– that most venerable of newspapers which responded to the tragic
deaths of 96 Liverpool fans after the Hillsborough disaster by inventing lies and smearing the victims.
Samson is very much at home writing for a newspaper that appeals to
some of the most moronic and braindead people ever to walk on the face
of the British Isles.
Of course, the horror that Icke should actually make some money back
from the sale of tickets and copies of his book is completely
indefensible. I mean, it’s not as if the Daily Mail “journalist” who
penned this diatribe gets paid to write is it? Likewise, we’d all be
rightfully up in arms if the Daily Mail actually had the shame to ‘cash
in’ on the release of information by selling copies of its newspapers!
Outrageous! Oh, hang on a minute…
The “journalist” who wrote this drivel doesn’t even have the guts to
put his or her name to it – that’s how utterly shambolic and shameful a
hit piece it is. As if ad hominem and childish insults were not enough,
the Daily Mail engages in outright defamation by completely lying about
the fact that Icke is a “polygamist” simply because he remains friends
with his ex-wife. This is the most abhorrent and pathetic smear we’ve
ever seen, and we’ve seen plenty.
Here’s the good news – every single one of the ‘best rated’ responses
to the article completely slams the Mail and supports Icke. The hit
pieces don’t work anymore because the establishment media has lost all
credibility – and articles like this will only see them lose more.
NATO helicopters and fighter jets attacked two military outposts in
northwest Pakistan on Saturday, killing as many as 28 troops and
plunging U.S.-Pakistan relations deeper into crisis.
Pakistan retaliated by shutting down NATO supply routes into
Afghanistan, used for sending in nearly half of the alliance’s land
shipments. It also said it would ask U.S. forces to quit an air base
used for CIA drone strikes on militants.
The attack is the worst incident of its kind since Pakistan uneasily
allied itself with Washington following the September 11, 2001 attacks
on the United States.
The NATO-led force in Afghanistan confirmed that NATO aircraft had
probably killed Pakistani soldiers in an area close to the
Afghan-Pakistani border.
“Close air support was called in, in the development of the
tactical situation, and it is what highly likely caused the Pakistan
casualties,” said General Carsten Jacobson, spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
He added he could not confirm the number of casualties, but ISAF was investigating. “We are aware that Pakistani soldiers perished. We don’t know the size, the magnitude,” he said.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani said the killings were “an attack on Pakistan’s sovereignty,” adding: “We will not let any harm come to Pakistan’s sovereignty and solidarity.”
The Foreign Office said it would take up the matter “in the strongest terms” with
NATO and the United States, while the Chief of Army Staff, General
Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, said steps would be taken to respond “to this irresponsible act.”
“A strong protest has been launched with NATO/ISAF in which it has been
demanded that strong and urgent action be taken against those
responsible for this aggression.”
Two military officials said up to 28 troops had been killed and 11
wounded in the attack on the outposts, about 2.5 km (1.5 miles) from the
Afghan border. The Pakistani military said 24 troops were killed and 13
wounded.
Source: Land Destroyer Report
Source: Corbett Report
Source: Infowars
Source: Washington's Blog
Source: Global Research
Source: Business Insider
Source: Corbett Report
Source: Activist Post
Source: Washington's Blog
Source: Prison Planet
Source: Land Destoryer Report
Source: RT
Source: End The Lie
Source: Mercola 
Source: Corbett Report
Source: Infowars
Source: Prison Planet
Source: Pecan
“Close air support was called in, in the development of the
tactical situation, and it is what highly likely caused the Pakistan
casualties,” said General Carsten Jacobson, spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).