Puppet MastersS


Snakes in Suits

Was Osama Bin Laden a CIA asset named Tim Osman?

With friends like these, does the CIA need enemies?

A look at the evidence that the US regime created Bin Laden's 'al Qaeda' by recruiting disaffected and unemployed youths from Muslim countries and shuttling them to Afghanistan via the US embassy in Saudi Arabia.


Dollar

A priest, a banker and a spook walk into The Vatican's money-laundering rabbit hole...

Scarano
© AP Photo/Francesco PecoraroMonsignor Nunzio Scarano is under investigation.
A priest, a banker and a spook... not the start of a joke or a John LeCarre spy novel, but merely the latest addition to a long list of financial scandals involving the Vatican Bank. Yet despite its quasi comedian if convoluted plotline, the latest attempt to defraud the Catholic church will likely pale in comparison to the most infamous incident involving the Institute of Religious Works (or IOR) as the Vatican Bank is also known.

That one involves one Roberto Calvi, the chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, who in 1982 was found hanging from London's Blackfriars bridge, a short distance away from JPMorgan's gold vault, his pockets stuffed will cash and bricks in what at the time was a presumed hit by the mafia taking revenge for funds lost through the collapse of Calvi's bank - a bank in which the Vatican was a significant shareholder.

That particular murder will likely remain unsolved, and the question whether the Vatican uses the mob as its tool of "retribution and righteous punishment" will remain unanswered, as the man who stonewalled the Vatican's response at the time on the grounds of sovereign immunity: the US archbishop Paul Marcinkus who was then-head of the Vatican Bank, took his secrets to the grave with him in 2006.

This time, however, with plenty of living loose ends, we may finally get a glimpse into how deep the rabbit hole involving the legal, and more importantly illegal, (ab)use of Catholic funds really goes.

Fast forward to today when we learn courtesy of the FT that the priest involved in the developing financial scandal is one Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, 61, a banker-turned priest, who was ordained at the age of 35 after working for many years at the Banca d'America e d'Italia, a Naples-based lender which was acquired in the late 1980's by Deutsche Bank. His Vatican career began in the financial wing of the Holy See, or Apsa, where he worked his way up to a senior post in the organization's analytical accounting division. He had been recently suspended once the Vatican learned he was under investigation for alleged money laundering.

Network

How the NSA is still harvesting your online data

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© guardian.co.ukThe NSA collects and analyzes significant amounts of data from US communications systems in the course of monitoring foreign targets.
Files show vast scale of current NSA metadata programs, with one stream alone celebrating 'one trillion records processed'

A review of top-secret NSA documents suggests that the surveillance agency still collects and sifts through large quantities of Americans' online data - despite the Obama administration's insistence that the program that began under Bush ended in 2011.

Shawn Turner, the Obama administration's director of communications for National Intelligence, told the Guardian that "the internet metadata collection program authorized by the Fisa court was discontinued in 2011 for operational and resource reasons and has not been restarted."

But the documents indicate that the amount of internet metadata harvested, viewed, processed and overseen by the Special Source Operations (SSO) directorate inside the NSA is extensive.

While there is no reference to any specific program currently collecting purely domestic internet metadata in bulk, it is clear that the agency collects and analyzes significant amounts of data from US communications systems in the course of monitoring foreign targets.

On December 26 2012, SSO announced what it described as a new capability to allow it to collect far more internet traffic and data than ever before. With this new system, the NSA is able to direct more than half of the internet traffic it intercepts from its collection points into its own repositories. One end of the communications collected are inside the United States.

Eye 1

NSA collected US email records in bulk for more than two years under Obama

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© Pablo Martinez Monsivais/APThe internet metadata collection program was halted in 2011 for 'operational and resource reasons'.
- Secret program launched by Bush continued 'until 2011'
- Fisa court renewed collection order every 90 days
- Current NSA programs still mine US internet metadata


The Obama administration for more than two years permitted the National Security Agency to continue collecting vast amounts of records detailing the email and internet usage of Americans, according to secret documents obtained by the Guardian.

The documents indicate that under the program, launched in 2001, a federal judge sitting on the secret surveillance panel called the Fisa court would approve a bulk collection order for internet metadata "every 90 days". A senior administration official confirmed the program, stating that it ended in 2011.

The collection of these records began under the Bush administration's wide-ranging warrantless surveillance program, collectively known by the NSA codename Stellar Wind.

According to a top-secret draft report by the NSA's inspector general - published for the first time today by the Guardian - the agency began "collection of bulk internet metadata" involving "communications with at least one communicant outside the United States or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States".

Eventually, the NSA gained authority to "analyze communications metadata associated with United States persons and persons believed to be in the United States", according to a 2007 Justice Department memo, which is marked secret.

Dollars

Britain's queen set for 5% raise on back of bumper real estate profits

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UK taxpayers giving queen a pay raise
Britain's Queen Elizabeth II can expect a sweet 5% raise next year, thanks in large part to record profits from real estate.

The Crown Estate, a public body that manages property for the monarch, posted a record profit of 252.6 million British pounds ($387.2 million) for the last financial year -- up by 5.2% from last year.

The good news for the nation is that all the profit from the estate is paid into the public coffers.

The queen is then paid a grant each year by the Treasury equal to 15% of the profit from two years before.

Handcuffs

Chilean students arrested in school raids after protests

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The clashes were among the worst in Santiago since protests began in 2011
Chilean police have arrested 122 people, many of them teenagers, after raiding secondary schools that had been taken over by their students.

The schools are due to be used as polling stations on Sunday when Chileans choose candidates for the presidential election in November.

The occupation was part of a two-year campaign calling for education reforms.

Police clashed with students in the capital Santiago on Wednesday night after a national protest on Wednesday.

The violence was among the worst seen in Chile since the demonstrations began in 2011, the BBC's Gideon Long reports from Santiago.

The country's powerful student movement has staged major demonstrations over the past two years demanding free and improved education.

Sporadic school and university takeovers have been part of the campaign.

Star of David

'Al Qaeda leaders' exposed as American Jewish agents

Several alleged 'spokesmen', 'ringleaders' and 'recruiters' of nebulous international terror organisation 'The Database', a.k.a. ' al Qaeda', have been exposed as American citizens with strong connections to Jewish organizations. Does this make them 'self-hating Jews'... or something else?


Comment: Cousin of alleged 9/11 hijacker exposed as Mossad agent


Che Guevara

Best of the Web: Revolution of the Mind! Turks respond to government crackdown on protests by silently reading in Taksim Square

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© George Henton/Al JazeeraGeorge Orwell's dystopic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four centralises around a police state with total government surveillance.
After weeks of violent clashes between police and protesters across Turkey a new form of resistance has emerged - the "Standing Man".

Standing silently, and initially alone, Turkish performance artist Erdem Gunduz stood, with his hands in his pockets, facing the Ataturk Cultural Centre in Taksim Square, Istanbul, for eight hours.

With extraordinary speed, Gunduz become the latest symbol of the resistance movement. In days that followed, thousands of people would emulate his solitary act, standing silently, for minutes or hours, in places across Turkey.

The contrast with the images of tear gas clouds and water cannon could not have been greater. Faces obscured by masks and helmets were revealed to show expressions of quiet contemplation.

Violent scenes are still occurring around Turkey, including in Istanbul once again this past weekend, but the Standing Man protests continue unabated.

The following images explore one aspect of the protest in Taksim Square, ongoing since before the communal standing took off. Public reading and informal education has been notable since the earliest days of the protest, but has since merged with the Standing Man to form "The Taksim Square Book Club".

The chosen reading material of many of those who take their stand is reflective, in part, of the thoughtfulness of those who have chosen this motionless protest to express their discontent.

Comment: Let the elites eat data... while the people read books!

Imagine a sea of people reading Red Pill Press books...


Pyramid

Best of the Web: No need to pretend anymore: JP Morgan calls for authoritarian regimes in Europe

In a document released at the end of May, the American banking and investment giant JP Morgan Chase calls for the overturning of the bourgeois democratic constitutions established in a series of European countries after the Second World War and the installation of authoritarian regimes.

The 16-page document was produced by the Europe Economic Research group of JP Morgan and titled "The Euro Area Adjustment - About Half-Way There." The document begins by noting that the crisis in the euro zone has two dimensions.

revolution
Meanwhile, the people of countries like Turkey, Brazil, Greece, Spain and several others demand justice. Are those at the top in fear that they will soon demand their heads too? What will they try to do to avoid this scenario?
First, the paper argues, financial measures are necessary to ensure that major investment houses such as JP Morgan can continue to reap huge profits from their speculative activities in Europe. Second, the authors maintain, it is necessary to impose "political reforms" aimed at suppressing opposition to the massively unpopular austerity measures being carried out at the behest of the banks.

The report expresses satisfaction with the implementation of a number of financial mechanisms by the European Union to secure banking interests. In this respect, the study maintains, reform of the euro area is about halfway there. The report does, however, call for more action by the European Central Bank (ECB).

Comment:
"Political systems around the periphery typically display several of the following features: weak executives; weak central states relative to regions; constitutional protection of labour rights; consensus-building systems which foster political clientalism; and the right to protest if unwelcome changes are made to the political status quo. The shortcomings of this political legacy have been revealed by the crisis. "
Unbelievable! So, according to JP Morgan, the problem is not that they have the power to destroy the economies of the world in order to enrich the already obscenely rich members of the financial elite. The problem, you see, is that the masses still have a few rights here and there to protest the theft.

Thus is the thinking of psychopaths.

We wonder what this 'Let them eat cake' attitude will bring to the likes of JP Morgan. If history serves as an indicator, it might not be pretty. Then again, it is perhaps their fear of Madame Guillotine that encourages them to seek absolute power over the rest of us.


Eye 1

Best of the Web: Anti-empire report #118: Eavesdropping on the planet


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© rt.com
Edward Snowden


In the course of his professional life in the world of national security Edward Snowden must have gone through numerous probing interviews, lie detector examinations, and exceedingly detailed background checks, as well as filling out endless forms carefully designed to catch any kind of falsehood or inconsistency. The Washington Post (June 10) reported that "several officials said the CIA will now undoubtedly begin reviewing the process by which Snowden may have been hired, seeking to determine whether there were any missed signs that he might one day betray national secrets."

Yes, there was a sign they missed - Edward Snowden had something inside him shaped like a conscience, just waiting for a cause.

It was the same with me. I went to work at the State Department, planning to become a Foreign Service Officer, with the best - the most patriotic - of intentions, going to do my best to slay the beast of the International Communist Conspiracy. But then the horror, on a daily basis, of what the United States was doing to the people of Vietnam was brought home to me in every form of media; it was making me sick at heart. My conscience had found its cause, and nothing that I could have been asked in a pre-employment interview would have alerted my interrogators of the possible danger I posed because I didn't know of the danger myself. No questioning of my friends and relatives could have turned up the slightest hint of the radical anti-war activist I was to become. My friends and relatives were to be as surprised as I was to be. There was simply no way for the State Department security office to know that I should not be hired and given a Secret Clearance. 1

So what is a poor National Security State to do? Well, they might consider behaving themselves. Stop doing all the terrible things that grieve people like me and Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning and so many others. Stop the bombings, the invasions, the endless wars, the torture, the sanctions, the overthrows, the support of dictatorships, the unmitigated support of Israel; stop all the things that make the United States so hated, that create all the anti-American terrorists, that compel the National Security State - in pure self defense - to spy on the entire world.