Puppet MastersS


Alarm Clock

CIA given free hand in Lithuania

Lithuania
© Unknown
«Irina» is from Kaliningrad. She was recruited with the help of blackmail and threats. The NTV documentary Call Agent is based on her confession. The film reveals the methods of work employed by the State Security Department of the Republic of Lithuania. At first they wanted her to operate on the territory of the Kaliningrad region, the Russian exclave sandwiched between Lithuania, Poland and the Baltic Sea, but then the plans changed. The Lithuanian secret service curators tasked «Irina» with gathering information to discredit Lithuanian politicians, entrepreneurs, journalists and diplomats. She conducted her activities under the guidance of former Lithuanian consul in Kaliningrad Mindaugas Jaskevicius and the head of security service Renatas Pyatkus among others. The both men are on the CIA's payroll. There are other Central Intelligence Agency's informers in the Lithuanian State Security Department ranks.

Years have passed since Lithuania became independent but Washington still harbors doubts about political reliability of the country's political elite... It's not excluded that someone may be secretly working for Moscow or «Belarusian dictator» Lukashenko. Even if it is not so, still the discrediting information on Lithuanian politicians and military received from the Central Intelligence Agency and the Lithuanian State Security Department is often used by Americans to influence the Lithuanian ruling circles. «Irina» told about the missions she was assigned, the task was to create delicate situations to discredit former presidents and prime-ministers close to incumbent President Dalia Grybauskaite, as well as promising politicians and military. Everything was thoroughly copied and transferred to Americans.

Pirates

Orwell was hailed a hero for fighting in Spain. Today he'd be a terrorist‏

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© Christopher Thomond'The British government did threaten people leaving to join the International Brigades, by reviving the Foreign Enlistment Act. But the act was unworkable.'
If George Orwell and Laurie Lee were to return from the Spanish civil war today, they would be arrested under section five of the Terrorism Act 2006. If convicted of fighting abroad with a "political, ideological, religious or racial motive" - a charge they would find hard to contest - they would face a maximum sentence of life in prison. That they were fighting to defend an elected government against a fascist rebellion would have no bearing on the case. They would go down as terrorists.

As it happens, the British government did threaten people leaving the country to join the International Brigades, by reviving the Foreign Enlistment Act of 1870. In 1937 it warned that anyone volunteering to fight in Spain would be "liable on conviction to imprisonment up to two years". This was consistent with its policy of non-intervention, which even Winston Churchill, initially a supporter, came to see as "an elaborate system of official humbug". Britain, whose diplomatic service and military command were riddled with fascist sympathisers, helped to block munitions and support for the Republican government, while ignoring Italian and German deployments on Franco's side.

Evil Rays

The Eastern European Islands of the global GULAG

CIA secret prisons worldwide
© Wikipedia
Among the first to report the existence of CIA special prisons and concentration camps in a number of countries, for example, in Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and on the territory controlled by the Kosovar Albanian regime, were the Swiss media. In December 2005 the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza confirmed that the «main European secret CIA prison» is located in Poland. The scandal which was at that time hushed up has now resurfaced. In Strasbourg hearings have begun in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on a suit brought by two prisoners of the American Guantanamo Bay detention camp, Palestinians Al-Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah, who assert that in the early 2000s U.S. intelligence agencies detained them in a Polish military prison...

For several months lawyers demanded that the court hearings be held behind closed doors and that the press not be admitted. However, the results of the investigation and the details of the abductions and tortures were made public anyway. It turned out that the Poles actively assisted in what the CIA calls «enhanced interrogation techniques», which include refined tortures and abuses like dehydration, hypothermia, and «putting the heat on» with death threats by putting a gun or a drill to someone's head. That is how they interrogated prisoners in the secret CIA prison near the village of Stare Kiejkuty, 170 km from Warsaw.

Bug

Barclays hikes bonuses despite fall in profits and warning of up to 12,000 job cuts this year‏

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© Dominic Lipinski/PABarclays has made £5.2bn profit in 2013, lower than in 2012.
Barclays stoked the row over City pay on Tuesday by announcing a 32% fall in profits but a rise of 10% in the bonus pool for its 140,000 staff around the world.

Antony Jenkins, promoted to run Barclays in the wake of the £290m fine for rigging Libor, defended the decision to increase bonus payouts as he warned that between 10,000 to 12,000 jobs would be cut this year as he races to cut costs. Some 820 senior roles are to go along with 7,000 jobs in the UK.

In a move that sparked the fury of the TUC, which accused the bank of "sticking two fingers up to hard-pressed families across Britain", the bank announced it was paying bonuses of £2.4bn - up from £2.2bn a year ago - across the bank. Within that, the investment bankers enjoyed bonuses of £1.6bn compared with £1.4bn a year ago, even though the investment banking side suffered a loss in the fourth quarter and its annual profits tumbled 37%. The bank as a whole saw its profits fall to £5.2bn from £7bn.

Comment: As Lobaczewski wrote: "Germs are not aware that they will be burned alive or buried deep in the ground along with the human body whose death they are causing."

Psychopaths in power: The Parasite on the Human Super-organism


Vader

'Destroy immediately': Top U.S. commander ordered Bin Laden photos purge

Osama
© Reuters/Sultan DogarPolicemen and residents stand near while demolition work is carried out on the building where al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. special forces in Abbottabad.
Eleven days after the 2011 US elite forces raid that resulted in the killing of Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, the head of US special operations ordered the destruction of all photos of the corpse or for them to be given to the CIA, new evidence shows.

The disclosure was revealed Monday in an email obtained and released by non-profit legal group Judicial Watch via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The heavily-redacted email was sent by Admiral William McRaven, head of US Special Operations Command, to subordinate officers on May 13, 2011, instructing them that any remaining photos of Bin Laden's body must be destroyed or handed over to the CIA.

Bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011 at his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by the special operations team commonly known as Seal Team Six during Operation Neptune Spear.

In the email, addressed to "Gentlemen," McRaven wrote, "One particular item that I want to emphasize is photos; particularly UBLs [Usama Bin Laden, as US military referred to him] remains. At this point - all photos should have been turned over to the CIA; if you still have them destroy them immediately or get them to the [redacted]."

The order to purge the photos came 11 days after the conservative government transparency organization Judicial Watch filed a FOIA request with the Defense Department seeking "all photographs and/or video recordings of Usama Bin Laden taken during and/or after the U.S. military operation in Pakistan on or about May 1, 2011."

Comment: The "destroy the photos of the remains immediately" email is a smoking gun revealing the fact that the raid and murder of individuals unknown, had nothing whatsoever to do with "killing Bin Laden". As everyone knows, Bin Laden died of kidney disease years ago.

Still, it is jaw-dropping that such liars and frauds are in charge of governments.




Wolf

Bernard Madoff: Wall Street psychopath?

Madoff
© Mario Tama/Getty ImagesMadoff aide may have been duped by psychopath, lawyer says.
That's one of the questions expected to be asked this week in a Manhattan federal court when lawyers begin the defense of five former aides to the jailed Ponzi schemer, including Daniel Bonventre, former head of Madoff's back-office operations. One witness that the defense wants to call to the stand is Paul Babiak, Ph.D., described by Bonventre's attorney as a world authority on psychopaths in the workplace.

Bonventre and four other former Madoff colleagues stand accused by the government of having participated in Madoff's $17 billion swindle, for which Madoff is now serving a 150-year prison sentence in North Carolina. At issue is whether they were duped by Madoff or knew they were helping to perpetrate a crime.

Babiak, a licensed psychologist, is co-author with psychologist Robert Hare of Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work.

Bonventre's attorney, Andrew Frisch, wrote in a court filing last week that Babiak has studied corporate psychopaths extensively. His expertise includes the ability of psychopaths to deceive and manipulate those around them, Frisch wrote in the filing. "If Dr. Babiak is called to testify, we expect him to say in substance that Mr. Madoff's conduct is consistent with that of a corporate psychopath," Frisch wrote.

According to Frisch, Babiak's research shows that the more time an employee spends with a psychopathic boss, the greater the employees' vulnerability to being duped and "the greater the likelihood [the employee] will buy into the con and accept the psychopath's legitimacy." So, was Bonventre conned? Did he believe in Madoff's legitimacy? Those are questions Babiak could address -- that is, if he were allowed to testify. The prosecution would just as soon that he did not.

Comment: See also:

Ponerology 101: The Psychopath's Mask of Sanity


Alarm Clock

Saudi Arabia's "Stalingrad"

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The trolleybus bombed on 30 December, 2013
The problems of Islamic countries have long been high on the agenda of global politics and the international media. The crisis there continues to grow, drawing in new countries and regions. If it reaches Saudi Arabia - the most influential country in the Arab world - what then? Will the United States continue to support its regional ally?

Saudi Arabia has challenged the entire world

Recent information has come to light that terrorists from the Islamist group Ansar al-Sunna have taken responsibility for the attacks late last year in Volgograd. The text of the militants' statement was posted on several Islamist websites, and a video by the mujahideen from the insurgency group Ansar al-Sunna, led by Emir Umar, was published on YouTube. A video clip posted on the Internet on Jan.19 showed two young men who call themselves Suleiman and Abdurrahman and are holding submachine guns. It claims that these were the bombers.

USA

French president Hollande goes to Washington to receive his orders

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© Jacquelyn Martin/APUS, French and Washington DC flags fly across the street from the White House.
- Senior official: 'Alliance has grown by leaps and bounds'
- French attitude to Iran creates distrust on Capitol Hill

François Hollande and Barack Obama were seeking to put images of cheese-eating surrender monkeys and awkward marital situations behind them, as they began an unusually warm three-day state visit at the home of Thomas Jefferson on Monday.

The two presidents declared theirs to be the new special relationship, in a joint newspaper column that focused on improved military co-operation between the US and what Washington officials now rarely fail to call America's "oldest ally".

"A decade ago, few would have imagined our two countries working so closely together in so many ways," they wrote, pointing to French support for planned US-led strikes in Syria that Britain refused to back, leaving Obama looking keenly for a reliable foreign partner.

Attention

Maryland legislators move to cut NSA headquarters from all state support

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NSA Headquarters Ft. Meade, Md.
It's lights out for the National Security Agency (NSA). State lawmakers in Maryland have filed emergency status legislation that seeks to cut the NSA's Ft. Meade headquarters off from all material support stemming from the state.

"Maryland has almost become a political subdivision of the NSA," Tenth Amendment Center Executive Director Michael Boldin said in a statement. "The agency relies heavily on state and local help. This bill bans all of it."

House Bill 1074 (HB1074) would ban the NSA facility from all public state utilities, ban the use of NSA collected evidence in court, ban universities from partnering with the NSA and ban all political subdivisions from assisting the NSA from within the state.

Cell Phone

NSA uses mobile phones to target death strikes

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© AFP
Be careful when you answer the phone.

That's the message you might heed when considering National Security Operations and CIA operations in Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan, according to a new report.

According to documents and an interview with an alleged former drone operator, the United States uses geolocation targeting that tracks the location of mobile phones to plot strikes on targets in countries where it believes militants are hiding out. Trouble is, they're not necessarily coupling it with information on the ground, meaning that strike targets can be determined by the locations of their phones alone.

What's more, the fact that the U.S. may rely solely on phone locations means that others can easily become victims of a strike. According the former drone operator quoted in the report, published Monday by Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill in First Look, those who believe they might be targets have taken to sharing SIM cards, meaning the actual identities of those carrying phones are obscured.