Puppet MastersS


Stop

When truth tried to stop war

Ray McGovern
consortiumnews.com
Thu, 31 Jan 2013 13:06 UTC
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© Photo credit: Office of Tony BlairFormer British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
The year 2013 is the one-decade anniversary of the U.S. political/media system's failure to stop a criminal President from launching a war of aggression on Iraq. It was a shameful time when only a few brave individuals, like the U.K.'s Katharine Gun, did the right thing, ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern reports.

Ten years ago, Katharine Gun, then a 28-year-old British intelligence officer, saw an e-mailed memo from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) that confirmed for her in black and white the already widespread suspicion that the U.S. and U.K. were about to launch war against Iraq on false pretenses.

Doing what she could to head off what she considered, correctly, an illegal war of aggression, she printed a copy of the memo and arranged for a friend to give it to the London Observer. "I have always ever followed my conscience," she said, explaining what drove her to take such a large risk.

Those early months of 2003 were among the worst of times - and not just because the U.S. and U.K. leaders were perverting the post-World War II structure that those same nations designed to stop aggressive wars, but because the vast majority of U.S. and U.K. institutions including the major news organizations and the nations' legislatures were failing miserably to provide any meaningful check or balance.
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Gold Seal

The American empire, RIP

Justin Raimondo
antiwar.com
Thu, 31 Jan 2013 12:49 UTC
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Fall of Saigon
When will historians of the future date the beginning of the decline and fall of the American empire?

The question may seem presumptuous. The idea that the American Century is a relic of the past, and we are entering a "new world order" of divided rather than hegemonic power, is relatively new, and still controversial. There are those who insist it ain't necessarily so, primarily neocons of the second mobilization such as Robert Kagan, who are quick to reassure all right-thinking patriotic Americans that we're still Number One and warn against the fatal lure of committing "superpower suicide."

To the rest of us, however - that is, to everyone outside the neocons' cultic universe - the signs of the Great American Contraction are everywhere, most noticeably in the incomes, productivity, and general economic well-being of ordinary Americans. Our own CIA - never a friend to the neocons, but that's another story - avers this condition is the single greatest threat to our national security: not Iran, not terrorism, but the very real threat of national bankruptcy. Our national debt is over 100 percent of GDP.

I would make the case, however, that the seeds of American decline were planted much earlier, during the cold war era. And if I had to pick a specific date that marked the beginning of the end, I would settle on January 31, 1968 - the day the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces began the Tet offensive, which was militarily a setback for them, but politically disastrous for the administration of Lyndon Baines Johnson.
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Bizarro Earth

22 U.S. veterans kill themselves each day

Greg Jaffe
Washington Post
Fri, 01 Feb 2013 12:43 UTC
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© AP
Every day about 22 veterans in the United States kill themselves, a rate that is about 20 percent higher than the Department of Veterans Affairs' 2007 estimate, according to a two-year study by a VA researcher.

The VA study indicates that more than two-thirds of the veterans who commit suicide are 50 or older, suggesting that the increase in veterans' suicides is not primarily driven by those returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"There is a perception that we have a veterans' suicide epidemic on our hands. I don't think that is true," said Robert Bossarte, an epidemiologist with the VA who did the study. "The rate is going up in the country, and veterans are a part of it." The number of suicides overall in the United States increased by nearly 11 percent between 2007 and 2010, the study says.

As a result, the percentage of veterans who die by suicide has decreased slightly since 1999, even though the total number of veterans who kill themselves has gone up, the study says.
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Health

U.S. military struggling to stop suicide epidemic among war veterans

Ed Pilkington
Guardian
Fri, 01 Feb 2013 12:35 UTC
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© Photograph: Libby BusbeeWilliam Busbee was in many ways the archetype of the US soldier, and his mother feels he was let down by the army he loved so much.
Last year, more active-duty soldiers killed themselves than died in combat. And after a decade of deployments to war zones, the Pentagon is bracing for things to get much worse

Libby Busbee is pretty sure that her son William never sat through or read Shakespeare's Macbeth, even though he behaved as though he had. Soon after he got back from his final tour of Afghanistan, he began rubbing his hands over and over and constantly rinsing them under the tap.

"Mom, it won't wash off," he said.

"What are you talking about?" she replied.

"The blood. It won't come off."

On 20 March last year, the soldier's striving for self-cleanliness came to a sudden end. That night he locked himself in his car and, with his mother and two sisters screaming just a few feet away and with Swat officers encircling the vehicle, he shot himself in the head.

At the age of 23, William Busbee had joined a gruesome statistic. In 2012, for the first time in at least a generation, the number of active-duty soldiers who killed themselves, 177, exceeded the 176 who were killed while in the war zone. To put that another way, more of America's serving soldiers died at their own hands than in pursuit of the enemy.
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Sheriff

Pennsylvania governor's son-in-law gets caught stealing cash in FBI sting

Karen Araiza
NBC Philadelphia
Fri, 01 Feb 2013 12:24 UTC
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© GettyNarcotics officer Gerold Gibson
The narcotics officer is accused of taking money that was planted by the FBI

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett avoided answering reporter questions Thursday about the FBI and police investitgation into his son-in-law, but he did issue a brief statement.

Corbett's son-in-law is Gerold Gibson, a narcotics officer with the Philadelphia police force. He's under investigation by the feds and Philly's Internal Affairs Unit. Sources tell NBC10's Nefertiti Jaquez that Gibson was caught on hidden camera, taking money out of a car he was told to search. What Gibson didn't know, according to sources, is that that the money was planted in the car by investigators.
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V

Violence flares in Cairo as thousands protest Morsi regime throughout Egypt


RT.com
Fri, 01 Feb 2013 12:18 UTC
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© AFP Photo / Khaled DesoukiEgyptian protesters throw stones during clashes with riot police in front of the presidential palace in Cairo on February 1, 2013.
Protests turn violent in key Egyptian cities again on Friday, as thousands take to the streets to demand the end of Morsi's government.

Protesters threw petrol bombs and stones at the British Embassy in Cairo and clashed with the security guards, Al-Arabiya reported.

Cairo footage also showed angry crowds pushed back from the presidential palace by the police.

Al-Arabiya said there were sporadic clashes with the police in Cairo earlier, and several protesters were injured by rubber bullets.

Several thousand people have gathered in Tahrir square on Friday, RT's Bel Trew said.
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Eye 1

Heavily armed child soldiers fighting in Mali conflict - reports


RT.com
Fri, 01 Feb 2013 12:15 UTC
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Malian child soldiers are fighting in the country's conflict, journalists on the ground have reported. While French troops have boasted of the successful retaking of northern Mali from Islamist fighters, sectarian violence is worsening.

The three-week-long intervention has created havoc and misery, reporter Gonzalo Wancha said, adding that the scars of the conflict will likely last a lifetime.

"The war became a real nightmare for the Malians," Wancha told RT. "The French intervention left a pile of debris and ashes, but that's just the visible traces of the war they left."

Reporters have witnessed scores of armed children fighting in Mali. Local resident Mohamed Kandanku, shared his story of losing his brother to the armed youth:
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Megaphone

'U.S. a police state, Obama consciously allows torture' - CIA veteran John Kiriakou


RT.com
Fri, 01 Feb 2013 11:59 UTC

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© Reuters / Jim YoungDemonstrator Maboud Ebrahimzadeh is held down during a simulation of waterboarding outside the Justice Department in Washington
Ten years ago, the idea of the US government spying on its citizens, intercepting their emails or killing them with drones was unthinkable. But now it's business as usual, says John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent and torture whistleblower.

Kiriakou is now awaiting a summons to start a prison sentence. One of the first to confirm the existence of Washington's waterboarding program, he was sentenced last week to two-and-a-half years in jail for revealing the name of an undercover agent. But even if he had another chance, he would have done the same thing again, Kiriakou told RT.

RT: The judge, and your critics all seem to believe you got off lightly. Would you say you got off lightly?

JK: No, I would not say I got off lightly for a couple of very specific reasons. First of all, my case was not about leaking, my case was about torture. When I blew the whistle on torture in December 2007 the justice department here in the US began investigating me and never stopped investigating me until they were able to patch together a charge and force me into taking a plea agreement. And I'll add another thing too, when I took the plea in October of last year, the judge said that she thought the plea was fair and appropriate. But once the courtroom was packed full of reporters last Friday she decided that it was not long enough and if she had had the ability to she would have given me ten years.
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Nuke

With no way to process it, U.S. will bury 70,000 tons of nuclear waste


RT.com
Fri, 01 Feb 2013 11:38 UTC
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© Reuters / Sergei Karpukhin
With two decades to go before it can reprocess spent nuclear fuel, the US will have to bury nearly 70,000 tons of it, a research lab reports. It comes after Congress and the Obama administration defunded a planned nuclear waste repository in 2011.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a facility that does research for the Department of Energy (DOE), said that "about 68,450 [metric tons] or about 98 percent of the total current inventory by mass, can proceed to permanent disposal without the need to ensure retrievability for reuse or research purposes" in its report, published near the end of 2012. The rest of the waste, the report said, could be kept available for research on fuel reprocessing and storage.

The report was fairly obscure until being cited in a DOE document that showed plans to find a new permanent waste dump after Congress and the Obama administration cut funding for the Yucca Mountain repository in 2011.

Reprocessing has little support in Washington due to concerns that spent fuel could fall into the wrong hands. Nevertheless the DOE started looking into reprocessing methods in 2005.
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Heart - Black

NASA flight director says personnel knew Columbia crew would die but chose not to tell them

David Edwards
Raw Story
Fri, 01 Feb 2013 11:22 UTC
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© Wikipedia
A NASA flight director has revealed that personnel on the ground knew in 2003 that the Space Shuttle Columbia would not survive re-entry, but chose not to inform the vessel's crew. According to an ABC News report from Thursday, when faced with the choice of letting the astronauts die trying to come home or leaving them to orbit until their air ran out, high-ranking NASA officials chose to let the Columbia crew die in ignorance of what was to befall them.

Wayne Hale, who became a Space Shuttle program manager in the years after the Columbia disaster, wrote on his blog Thursday about the meeting among ground personnel at Johnson Space Center as they grappled with the decision. Video of Columbia's takeoff showed a briefcase-sized chunk of foam breaking off an engine and colliding with the shuttle's wing, gouging a hole in the shield designed to protect the craft from the furious heat generated as it crossed from the vacuum of space into the atmosphere.
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