Puppet MastersS


Bizarro Earth

South African Miners Charged with Murder of 34 Colleagues Actually Shot by Police

Charlie Wells
New York Daily News
Thu, 30 Aug 2012 07:51 UTC
Prosecutors used a controversial doctrine called 'common purpose,' popular during the country's apartheid era, to make the charge.
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© Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesA picture taken on August 20 shows police standing guard as miners allegedly involved in violent clashes between protesting workers and police at the Marikana mine arrive at the Ga-Rankuwa courthouse.
Nearly 300 miners in South Africa were charged with murdering 34 of their colleagues Thursday - even though the dead were actually shot by police.

"It's the police who were shooting but they were under attack by the protesters, who were armed, so today the 270 accused are charged with the murders," Frank Lesenyego, a spokesperson for the National Prosecuting Authority, told the Associated Press.

This legal doctrine is controversial and was popular during apartheid. Known as "common purpose", it holds, said the spokesperson, "that people are charged with common purpose in a situation where there are suspects with guns or any weapons and they confront or attack the police and a shooting takes place and there are fatalities."

Many say this turns the victims into the perpetrators.

"The whole world saw the policemen kill those people," Julius Malema, a former youth leader of the African National Congress, told the BBC. He said the decision to charge the miners instead of the policemen was "madness."
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USA

Best of the Web: Hope and Change: France Falls Victim to Its Allegiance to the US

Thierry Meyssan
Voltairenet
Tue, 21 Aug 2012 18:03 UTC
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Meet the new bosses, same as the old
Most French people are primarily concerned about the economy and don't see international issues as something that affects them directly. They deplore the submissiveness of their leaders to the United States, but have learned to live with it. However, as argued by Thierry Meyssan, it is precisely the choices made at the foreign policy level that determine the currently poor health of the French economy.
François Hollande's presidential campaign largely consisted of denunciations of the catastrophic policies and the garish behavior of his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy. He pledged that change would come immediately. One hundred days after his election, Hollande may have altered the style of rule but not the policies which remain the same even as France sinks ever deeper into crisis.

The main themes being debated by the French press as well as the manner in which these themes are framed expose the rank submission of the French governing classes to U.S. domination. They also serve to justify that acquiescence.

The French people expected that once the elections were over several large firms would announce layoff plans. The release of an internal memo from France's biggest carmaker, PSA Peugeot Citroën, contemplating the closing of its factories in Aulnay-sous-Bois and Sevelnord and the elimination of more than 8,000 jobs, not counting all the ancillary employment, came as a bombshell. The government responded with empty gestures by summoning the CEO of the PSA, questioning his competence while falling back on a stereotypical portrayal of a big boss exploiting the working class.
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Target

Best of the Web: Syria in the crosshairs: The Brahimi Plan

Thierry Meyssan
Voltairenet
Wed, 29 Aug 2012 17:48 UTC
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The Western press is saluting the audacity of Lakhdar Brahimi for having picked up the gauntlet by accepting to replace Kofi Annan as Special Representative of the Secretary Generals of both the United Nations and the Arab League in Syria. However, according to Thierry Meyssan, the truth of the matter is starkly different. Given the current failure of outright regime change in Damascus, this NATO confidence man has been entrusted with the task of unleashing all-out civil war in Syria.
In the aftermath of the second Russian-Chinese veto which formally prohibited foreign intervention in Syria on February 4, the West feigned seeking peace while actively organizing a vast secret war. On the diplomatic front, they appeared to accept the Lavrov-Annan Plan, even as these same countries were facilitating the movement into Syria of tens of thousands of mercenaries and while UN Observers were escorting the leaders of the Free Syrian Army to get them through the roadblocks.

The July 18th attack that decapitated the Syrian military command was intended to open the gates of Damascus for these Contras as part of the West's pursuit of "regime change." This did not happen. Given the failure of these forces on the ground, and in open contempt of the third Russian-Chinese veto, the Western allies took things to the next level. Not being able to accomplish "regime change", the strategic choice is to sew chaos. They therefore sabotaged the Lavrov-Annan Plan and proclaimed their intention to assassinate President Bashar al-Assad. The speeches of Obama and Hollande, both of which delivered sharp ultimatums on Assad's hypothetical first-use of chemical weapons (in ways flagrantly reminiscent of the Bush Administration's lies about Iraq) confirm that all forms of war are in play.
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Bad Guys

Buying the Presidency: The Right-Wing Billionaires Behind Mitt Romney

Tim Dickinson
Rolling Stone
Thu, 24 May 2012 17:23 UTC
Mitt Romney
© Mario Tama/Getty Images Mitt Romney addresses members of the press on his campaign's private plane enroute to Washington, DC.
They're trying to buy a presidency - and they expect a big payoff on their investment

Presidential politics has always been a rich man's game. But now, thanks to the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United that upended decades of limits on campaign donations, financing a presidential race is the exclusive domain of the kind of megadonor whose portfolios make Mitt Romney look middle-class. "I have lots of money, and can give it legally now," Texas billionaire and top GOP moneyman Harold Simmons recently bragged to The Wall Street Journal. "Just never to Democrats."

In past elections, big donors like Simmons gave millions for advocacy groups like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. By law, such groups were only allowed to run issue ads - but instead they directly targeted John Kerry, drawing big fines from the Federal Elections Commission. Now, with the blessing of the Supreme Court, the wealthy can legally hand out unlimited sums to groups that openly campaign for a candidate, knowing that their "dark money" donations will be kept entirely secret. The billionaire Koch brothers, for instance, have reportedly pledged $60 million to defeat President Obama this year - but their off-the-book contributions don't appear in any FEC filings.
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Newspaper

Best of the Web: Correspondence and collusion between the New York Times and the CIA

Glenn Greenwald
The Guardian
Wed, 29 Aug 2012 17:26 UTC
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© @marieharf, via TwitterCIA spokeswoman Marie Harf told New York Times national security reporter Mark Mazzetti to 'keep me posted' about a forthcoming Maureen Dowd column; he obliged.
Mark Mazzetti's emails with the CIA expose the degradation of journalism that has lost the imperative to be a check to power

The rightwing transparency group, Judicial Watch, released Tuesday a new batch of documents showing how eagerly the Obama administration shoveled information to Hollywood film-makers about the Bin Laden raid. Obama officials did so to enable the production of a politically beneficial pre-election film about that "heroic" killing, even as administration lawyers insisted to federal courts and media outlets that no disclosure was permissible because the raid was classified.

Thanks to prior disclosures from Judicial Watch of documents it obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, this is old news. That's what the Obama administration chronically does: it manipulates secrecy powers to prevent accountability in a court of law, while leaking at will about the same programs in order to glorify the president.

But what is news in this disclosure are the newly released emails between Mark Mazzetti, the New York Times's national security and intelligence reporter, and CIA spokeswoman Marie Harf. The CIA had evidently heard that Maureen Dowd was planning to write a column on the CIA's role in pumping the film-makers with information about the Bin Laden raid in order to boost Obama's re-election chances, and was apparently worried about how Dowd's column would reflect on them. On 5 August 2011 (a Friday night), Harf wrote an email to Mazzetti with the subject line: "Any word??", suggesting, obviously, that she and Mazzetti had already discussed Dowd's impending column and she was expecting an update from the NYT reporter.
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Eye 1

US is the Worst Police State in the World - By the Numbers

Glen Ford
Black Agenda Report
Tue, 28 Aug 2012 17:07 UTC
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'Super Max Prison' in florence Colorado
There's no getting around the fact that the United States is the Mother of All Police States. China can't compete in the incarceration business. With four times the U.S. population, it imprisons only 70 percent as many people - about the same number as the non-white prison population of the U.S. Even worse, 80,000 U.S. inmates undergo the torture of solitary confinement on any given day.

When U.S. corporate media operatives use the term "police state," they invariably mean some other country. Even the so-called "liberal" media, from Democracy Now to the MSNBC menagerie, cannot bring themselves to say "police state" and the "United States" without putting the qualifying words "like" or "becoming" in the middle. The U.S. is behaving "like" a police state, they say, or the U.S. is in danger of "becoming" a police state. But it is never a police state. Since these privileged speakers and writers are not themselves in prison - because what they write and say represents no actual danger to the state - they conclude that a U.S. police state does not, at this time, exist.

Considering the sheer size and social penetration of its police and imprisonment apparatus, the United States is not only a police state, but the biggest police state in the world, by far: the police state against whose dimensions all other police systems on Earth must be measured.
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Bad Guys

Exposing the Lies: The Federal Bailout That Saved Mitt Romney

Tim Dickinson
Rolling Stone
Wed, 29 Aug 2012 17:10 UTC
Mitt Romney
© Jewel Samad / AFP / Getty Images
Government documents prove the candidate's mythology is just that

Mitt Romney likes to say he won't "apologize" for his success in business. But what he never says is "thank you" - to the American people - for the federal bailout of Bain & Company that made so much of his outsize wealth possible.

According to the candidate's mythology, Romney took leave of his duties at the private equity firm Bain Capital in 1990 and rode in on a white horse to lead a swift restructuring of Bain & Company, preventing the collapse of the consulting firm where his career began. When The Boston Globe reported on the rescue at the time of his Senate run against Ted Kennedy, campaign aides spun Romney as the wizard behind a "long-shot miracle," bragging that he had "saved bank depositors all over the country $30 million when he saved Bain & Company."

In fact, government documents on the bailout obtained by Rolling Stone show that the legend crafted by Romney is basically a lie. The federal records, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that Romney's initial rescue attempt at Bain & Company was actually a disaster - leaving the firm so financially strapped that it had "no value as a going concern." Even worse, the federal bailout ultimately engineered by Romney screwed the FDIC - the bank insurance system backed by taxpayers - out of at least $10 million. And in an added insult, Romney rewarded top executives at Bain with hefty bonuses at the very moment that he was demanding his handout from the feds.
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Eye 1

Best of the Web: Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital

Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone
Wed, 29 Aug 2012 16:16 UTC
mitt romney
© Rolling Stone / Robert Grossman
How the GOP presidential candidate and his private equity firm staged an epic wealth grab, destroyed jobs - and stuck others with the bill

The great criticism of Mitt Romney, from both sides of the aisle, has always been that he doesn't stand for anything. He's a flip-flopper, they say, a lightweight, a cardboard opportunist who'll say anything to get elected.

The critics couldn't be more wrong. Mitt Romney is no tissue-paper man. He's closer to being a revolutionary, a backward-world version of Che or Trotsky, with tweezed nostrils instead of a beard, a half-Windsor instead of a leather jerkin. His legendary flip-flops aren't the lies of a bumbling opportunist - they're the confident prevarications of a man untroubled by misleading the nonbeliever in pursuit of a single, all-consuming goal. Romney has a vision, and he's trying for something big: We've just been too slow to sort out what it is, just as we've been slow to grasp the roots of the radical economic changes that have swept the country in the last generation.
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Evil Rays

Public Schools Use RFID Chips to Track and Punish Students For Pre-Crime

Susanne Posel
Activist Post
Thu, 30 Aug 2012 10:24 UTC
fun barcode

In the San Antonio school district, the Student Locator Project (SLP) is being beta-tested at Jay High School and Jones Middle School - two schools in the Northside district. The SLP includes the use of radio frequency identification technology (RFID) to "make schools safer, know where our students are while at school, increase revenues, and provide a general purpose 'smart' ID card."

In order to check out school library books, register for classes, pay for school lunches, the "smart" ID card is being employed to trace and track students and their movements on campuses all across America. By using leverage of educators to coerce school districts to adopt this method of tracking students, the argument for the use of the RFID technology is campus safety, efficient registration, and food and library programs.

In Austin, Texas, collaboration with the Global Positioning System (GPS) and RFID technology is being used to deter students from skipping classes. In fact, those students having a negative record with the school they attend are being targeted to be under surveillance.

An estimated 1,700 students have already been pledged to the program with parental permission. These students are assigned a "mentor" who oversees the actions of the students and to whom the students must contact on a weekly basis to report to. This is reminiscent of having a parole officer for student who have not committed a crime, yet are being touted as pre-criminals.
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USA

Suppressing Freedom and Democracy: US arms sales triple in one year


Russia Today, America
Thu, 30 Aug 2012 09:32 UTC

According to recent reports, the US leads the globe in weapons sales. In 2011, arms deals tripled to a record high resulting in over $66 billion in revenue. In the global market, the US accounts for 79 percent of weapons sales with most of the clientele being in the Persian Gulf. So how did America become the number one sales dealer worldwide? Anthony Shaffer, with the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, joins us with his take on the sales of arms.
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