The intensity and sweep of the Food and Drug Administration's efforts to spy on the communications of whistle-blowing employees suspected of leaking trade secrets to outsiders were astonishing. What started as an effort to monitor the e-mails of a single individual quickly grew to encompass five employees and their communications with other F.D.A. workers, journalists, Congressional staff members and two government offices that investigate allegations raised by whistle-blowers on what is supposed to be a confidential basis.
The surveillance began on April 22, 2010, after GE Healthcare, a unit of General Electric, requested an investigation of how information that it considered a trade secret had ended up in The New York Times on March 29, 2010. That article focused primarily on allegations about unwarranted radiation risks posed by a CT machine made by General Electric to screen patients for colon cancer; it quoted two of the whistle-blowers who would later come under surveillance and be let go.
Puppet Masters
© Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
Police officers made arrests on Liberty Street near Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan in March during an Occupy Wall Street protest.
Police officers made arrests on Liberty Street near Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan in March during an Occupy Wall Street protest.
The group, called the Protest and Assembly Rights Project, which included people involved with the law clinics at New York University School of Law and Fordham Law School, said that they had cataloged hundreds of instances of what they described as excessive force and other forms of police misconduct said to have taken place since September, when the Occupy Wall Street movement began.
Although the report referred to some well-known events, including Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna's use of pepper spray, it also detailed specific instances of alleged misconduct that had not appeared in news reports.
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USNORTHCOM and Leon Panetta, US Secretary of Defense, has readily admitted that US armed forces will collaborate with local law enforcement "if called upon".
In fact, more than 20,000 troops were brought home and readied for deployment within the US to assist in "civil unrest and crowd control".
The US military will prop up the US Secret Service "for operational security reasons we do not discuss the numbers of military personnel and resources that are involved. Additionally, we do not share our operational plans," said U.S. Navy Lt. Cdr. William G. Lewis.
The extent of use of military forces on civilian matters, as reported by mainstream media (MSM) have included the reallocation of hundreds of military police officers being trained to "assist local authorities" in investigation, crime scene and case building.
© Unknown
Iran's Ambassador to Russia Reza Sajjadi.
Iran's Ambassador to Russia Reza Sajjadi.
The issue was raised in a meeting between Iran's Ambassador to Russia Reza Sajjadi and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov in Moscow on Wednesday.
During the meeting, the two officials stressed the need to solve the current crisis in Syria through negotiations and peaceful means.
In a meeting to discuss the latest developments in Syria, the diplomats also exchanged views on bringing the Syrian case to the Security Council of the United Nations.
Sajjadi and Bogdanov also stressed the need to prevent any foreign interventions in the internal affairs of Syria urging foreign states to stop making non-constructive moves in Syria.
Apart from the fact that the DHS and the FBI released a memo in May this year to security and emergency services to be on the alert for a 'terrorist' attack at a movie theater; apart from the fact that on the same day as the Aurora massacre, Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine was holding an identical drill 17 miles away that simulated a shooter in a movie theater; apart from the fact that the FBI is officially known to have set up 'terror attacks' that included creating the plan, providing the weapons and equipment, preparing the location of the attack and even driving the vehicles to pull it off; APART from all that, there is the also the problem of the eyewitnesses to the Colorado shooting who stated that the gunman (James Holmes) seemed to have an accomplice.
© Skip Bolen/EPA
Barack Obama in New Orleans, where he pledged to seek a consensus between Democrats, Republicans and community leaders on reducing gun violence.
Barack Obama in New Orleans, where he pledged to seek a consensus between Democrats, Republicans and community leaders on reducing gun violence.
Barack Obama has broken the silence he has maintained on gun control since the Colorado shootings, making a plea for Democrats, Republicans and community leaders to "arrive at a consensus" on how to reduce gun violence across the United States.
At the end of a trip lasting several days that began in Aurora, Colorado, where he met with families and victims of the massacre in a cinema, the US president told an audience that such tragedies were replayed on a smaller scale in cities throughout the country on a daily basis.
"Every day and a half the number of young people we lose to violence is about the same as the number of people we lost in that movie theater," Obama said in remarks at the National Urban League Conference in New Orleans.
© Gilles Mingasson/Getty Images
Gun shop in Texas: sales of firearms have soared across the US following the Colorado massacre.
Gun shop in Texas: sales of firearms have soared across the US following the Colorado massacre.
In Colorado - the scene of Friday's shooting during the screening of a Batman film that killed 12 and injured dozens of others - gun sales jumped in the three days that followed. The state approved background checks for 2,887 people who wanted to purchase a firearm - 25% more than the average Friday to Sunday period in 2012 and 43% more than the same period the week before.
Dick Rutan, owner of Gunners Den in suburban Arvada, said requests for concealed-weapon training certification were "off the hook". His four-hour course in gun safety, required for certification for a concealed-weapons permit in Colorado, had drawn double the interest since Friday.
Comment: They have been deliberately flooding the US with affordable military-grade firearms for decades. Perhaps the deeper intention of apparently senseless acts like this horrific mass shooting is to rile gun owners into a defensive posture and thereby increase gun sales, not decrease them. As is outlined in The Controversy of Zion, the Powers That Be want global revolution, so that when it's over they can pick up the pieces and start with some new form of control. People don't realise that the 'security forces' are as expendable as civilians to the Powers That Be.
What those who constantly appeal to the US constitution's 2nd amendment don't seem to grasp is that if the government really wanted to "take away your guns" they would have done it long ago. They have deliberately allowed the mass arming of American civilians. Are we to suppose that this state of affairs happened by accident?
© AlaskaStock/Corbis
This is the image The Guardian selected to go with this article because they hope that you will still associate polar bears standing on icebergs with "man-made global warming"
This is the image The Guardian selected to go with this article because they hope that you will still associate polar bears standing on icebergs with "man-made global warming"
The loss of ice around the Arctic has adverse effects on wildlife and also opens up new northern sea routes and opportunities to drill for oil and gas under the newly accessible sea bed.
The reduction has been accelerating since the 1990s and many scientists believe the Arctic may become ice-free in the summers later this century, possibly as early as the late 2020s.
"Since the 1970s, there's been a 40% decrease in the summer sea ice extent," said Jonny Day, a climate scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading, who led the latest study.
"We were trying to determine how much of this was due to natural variability and therefore imply what aspect is due to man-made climate change as well."
Comment: What they're not telling you is that more meltwater from the Arctic ice sheets will dilute the Gulf Stream, presenting serious repercussions for the northern hemisphere:
Fire and Ice: The Day After Tomorrow
The only 'authoritarians' Latin America has ever had are those put in power by the US.
A recent article by The Washington Post's Juan Forero entitled 'Latin America's new authoritarians' is just the latest example of how the imperialists' media machine is relentlessly engaged in media warfare against sovereign nations in the South, in order to fertilise the ground for new or increased economic and military aggression against them. Such psy-op campaigns also seek to influence events on the ground in target nations, in this case in Venezuela ahead of the October elections where all signs point to another resounding victory for current President Hugo Chávez Frías.
The article is part of the psychological wing of what Nicaraguan based website tortilla con sal terms the West's "War on Humanity" in order to convince the world of the moral superiority of the minority (the Western elite/imperialists) over the majority so as to minimise the threat of a mass organised effort to challenge that minority's increasingly doomed attempts to achieve total global hegemony.
Their morals, the minority argues through its vast propaganda network which bombard the majority, are superior because they are universal and therefore must be defended and achieved regardless of the cost, including that of the destruction of entire nations, let alone millions upon millions of lives, whose governments stand in the way, Libya being the most recent example.
In the last few days there has been numerous reports that seem to indicate that once again the government and corporate controlled media are directly lying and possibly covering up a "black op" that resulted in at least a dozen deaths during a premier screening of the new Batman movie at a theater in Aurora, Colorado.
Now, yet another startling revelation has come to light and, like other bits of evidence released in the last two days, this "coincidence" adds to a series of facts that bear all the hallmarks of a false flag.
On the same day as the Aurora massacre, Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine was holding an identical drill that simulated a shooter in a movie theater.
Now, yet another startling revelation has come to light and, like other bits of evidence released in the last two days, this "coincidence" adds to a series of facts that bear all the hallmarks of a false flag.
On the same day as the Aurora massacre, Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine was holding an identical drill that simulated a shooter in a movie theater.
Comment: Surprise! Gun sales surge in US following Colorado shooting