Puppet MastersS


Black Cat

New details in Hastert allegations 'paint a horrifying picture of a monster'

Steve Benen
MSNBC
Mon, 11 Apr 2016 18:28 UTC
Pedophile Dennis Hasert
© Paul Beaty/APFormer House Speaker and serial child molester Dennis Hastert arrives at the federal courthouse, June 9, 2015
Nearly a year later, it still seems hard to believe. As we discussed last May, a criminal indictment against former House Speaker Dennis Hastert was made public, alleging that an unnamed person approached the Illinois Republican and confronted him over misdeeds that happened "years earlier." Soon after, the Republican began paying the unnamed person through a series of cash installments. According to the allegations at the time,

Hastert agreed to pay $3.5 million in order to "compensate for and conceal" unspecified "misconduct." The former GOP leader was charged, not for the misdeeds, but for his attempts to cover them up, including alleged lies to the FBI. Four months later, Hastert issued a guilty plea on the charges related to his financial improprieties, but as the sentencing phase gets underway, prosecutors are now adding crushing details to the case against the former Speaker.
Justice Department prosecutors said Friday that former House speaker Dennis Hastert abused four young boys when he was their wrestling coach and urged that he be ordered to serve up to six months in prison when he's sentenced later this month. [...]


Comment: Up to 6 months for sexually abusing four children?! Only in a pathocracy.


For the first time, government lawyers said Hastert made payments to a man who was sexually abused at age 14 by Hastert when he was the boy's wrestling coach. Prosecutors said the abuse also involved "other minors," and included touching their genitals or engaging in oral sex.
In their court filings, prosecutors, seeking a harsh penalty, took aim at "the actions at the core of this case took place not on the defendant's national public stage but in his private one-on-one encounters in an empty locker room and a motel room with minors that violated the special trust between those young boys and their coach."

The allegations paint a horrifying picture of a monster. They also raise an alarming realization that Dennis Hastert - the longest serving Republican House Speaker in American history, a man who was two heartbeats from the presidency of the United States for eight years - allegedly spent part of his life as a serial child molester, unbeknownst to anyone except Hastert and his victims.

Comment: The former GOP served as Speaker of the House under Bush and Clinton and this isn't the first time he's been accused of sexual crimes against children. It's interesting that it this should come out when Killary is running for president. Almost 10 years ago, Sott.net's Joe Quinn wrote about the crimes of Hastert and Mark Foley. Why did it take 10 years to get Hastert in the dock? See also:

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War Whore

Snakes in suits: British military firm hired ex-child soldiers from Sierra Leone for Iraq operations


RT
Mon, 18 Apr 2016 06:58 UTC
Child soldier
© Plus PicturesPRO/Vimeo

Comment: If you need any more blatant evidence that psychopathic CEOS see human beings as little more than disposable fodder for war and profit, here it is. The rationalization for children suffering the atrocities of war, fighting and dying for Western hegemony is just mind boggling.


Former child soldiers from Sierra Leone have been employed by a private British military company to provide security for American bases in Iraq as part of a 2,500-strong contingent hired for the job, a new Danish documentary has revealed.

According to investigation based on contract documents, UK's Aegis Defense Services contracted by US Department of Defense employed some 2,500 mercenaries to provide security force for the Pentagon-administered Project and Contracting Office (PCO) in Iraq.

Part of the security force, according to a documentary, titled "Børnesoldatens Nye Job" ("The Child Soldier's New Job") included child soldiers from Sierra Leone who were paid only $16 a day.

"When war gets outsourced, then the company tries to find the cheapest soldiers globally. Turns out that that is former child soldiers from Sierra Leone. I think it is important that we in the West are aware of the consequences of the privatization of war," said the film's director, Mads Ellesøe, as quoted by the Guardian.

Aegis was hired by Washington starting from 2004 to provide security for American bases in Iraq. The firm initially employed British, American and Nepalese personnel to do the job. But from 2011, the firm started to employ fighters from Africa to cut costs.

Comment: See also:

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Light Saber

Islamist-linked group to defy ceasefire, declares battle on Damascus


RT
Mon, 18 Apr 2016 09:28 UTC
Jaysh-Al-Nasr
© twitter.comJaysh Al-Nasr, the next generation.
A Syrian militant group called Jaysh Al-Nasr has announced plans to go into battle against government forces, claiming that it would respond with force to violations of the ceasefire. The declaration was sent to Reuters by Mohamed Rasheed, head of the group's media office. The statement didn't provide any details of the battle.

The group has its base of operations in the cities of Idleb and Hama and was formed in August last year as an alliance of 16 separate rebel units. It claimed to be operating under the umbrella of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), a US-backed band of Syrian fighters.

One of those groups, the Falcons of al-Ghab, was deemed moderate enough by Washington to be provided with BGM-71 TOW anti-tank missiles. It later merged with the powerful Islamist alliance called Ahrar Al-Sham along with two other rebel groups that formed Jaysh Al-Nasr. Damascus considers Ahrar Al-Sham terrorists and warned that it would not allow them to gain territory under the protection of the ceasefire, which was declared with US and Russian backing in February.

Jaysh Al-Nasr's latest major act was claiming the downing of a Syrian Army Mig-21 on March 12 near the village of Kafr Nabudah. The rebels killed the pilots of the plane after they ejected and reached the ground.

Comment: Morphing. The same old new enemy...like recombinant DNA. New name, new flag, same boss, same backing, same resolve, same agenda. Only worse.

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Smiley

SOTT Focus: Hysterical U.S. government officials try to BS the world about "Russian aggression"

Joe Quinn
Sott.net
Mon, 18 Apr 2016 19:31 UTC
Su-24 with Putin
© Facebook
In the latest in a long series of similar fleeting engagements between the US and Russian militaries, the USS Donald Cook was "aggressively buzzed" last week by two Russian Su-24 jets in the Baltic sea. Reports in the Western press echoed the response of US officials who called the maneuvers of the Russia jets "reckless" and "provocative". John Kerry went as far as to suggest that the Russian jets could have been shot down: "under the rules of engagement that could have been a shoot-down", the US Secretary of State said. For its part, the Pentagon flat-out lied, claiming it was a "simulated attack," even though the Russian aircraft approached "wings clean," without armaments, indicating no aggressive intent.

Readers will remember that the USS Donald Cook was previously buzzed by a Russian Su-24 in the Black Sea exactly two years before this latest incident, on April 12, 2014. At the time, several websites claimed that the Aegis Combat System of the American missile destroyer was completely neutralized by the 'Khibiny' electronic warfare complex on the Russian jet. Since then, the manufacturer of the system, Kret, has denied that the Su-24 was carrying their equipment:
"Nowadays Khibiny is being installed on Su-30, Su-34 and Su-35, so the famous April attack in the Black sea on USS Donald Cook by a Su-24 bomber jet allegedly using Khibiny complex is nothing but a newspaper hoax. The destroyer's buzzing did take place. This EW system can completely neutralise enemy radar, but Khibiny are not installed on Su-24s."
But while last week's 'incident' was very much par for the course in terms of the faltering Russia/NATO relationship in recent years, the response of US officials was very instructive in highlighting what US officials really think about the resurgence of Russia over the past 10 years, and the state of the East/West 'balance of power'.
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Snakes in Suits

Soft coup in Brazil - The Empire strikes back at BRICS nations

Eric Draitser
GlobalResearch
Mon, 18 Apr 2016 16:23 UTC
brics

First publishd by Mint Press and Global Research in March 2016, this incisive article provides an understanding of the soft coup in Brazil

Despite all the fancy anti-corruption rhetoric, the assault on President Rousseff's leftist government is the result of a coordinated campaign by business interests tied to Washington and Wall Street.

The last decade has seen a remarkable coalescing of non-Western nations in both economic and political partnerships. These multilateral institutions have been championed as alternatives to Western organs of political and economic power such as NATO, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.

From the growth of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to the establishment of the Eurasian Economic Union, China's "One Belt, One Road" strategy to link much of the Eurasian landmass via trade and investment, and most recently the establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, many have viewed these developments as essential for the decentralization of global power away from the imperial centers of Washington, Wall Street, London and Brussels.

But perhaps none of the emerging Global South international groupings has been more promising in terms of both public relations and real economic partnership than that of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).
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Bomb

Ankara's war on Kurds spills onto Syrian civilians across the border


RT
Mon, 18 Apr 2016 05:21 UTC
Map Qamishli
© brisbane.indywatch.orgAnkara's war against the Kurds in Nusaybin takes victims over the border in Qamishli, Syria.
While Ankara claims its ongoing military crackdown only targets terrorists, civilians often fall victim to the offensive - and not just in Turkey's Kurdish-populated provinces, but also across the border in Syria where people suffer from cross-border shelling daily.

Turkish authorities have banned journalists and human rights organizations from covering its military operations against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in the Nusaybin district in the southeastern Turkish province of Mardin. The only way to get a glimpse of the ongoing military action is to observe the so-called anti-terrorist operation from the relative safety of a Syrian town of Qamishli, which lies only 200 meters away from the Turkish army's positions. But journalists on Syrian territory are under the constant threat of stray shells coming from the Turkish side. RT has obtained an exclusive footage showing the Turkish military operation against Kurds from a local stringer.

At least two people including a child have been killed in Qamishli, according to an RT stringer on the ground, as a result of the cross-border artillery fire, which has continued at regular pace since early March, when Ankara launched the assault on Nusaybin. For over a month now, heavy artillery has been used against the civilian population of both cities. On average more than 10 shells hit Qamishli daily, locals on the Syrian side of the border told an RT crew. Indiscriminate artillery fire destroyed many houses, mosques and other civilian infrastructure.


Comment: Disconnect: Assad, set-up and falsely accused of a chemical weapon attack on his constituents suffers five years of war tearing apart his country and the killing hundreds of thousands by the Western coalition and their proxies. Erdogan, blatantly, unrelentingly massacres the Kurds, no matter the country, a clear breach of international law, and this has no intervention at all. It is never about the people or how many suffer. It is about pathocratic power and whose agenda is fulfilled at the end of the day.

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Jet1

Britain's secret kill list assassination program

Graham Vanbergen
TruePublica.org.uk
Thu, 14 Apr 2016 16:02 UTC
Predator drone
© Flickr/ KAZ Vorpal
An extraordinary story has just emerged from the human rights charity reprieve.org.uk who, as they say "help people who suffer extreme human rights abuses at the hands of the world's most powerful governments".

Their recently published report entitled Britain's Kill List accuses the Conservative government of extreme deception of parliament and therefore all citizens of Britain and the world more widely. Officially, Britain has never had a so-called 'kill list' but David Cameron had to admit to a limited extra judicial assassinations programme a few months ago, which we reported. There was little establishment media coverage and even less public response. But no-one thought this programme was as extensive and broad as has just been unearthed.

David Cameron's first speech as Prime Minister on May 11th 2010 falsely gave us some hope and can now only be seen as something as hypocrisy on steroids -
"If there's one thing I've noticed since doing this job, it's how all the information about government - the money it spends, where it spends it, the results it achieves - how so much of it is locked away in a vault marked sort of 'private for the eyes of Ministers and officials only ...' By bringing information out into the open you'll be able to hold government and public services to account."
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USA

Flashback It's about oligarchy, not democracy as most Americans have 'near-zero' policy input


RT
Fri, 15 Apr 2016 03:46 UTC
J Carter
© www.discussionist.com
The first-ever scientific study that analyzes whether the US is a democracy, rather than an oligarchy, found the majority of the American public has a "minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy" compared to the wealthy.

The study, due out in the Fall 2014 issue of the academic journal Perspectives on Politics, sets out to answer elusive questions about who really rules in the United States. The researchers measured key variables for 1,779 policy issues within a single statistical model in an unprecedented attempt "to test these contrasting theoretical predictions" - i.e. whether the US sets policy democratically or the process is dominated by economic elites, or some combination of both.

"Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts," the researchers from Princeton University and Northwestern University wrote.

While "Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association," the authors say the data implicate "the nearly total failure of 'median voter' and other Majoritarian Electoral Democracy theories [of America]. When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."


Comment: Organized pluralism: the theory that competing interest groups decide what the government does. Elitism: The theory that a small group of wealthy or well-connected people actually control the government.


Comment: Silence lets the oligarch grow stronger. And it has. Since this study came out, the only progress has been by the privileged elite. Americans were asleep on the watch. Now watching is pretty much all they can do.

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Bad Guys

Overuse of sanctions may hurt the US financial system: Adam Szubin says


RT
Mon, 18 Apr 2016 13:10 UTC
Capitol
© Jonathan Ernst / Reuters
The United States has long been imposing sanctions against regimes it dislikes. However, even the biggest proponents of the policy say it can strike back. "Sanctions are not a silver bullet, or the solution to every foreign policy crisis. And, even when sanctions do work, they can come with negative side effects for the United States or for the international financial system," said Adam Szubin the US Under-Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.

The Treasury official added that sanctions can impose serious costs and hit not only adversaries, but also US' allies. "They can strain diplomatic relations or dampen commercial activity. And they carry a risk of retaliation from targets," he said. Szubin also said the overuse of sanctions may hurt the US financial system, the hub of world business, and in the long-term the US could lose that status. "And if we lose that, we lose the very economic leverage that has made our sanctions so effective in the first place," he said.

According to Szubin, the Treasury Department now administers more than 30 sanctions programs across the globe. His warning came as Republicans seek ways of imposing new sanctions against Iran despite meeting all the requirements of the nuclear deal signed in 2015.

Comment: Kerry was quick to point the finger of blame at Russia for the MH-17 shoot-down on July 17,2014., even when his team knew the truth:
A source who had been briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts in that same time frame was telling me that it was already clear to them that an element of the Ukrainian military was responsible.

But hanging the slaughter of all those innocents around Russian President Vladimir Putin's neck was just too tempting - and served U.S. propaganda needs to get Europe to join in economic sanctions against Russia and to let the U.S. government rev up a new and costly Cold War.
See also:

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MIB

Daesh fanatics discovered working as European Parliament chauffeurs


Sputnik
Sat, 16 Apr 2016 17:45 UTC
Daesh propaganda material has been discovered in the possession of two members of the chauffeur service for the European Parliament

European Parliament
© Flickr/ European ParliamentEuropean Parliament
Two chauffeurs who worked as drivers for Members of the European Parliament have been caught with Daesh propaganda CDs, Der Spiegel reported.

Sources told the newspaper that both drivers are now being investigated by the police. One of the drivers worked for the EU in Strasbourg, and the other worked in Brussels.

As a result of the revelations, the European Parliament decided on Monday to stop using the services of private chauffeur companies, and instead employ drivers directly via the Parliament.

Comment: It must be quite unnerving as a member of the European Parliament to be hearing that people working so close to them are involved with terrorist organisations. Such a frightening scenario for them would surely make them a lot easier to be convinced to put forward, vote for and pass more draconian legislations, eroding freedom for the sake of 'safety'.

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