Puppet MastersS


Bomb

Yemen violence: Bomb blast hits air force bus


BBC
Sun, 25 Aug 2013 07:09 UTC
Yemen bomb blast
© ReutersThe bus was travelling on the road leading to Sanaa international airport
A bomb blast has struck a bus transporting air force personnel to their base in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, killing at least six people, officials say. Several others are reported to have been wounded.

The bus was travelling on the road leading to Sanaa international airport, near the base, an official said. The government is battling al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula militants who often target the military.

Ameen Saree, an air force officer who rushed to the scene, said a bomb had been planted in the vehicle. "The bomb exploded in the rear part of the bus and six of our colleagues were immediately killed," he told Reuters news agency.

Air force spokesman Col Mahdi al-Aidarous said about 24 officers and soldiers were on the bus, the Associated Press news agency reports.
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Snakes in Suits

The confidential memo at the heart of the global financial crisis

Greg Palast
vice.com
Sun, 25 Aug 2013 05:58 UTC
Image
When a little birdie dropped the End Game memo through my window, its content was so explosive, so sick and plain evil, I just couldn't believe it.

The Memo confirmed every conspiracy freak's fantasy: that in the late 1990s, the top US Treasury officials secretly conspired with a small cabal of banker big-shots to rip apart financial regulation across the planet. When you see 26.3 percent unemployment in Spain, desperation and hunger in Greece, riots in Indonesia and Detroit in bankruptcy, go back to this End Game memo, the genesis of the blood and tears.

The Treasury official playing the bankers' secret End Game was Larry Summers. Today, Summers is Barack Obama's leading choice for Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, the world's central bank. If the confidential memo is authentic, then Summers shouldn't be serving on the Fed, he should be serving hard time in some dungeon reserved for the criminally insane of the finance world.
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Eye 1

Pay per gaze eyetracking: Stuffing eyeballs with ads

Max Keiser
RT.com
Sun, 25 Aug 2013 05:09 UTC
Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the Dutch blues and the pay per gaze advertising coming to a pair of glasses near you. Max proposes a scheme of mortgages collateralized by food stamps. In the second half, Max talks to Ann Pettifor of PrimeEconomics.org about the Alice in Wongaland economy in the United Kingdom where people borrow from payday lenders in order to live and, instead of lending to the economy, the economy is lending to banks. They also discuss interest rate apartheid, carry trades and public unrest.

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Mail

Cameron should probe Miranda detention, return data


Committee to Protect Journalists
Tue, 20 Aug 2013 22:21 UTC
The Rt. Hon. David Cameron
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
10 Downing Street
London SW1A 2AA
Great Britain

Via facsimile: (+44) 2079250918

Dear Prime Minister Cameron,

The Committee to Protect Journalists, an international media freedom organization, calls on you to launch a thorough and transparent investigation into the detention and harassment of David Miranda by the London Metropolitan Police and to ensure that his confiscated equipment and data are returned at once. The use of anti-terror laws to seize journalistic material from Miranda, partner and assistant to Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, is deeply troubling and not in keeping with the U.K's historic commitment to press freedom.
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Light Saber

Glenn Greenwald: Detaining my partner was a failed attempt at indimidation

Glenn Greenwald
The Guardian
Mon, 19 Aug 2013 22:10 UTC
miranda and greenwald
© The GuardianThe Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, right, and his partner David Miranda.
At 6:30 am this morning my time - 5:30 am on the East Coast of the US - I received a telephone call from someone who identified himself as a "security official at Heathrow airport." He told me that my partner, David Miranda, had been "detained" at the London airport "under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act of 2000."

David had spent the last week in Berlin, where he stayed with Laura Poitras, the US filmmaker who has worked with me extensively on the NSA stories. A Brazilian citizen, he was returning to our home in Rio de Janeiro this morning on British Airways, flying first to London and then on to Rio. When he arrived in London this morning, he was detained.

At the time the "security official" called me, David had been detained for 3 hours. The security official told me that they had the right to detain him for up to 9 hours in order to question him, at which point they could either arrest and charge him or ask a court to extend the question time. The official - who refused to give his name but would only identify himself by his number: 203654 - said David was not allowed to have a lawyer present, nor would they allow me to talk to him.
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HAL9000

So the innocent have nothing to fear? After David Miranda we now know where this leads

Simon Jenkins
The Gurdian
Tue, 20 Aug 2013 21:53 UTC
surveillance
© Yannis Behrakis/Reuters'But it remains worrying that many otherwise liberal-minded Britons seem reluctant to take seriously the abuses revealed in the nature and growth of state surveillance.'
The destructive power of state snooping is on display for all to see. The press must not yield to this intimidation

You've had your fun: now we want the stuff back. With these words the British government embarked on the most bizarre act of state censorship of the internet age. In a Guardian basement, officials from GCHQ gazed with satisfaction on a pile of mangled hard drives like so many book burners sent by the Spanish Inquisition. They were unmoved by the fact that copies of the drives were lodged round the globe. They wanted their symbolic auto-da-fe. Had the Guardian refused this ritual they said they would have obtained a search and destroy order from a compliant British court.

Two great forces are now in fierce but unresolved contention. The material revealed by Edward Snowden through the Guardian and the Washington Post is of a wholly different order from WikiLeaks and other recent whistle-blowing incidents. It indicates not just that the modern state is gathering, storing and processing for its own ends electronic communication from around the world; far more serious, it reveals that this power has so corrupted those wielding it as to put them beyond effective democratic control. It was not the scope of NSA surveillance that led to Snowden's defection. It was hearing his boss lie to Congress about it for hours on end.
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Stormtrooper

The real, terrifying reason why British authorities detained David Miranda

Bruce Schneiner
The Atlantic
Thu, 22 Aug 2013 19:01 UTC
Leviathan
Illustration from the original edition of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, by Abraham Bosse (1651)
The scariest explanation of all? That the NSA and GCHQ are just showing they don't want to be messed with.

Last Sunday, David Miranda was detained while changing planes at London Heathrow Airport by British authorities for nine hours under a controversial British law -- the maximum time allowable without making an arrest. There has been much made of the fact that he's the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian reporter whom Edward Snowden trusted with many of his NSA documents and the most prolific reporter of the surveillance abuses disclosed in those documents. There's less discussion of what I feel was the real reason for Miranda's detention. He was ferrying documents between Greenwald and Laura Poitras, a filmmaker and his co-reporter on Snowden and his information. These document were on several USB memory sticks he had with him. He had already carried documents from Greenwald in Rio de Janeiro to Poitras in Berlin, and was on his way back with different documents when he was detained.
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HAL9000

NSA's surveillance programs are the 'most serious attacks on free speech we've seen'

Josh Levy
Information Clearing House
Sat, 24 Aug 2013 18:50 UTC
protesters
© Bloomberg
The NSA's state surveillance programs are anti-democratic and unconstitutional. They could be the most serious attacks on free speech we've ever seen.

On Sunday, U.K. intelligence officers held Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald's partner David Miranda for nine hours at Heathrow Airport, confiscating his laptop, phone and documents and even forcing him to reveal his passwords to online accounts.

And on Monday, we learned that the British intelligence unit GCHQ demanded that the Guardian return all of the data related to Edward Snowden's leaks. The agents stormed the Guardian's London headquarters--even though the NSA reporting is flowing from the paper's New York office--and oversaw the destruction of journalists' computers and hard drives.

These were not just overly aggressive police actions. They were political moves designed to intimidate journalists and silence dissent.
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Evil Rays

Murdered American journalist Michael Hastings 'feared tampering with his mercedes'

David J. Krajicek
Who What Why
Fri, 23 Aug 2013 18:37 UTC
Hastings mercedes
© Los Angeles Times / Associated PressLAPD officers examine the scene of a car crash that killed journalist Michael Hastings, shown at right
A coroner's report that found traces of narcotics in the remains of journalist Michael Hastings has helped frame the prevailing story of his death as a tragic, troubled-soul narrative.

He apparently had relapsed into drug use, and just hours before the muckraker was killed in a car crash in Los Angeles, a sibling had arrived to urge him into rehab.

But in the broadest post-mortem profile to date, Gene Maddaus writes in the LA Weekly that Hastings told a neighbor he feared that the rental Mercedes sedan he died in had been tampered with. Maddaus writes:

"One night in June, he came to (neighbor Jordanna) Thigpen's apartment after midnight and urgently asked to borrow her Volvo. He said he was afraid to drive his own car. She declined, telling him her car was having mechanical problems.

Comment: On the strange death of Michael Hastings: Was the reporter car-hacked or bombed?

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Light Saber

International Human Rights Commission Chief: The Syrian army doesn't use chemical weapons, but those who exploit 'democracy, freedom and human rights' most certainly do


FARS News Agency
Sat, 24 Aug 2013 18:31 UTC
amin khan
Dr.Muhammad Shahid Amin Khan
Chief of the International Human Rights Commission (IHRC) Muhammad Shahid Amin Khan stressed that the Syrian army doesn't use any chemical weapons in facing the terrorists, "but those who exploit the mottoes of democracy, freedom and human rights are the ones who use these weapons against all Syrians".

Khan told al-Mayadeen TV Channel on Friday that the Syrian government is well cooperating with the UN investigation mission on the use of chemical weapons, therefore an independent objective investigation based on clear evidence should be conducted.

He pointed out that the armed terrorist groups are using the chemical weapons against the Syrians and accuse the Syrian government, in cooperation with some media.

The Syrian government expressed readiness for dialogue in the interest of the Syrian people, but the opposition rejects dialogue and continues the killing of the Syrian people supported by some foreign countries, he asserted.
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