The barbarous phenomenon we recently witnessed in France has roots that go back to at least 1979 when the mujahedeen made their appearance in Afghanistan. At that time their ire was directed at the leftist Taraki government that had come into power in April of 1978. This government's ascension to power was a sudden and totally indigenous happening - with equal surprise to both the USA and the USSR.

In April of 1978 the Afghan army deposed the country's government because of its oppressive measures, and then created a new government, headed by a leftist, Nur Mohammad Taraki, who had been a writer, poet and professor of journalism at the University of Kabul. Following this, for a brief period of time, Afghanistan had a progressive secular government, with broad popular support. As I pointed out in an earlier publication, this government ". . . enacted progressive reforms and gave equal rights to women. It was in the process of dragging the country into the 20th century, and as British political scientist Fred Halliday stated in May 1979¹, 'probably more has changed in the countryside over the last year than in two centuries since the state was established.'"

The Taraki government's first course of action was to declare non-alignment in foreign affairs and to affirm a commitment to Islam within a secular state. Among the much needed reforms, women were given equal rights, and girls were to go to school and be in the same classroom as boys. Child marriages and feudal dowry payments were banned. Labour unions were legalized, and some 10,000 people were released from prisons. Within a short time hundreds of schools and medical clinics were built in the countryside.

The landholding system hadn't changed much since the feudal period; more than three-quarters of the land was owned by landlords who composed only 3 percent of the rural population. Reforms began on September 1, 1978 by the abolition all debts owed by farmers - landlords and moneylenders had charged up to 45 percent interest. A program was being developed for major land reform, and it was expected that all farm families (including landlords) would be given the equivalent of equal amounts of land.²

What happened to this progressive government? In brief, it was undermined by the CIA and the mujahedeen, which triggered a series of events that destroyed the country - and ironically led to the disaster of September 11, 2001 in the USA and to the present chaos and tragedy in Afghanistan.

A military judge halted a hearing at Guantanamo Bay on Monday when two detainees being tried in connection with the September 11 terror attacks said they recognized their translator from a secret CIA prison where they were formerly held.

Moments into the proceedings - the first hearing in six months - Army Col. James L. Pohl recessed court after one defendant, then another, objected to their English-to-Arabic translator, journalists reported from Gitmo.

"The problem is I cannot trust him because he was working at the black site with the CIA, and we know him from there," defendant Ramzi Bin Al-Shibh said soon after Monday morning's hearing began, according to the Miami Herald.

Once Al-Shibh made the allegation, an attorney for co-defendant Walid bin Attash said her client was "visibly shaken" upon seeing the man during Monday's proceedings and raised the same objection.

"My client relayed to me this morning that there is somebody in this courtroom who was participating in his illegal torture," attorney Cheryl Bormann told Col. Pohl, according to Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg.

Monday's hearing was the first for the Gitmo detainees since proceedings took a pause in August, and the first since the Senate Intelligence Committee released an executive summary of its years-in-the-making report on the CIA's use of torture in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Al-Shibh, 42, and Attash, 36, were captured in 2002 and 2003, respectively, and held by the CIA at a secret prison until being transferred to Gitmo in 2006.

Both detainees appear in last year's Senate report as being victims of harsh interrogation techniques deployed by US investigators in an effort to elicit intelligence from suspected terrorists. According to the Senate's analysis, US efforts to coerce detainees into providing information to authorities through torture proved to be largely unsuccessful.

Manipulation takes many forms, and aims at us from multiple levels. Emotions, inattention, preoccupation, distraction, lack of information, misinformation, and levels of trust all aid in the success of manipulation-craft bewitchment. The systems and techniques, utilized to manipulate and deceive, are known and tried. They are natural systems experienced in society and the psychological functions of reality. When used with the intent to beguile they become manipulation-crafts. Below are a few examples of techniques and mechanisms you face. Knowing them and recognizing the process is key to your understanding and freewill.

Hegelian Dialectic

For every idea or (Thesis) there would be an opposite idea or (Antithesis). The resulting conflict between the two leads to a combination of the two or (Synthesis). The Synthesis then becomes the new Thesis and the cycle continues.

This process can be observed with any meeting of the minds throughout time. However, if both parts of the equation are under the direction of the same architect, the resulting synthesis is a structure of intended design. Utilizing the Hegelian Dialectic as manipulation-craft is detrimental to a free society. It makes the political and democratic processes inept.

Years of unending news stories on U.S. government programs of surveillance, rendition and torture have apparently chilled the speech of even top business executives in the United States.

Yesterday, Jim Clifton, the Chairman and CEO of Gallup, an iconic U.S. company dating back to 1935, told CNBC that he was worried he might "suddenly disappear" and not make it home that evening if he disputed the accuracy of what the U.S. government is reporting as unemployed Americans.

The CNBC interview came one day after Clifton had penned a gutsy opinion piece on Gallup's web site, defiantly calling the government's 5.6 percent unemployment figure "The Big Lie" in the article's headline. His appearance on CNBC was apparently to walk back the "lie" part of the title and reframe the jobs data as just hopelessly deceptive.

Clifton stated the following on CNBC:

"I think that the number that comes out of BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] and the Department of Labor is very, very accurate. I need to make that very, very clear so that I don't suddenly disappear. I need to make it home tonight."

After getting that out of the way, Clifton went on to eviscerate the legitimacy of the cheerful spin given to the unemployment data, telling CNBC viewers that the percent of full time jobs in this country as a percent of the adult population "is the worst it's been in 30 years."

A powerful explosion lit up the night sky Sunday night in Donetsk at 10:50 pm. Shock waves shook the city, blowing out windows, and the blast was felt in the neighboring cities of Gorlovka and Makeyevka. The explosion was reported in the Kuibyshev region of Donetsk at or near a chemical weapons factory that was also targeted in September and November of last year. The location of the blast appears to be within the chemical factory area, but the Saker reports the impact was 1000 meters away from the main buildings. Russian TV has shown a crater 10 meters deep. Donetsk Republic leaders have said it would have needed the equivalent power of 1 ton of TNT to create, raising the possibility that a new type of weapon is in use.

Casualties from the explosion have yet to be confirmed from Donetsk, while Ukraine's leader of the radical Right Sector, Dmitry Yarosh, claims the blast killed "200 terrorists".

The explosion could be seen tens of kilometers away and residents have been posting their footage online:

The time for the final all-in bet has arrived.

As we explained yesterday, when we wrote that "Greece Gambles On "Catastrophic Armageddon" For Europe, Warns It "Only Has Weeks Of Cash Left"", and as confirmed further by today's fire and brimstone speech by Greek PM Tsipras, in which he not only did not concede one millimeter to Europe but raised the stakes even higher, by promising among other things to raise the minimum wage and to halt foreclosures, Greece is now betting everything that Europe will not allow it to exit, hoping that "this time is not different", and the existential terror that would be heaped on the Eurozone as forecast in 2012 by the likes of Citi's Buiter and IIF's Charles Dallara, will still take place, and Europe will concede that spending a few more billion on Greece's bridge program is worth to avoid what could potentially spiral into an out of control collapse.

To be sure, that is precisely what Yanis Vaourfakis implied today when he said that "if Greece is forced out of the euro zone, other countries will inevitably follow and the currency bloc will collapse, Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said on Sunday, in comments which drew a rebuke from Italy."

The comments emerged from an interview we commented on earlier with Italian state television network RAI, Varoufakis said Greece's debt problems must be solved as part of a rejection of austerity policies for the euro zone as a whole. He called for a massive "new deal" investment program funded by the European Investment Bank.

In the run-up to his visit to the Arab Republic of Egypt, Vladimir Putin gave an interview to the Al-Ahram daily newspaper.

QUESTION: How do you assess the current state of bilateral relations between Russia and Egypt following the revolutionary events in Egypt in 2011-2013? What is your vision of their prospects, particularly in light of the outcomes of the visit of Abdel el-Sisi, President of the Arab Republic of Egypt, to Russia in August 2014?

PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA VLADIMIR PUTIN: Egypt is a long-time and trusted partner of Russia. The history of modern diplomatic relations between the two countries that dates back to the year of 1943 has been eventful and colorful. For more than seven decades, both our countries and the international arena have seen numerous transformations. And yet, our desire to work together towards the development of Russia and Egypt as well as ensuring international and regional security has remained unchanged.

The FDA continues to be one of the most dangerous government agencies in the United States. The sheer scope of people it affects with its corruption is staggering. As Jon Rappoport has highlighted, the FDA's own webpage admits that the drugs it certifies as safe contribute to over 100,000 deaths per year.

And as you'll see in the video interview below with constitutional attorney, Jonathan Emord, not only does the FDA routinely approve drugs over objections from its own medical reviewers, but the FDA does zero independent medical testing of its own. It is a system built upon conflicts of interest that leaves consumers completely in the dark about the true consequences of taking Big Pharma products.

As the newly inflamed vaccine debate rages across America, the fundamental role of the FDA in disseminating false information and flat-out covering up widespread health dangers must be examined more fully. Here are two key articles from natural health author, Catherine J. Frompovich, which add to the information presented in the following video:

• Exposing the FDA's Vaccine Injury Cover-up: An Interview With Walter Kyle, Esq.
• Big Pharma's Corporate Crimes and Fines: How Can They Get Away With It?

As the corporate media desperately attempts to dupe as many people as possible into getting MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccines for the protection of "the children," uncovered court documents revealing major vaccine fraud at Merck & Co., the multinational drug company that produces MMR vaccines for the U.S. market, are only getting the attention they deserve from the alternative media.

Back in 2010, two former Merck scientists, repulsed by what they saw taking place at the highest levels of the company, filed a False Claims Act in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The filing accuses Merck of lying about the safety and effectiveness of MMR vaccines, tampering with study data, defrauding the U.S. government and various other high-level crimes.

Claims by Merck that the mumps component of the MMR vaccine is "95 percent effective" are also questioned in the filing. Stephen Krahling and Joan Wlochowski say Merck senior management falsified data specifically on the effectiveness of the mumps vaccine, intentionally spiking blood samples with animal antibodies in order to trick the public into thinking that the vaccine is effective.

"Merck... added animal antibodies to blood samples to achieve more favorable test results, though it knew that the human immune system would never produce such antibodies, and that the antibodies created a laboratory testing scenario that 'did not in any way correspond to, correlate with, or represent real life... virus neutralization in vaccinated people,'" explains CourthouseNews.com.

Other alleged transgressions include Merck swindling the U.S. government out of "hundreds of millions of dollars for a vaccine that does not provide adequate immunization," as well as promoting the spread of mumps with its fraudulent vaccine. This elaborate scam, which the duo says has been taking place since the late 1990s, has allowed Merck to monopolize the vaccine market, specifically with regard to MMR vaccines.

The leader of France's rightwing Front National (FN), Marine Le Pen, has called Brussels "American lackeys" over the EU's Ukraine policy. She further accused Washington of attempting to start a "war in Europe" and expand NATO towards Russia's borders.

"European capitals do not have the wisdom to refuse to be dependent on US positions on Ukraine," Le Pen told French journalists on Sunday.

"Regarding Ukraine, we behave like American lackeys," she said, before warning that "the aim of the Americans is to start a war in Europe to push NATO to the Russian border."

She went on to accuse European leaders of turning a blind eye to the Ukrainian government's "bombing of civilians," adding that both those in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine believed the country should be federalized.