Puppet MastersS


Dollar

Billions of U.S. tax dollars potentially funding Afghan terrorism - report

Image
© AFP Photo / Rahmatullah AlizadAfghanistan security forces investigate the site of a roadside bomb blast in Saidabad district of Wardak province on April 8, 2013
Grey areas in US legislation could mean that taxpayer money is financing Afghan terrorism, a report has revealed. It calls on Congress to change the $100,000 threshold on reconstruction contracts to include the 80 percent that evade scrutiny.

The "alarming" findings were greeted with calls for urgent action to mend the weak links in US regulations.

The report, titled 'Contracting with the Enemy' and published by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), draws attention to the mismanagement of the Department of Defense's (DOD) funds.

According to the document, such oversights mean that "millions of contracting dollars could be diverted to forces seeking to harm US Military and civilian personnel and derail the multi-billion dollar reconstruction effort."

Last year, the US invested around $1.7 million and awarded 9,733 contracts in Afghanistan; it is unclear how much of this may have been diverted to the insurgency.

Gear

Not surprising: Guantanamo Bay hearing delayed after mysterious disappearance of legal files

Image
© AFP Photo / Janet HamlinCourtroom sketch by Janet Hamlin, shows terror suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, 46, who was arraigned at Wednesday's hearing on charges related to the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen.
Pre-trial hearings in the Guantanamo Bay war crimes tribunals have been delayed to address the disappearance of defense legal documents from Pentagon computers, military officials said on Thursday.

A weeklong hearing was scheduled to start on Monday for Abd al Rahim al Nashiri - a Saudi Arabian citizen alleged to be the mastermind of the bombing of the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen in 2000. The attack killed 17 US soldiers aboard the ship and wounded 37 others.


Comment: Interesting, and we thought it was quite obvious that Mossad and CIA were behind it, but hey, we don't live in the perfect Universe.


But the trial has now been pushed back to June 11, the US naval base said in an order on Thursday.

It comes just one day after Nashiri's lawyer, Ricard Kammen, urged Army Colonel James Pohl - who oversees the war crimes court - to cancel this week's hearing.

He said that officials mishandled more than 500,000 defense lawyer emails and appear to be monitoring their internet searches as they prepare their cases. Kammen also addressed the disappearance of documents, which he blamed on a Pentagon server failure.

"We want to put the case on hold...to find the scope of the intrusions," Kammen said in a Wednesday statement quoted by Reuters. "Was this the product of negligence or something worse? Also, we need to have the problem fixed."

Stormtrooper

NORAD conducts exercise flights over Rhode Island and Massachusetts

Image
The North American Aerospace Defense Command is conducting exercise flights Thursday over Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts.

The flights are scheduled for the morning, but could be delayed due to weather concerns. The purpose of the exercise is to practice intercept and identification procedures.

The flights are scheduled to take place in the area between Providence and Plymouth, Mass. People in this area may hear and/or see NORAD-controlled fighter jets in close proximity to a military or military contracted aircraft, which will be taking on the role of aircraft of interest.

Che Guevara

Privacy backlash against CISPA cybersecurity bill gains traction

Image
© Credit: C-SPANHouse members during last year's floor debate on CISPA (clockwise from top left): Jared Polis, who warned it would "waive every single privacy law ever enacted"; Adam Schiff; Sheila Jackson Lee; Hank Johnson; Mike Rogers; Jan Schakowsky
A petition to the White House asking the president to "stop" a controversial cybersecurity bill passes the 100,000 mark. The only problem: President Obama has already threatened to veto it.

It's not exactly a secret where President Obama stands on a controversial Republican-backed cybersecurity bill: he's already promised to veto it.

But a cadre of Internet activists opposed to the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act nevertheless created a petition to the president asking him to "stop CISPA" -- and it has crossed the 100,000-signature threshold necessary to secure a response from the administration.

In reality, there's little Obama can do to stop CISPA that he hasn't already done. The administration offered a stark warning in last year's veto threat, which talked up a competing Democrat-backed bill and predicted CISPA "will undermine the public's trust in the government as well as in the Internet by undermining fundamental privacy, confidentiality, civil liberties, and consumer protections."

CISPA is controversial because it overrules all existing federal and state laws by saying "notwithstanding any other provision of law," companies may share information "with any other entity, including the federal government." It would not, however, require them to do so.

That language has alarmed dozens of advocacy groups, including the American Library Association, the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Reporters Without Borders, which sent a letter (PDF) to Congress on Monday opposing CISPA. It says: "CISPA's information sharing regime allows the transfer of vast amounts of data, including sensitive information like Internet records or the content of e-mails, to any agency in the government."

Red Flag

Missouri highway patrol gave feds list of concealed gun permit holders

Image
© Reuters
The Missouri State Highway Patrol acknowledged Thursday that it has twice provided a list of 163,000 Missouri residents with concealed gun permits to a federal investigator - an admission immediately seized upon by Republicans as grounds for further investigations, firings and potentially even criminal charges against state officials.

Testifying before a Senate committee, Highway Patrol Col. Ron Replogle said the concealed guns list was given to an investigator looking into potential fraud involving Social Security benefits for the disabled. But he said the investigator never was able to read the encrypted information and ultimately destroyed the computer discs.

Republicans expressed concern that the privacy rights of Missouri residents are being infringed, but members of Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon's administration insisted there was nothing wrong with the information sharing.

Cult

Bryan Fischer: 'Homofascists' will treat Christians like Jews in the Holocaust

Image
The director of issues analysis of the fundamentalist American Family Association (AFA) on Thursday warned that "homofascists" were going to make anti-LGBT Christians wear badges like Jews had to wear during the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.

During his Focal Point radio show, AFA's Bryan Fischer explained that he was outraged that Dr. Ben Carson decided to drop out as commencement speaker at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine after his comments linking same sex marriage to bestiality.

"If you don't believe in sodomy-based marriage, you're not prepared to endorse and sanction sodomy-based marriage, you have no place in this institution," Fischer complained. "So we're getting to the point - I don't know what the emblem would be - remember when the Jews in Nazi Germany, they had to wear a yellow Star of David on their sleeve? I mean, we're getting to the point now, that's what they're going to make us do."

Snakes in Suits

Palestinian prime minister's resignation complicates U.S. plan

Salam Fayyad, Obama
© Reuters/Jason ReedU.S. President Barack Obama (R) watches a cultural event alongside Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad at the Al Bireh Youth Center in Ramallah March 21, 2013.
Palestinian officials and the United States voiced optimism on Sunday that the resignation of U.S.-backed Prime Minister Salam Fayyad would not hinder Washington's planned development initiative for the West Bank.

Fayyad quit on Saturday after months of tension with President Mahmoud Abbas, leaving the Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited self-rule in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, in confusion just as the United States tries to revive peace talks with the Jewish state.

His exit came less than a week after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visited and promised a plan to remove "bottlenecks and barriers" to economic development in the West Bank.

Kerry told reporters in Tokyo on Sunday the United States would pursue its initiative "no matter what" and there is "more than one person that (the United States) can do business with".

"We will continue to work at this and hope that President Abbas finds the right person to work with him in a transition and to work with us and to establish confidence," Kerry said.

U.S.-educated Fayyad, a former World Bank official, was appointed in 2007 and drew Western praise for his efforts to develop institutions fit for a future Palestinian state. But his popularity sank amid 25 percent unemployment and soaring prices.

Palestinian officials said Fayyad, trusted by the West as a non-corrupt conduit for aid funds, would not handle the U.S. development plan as interim caretaker prime minister.

Bad Guys

Best of the Web: The Orwellian Paradigm: Killing you, for your own safety

Orwell
© BBC
Almost thirty years ago, cultural critic Neil Postman argued in Amusing Ourselves to Death that television's gradual replacement of the printing press has created a dumbed-down culture driven by mindless entertainment. In this context, Postman claimed that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World correctly foresaw our dystopian future, as opposed to George Orwell's 1984.

Contrary to Postman's critique, however, the principles of Newspeak and doublethink dominate modern political discourse. Their widespread use is a testament to Orwell's profound insight into how language can be manipulated to restrict human thought.

War is peace

Formulating the Language of Perpetual War - From AUMF to "Associates of Associates."

The semantic deception began shortly after September 11, 2001. "Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda," Bush said in his State of the Union address, "but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated (emphasis added)."

Propaganda

Best of the Web: North Korea Psyop deception to deflect attention away from failing U.S. administration

North Korea
© n/a
So far the conflict between the USG and North Korean is a virtual false-flag only. A major Psyops designed to deflect attention away from a seriously failing US Administration which is pulling out all the stops to pass gun-control laws which are designed to eventually lead to complete confiscation.

This current conflict with North Korea has been engineered and portrayed as a real state of conflict when it is virtual only. In practical terms, North Korea and America are now only involved in a state of virtual war which is unlikely to be followed with an actual real shooting war.

Virtual war is an imaginary war fought only in the major mass media and the enemy is the news consumer or the public which is psychologically managed. Virtual war is a newer type of warfare which is a major Psychological operation, (aka a Psyop), that is, an act of Mindwar against the people.

Vader

Gitmo guards fire rounds during prison raid over protests

Image
© file imageInmates have been on a hunger strike for three months
Months of increased tension at the Guantanamo Bay prison, including an ongoing hunger strike, boil over into violent clashes.
Guantanamo Bay prison guards have fired several rubber shots to quell prisoner unrest as they moved inmates into individual cells, US military officials said.


The violence erupted during an early morning raid carried out because, according to military officials, prisoners had covered up security cameras and windows as part of a protest and hunger strike over their indefinite confinement and conditions at the US base in Cuba.

Prisoners fought guards with makeshift weapons that included broomsticks and mop handles when troops arrived to move them, said Robert Durand, a military spokesman.

Guards responded by firing four "less-than-lethal rounds" in the section of the prison known as Camp Six, he said.

Mr Durand said there were "no serious injuries to guards or detainees" during the operation aiming "to reestablish proper observation" at the facility.

The rounds included a modified shotgun shell that fires small rubber pellets as well as a type of bean-bag projectile, said Army Colonel Greg Julian.