Puppet MastersS


Che Guevara

Best of the Web: Largest demonstration in world history? 20 million people take to the streets in Egypt, give Muslim Brotherhood leader Morsi two days to step down... or face rebellion

Egypt's protest movement has given the president an ultimatum to step down by Tuesday or face a mass rebellion. Some 20 million outraged citizens have flooded cities across the nation in a show of frustration at Mohamed Morsi's failure to keep the promises he made when he came to power a year ago. At least 7 people have been killed and more than 600 injured during the rallies so far. RT's Bel Trew reports from Cairo.


Black Magic

FBI document: Unknown organisation planned to assassinate Houston Occupy Movement leaders "if necessary"

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Would you be shocked to learn that the FBI apparently knew that some organization, perhaps even a law enforcement agency or private security outfit, had contingency plans to assassinate peaceful protestors in a major American city - and did nothing to intervene?

Would you be surprised to learn that this intelligence comes not from a shadowy whistle-blower but from the FBI itself - specifically, from a document obtained from Houston FBI office last December, as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Washington, DC-based Partnership for Civil Justice Fund?

To repeat: this comes from the FBI itself. The question, then, is: What did the FBI do about it?

The Plot

Remember the Occupy Movement? The peaceful crowds that camped out in the center of a number of cities in the fall of 2011, calling for some recognition by local, state and federal authorities that our democratic system was out of whack, controlled by corporate interests, and in need of immediate repair?

That movement swept the US beginning in mid-September 2011. When, in early October, the movement came to Houston, Texas, law enforcement officials and the city's banking and oil industry executives freaked out perhaps even more so than they did in some other cities. The push-back took the form of violent assaults by police on Occupy activists, federal and local surveillance of people seen as organizers, infiltration by police provocateurs - and, as crazy as it sounds, some kind of plot to assassinate the "leaders" of this non-violent and leaderless movement.

Heart - Black

Psychopathic traits are useful tools in politics

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Is Kevin Rudd a psychopath?
Kevin Rudd is "a psychopath with a giant ego" tweeted the ALP's member for Bendigo, Steve Gibbons, last year.

Calling someone a "psychopath" is a provocative and alarming term that shouldn't be thrown around lightly - instantly conjuring up images of Ivan Milat, Charles Manson and John Jarratt in Wolf Creek.

It's also a term that's always fascinated me - as I'm uncomfortable with the idea our everyday lives are intertwined with people who are genuine, clinically diagnosed psychopaths.

And they're out there. In recent times there have been numerous articles written about psychopaths in the workplace - psychologist Robert Hare even wrote a book Snakes in Suits about psychopaths in the corporate world.

Comment: Making tough decisions is not a 'psychopathic trait'. Decisions are only 'tough' when someone tries to take all the known factors, and all the interested parties' points of view, into account. Psychopaths don't do this: they just do whatever pleases them, and with complete disregard for others.

More to the point; Psychopathic traits aren't just useful tools in politics today, psychopathic traits constitute the essence of the entire body politic today.


Stop

Without conscience: Israel Prison Service tries to break Eritreans' hunger strike

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© Eliyahu HershkovitzSaharonim detention facility in southern Israel.
Nearly 350 Eritrean migrants being held at the Saharonim detention center were transferred to other wings or other prisons.


In an attempt to end the hunger strike by Eritrean migrants being held at the Saharonim detention center, the Israel Prison Service on Sunday began transferring them to other wings in the prison, or to other facilities entirely.

The Prison Service moved about 344 detainees - some to other wings in Saharonim and others to prisons in the south, including the Ketziot Prison near the Egyptian border and the Eshel Prison in Be'er Sheva.

The IPS said that force was not necessary to transfer the detainees, although some passively resisted the move.

This morning 113 prisoners resumed eating, the IPS said. But 230 people from another section joined the strike and refused to accept the breakfast served to them.

MIB

Ex-NSA agent: Secret deals between U.S. and European governments to hand over private data to NSA have been in place for decades

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Wayne Madsen, an NSA worker for 12 years, has revealed that six EU countries, in addition to the UK, colluded in data harvesting.
Germany 'among countries offering intelligence', according to new claims by former US defence analyst

At least six European Union countries in addition to Britain have been colluding with the US over the mass harvesting of personal communications data, according to a former contractor to America's National Security Agency, who said the public should not be "kept in the dark".

Wayne Madsen, a former US navy lieutenant who first worked for the NSA in 1985 and over the next 12 years held several sensitive positions within the agency, names Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain and Italy as having secret deals with the US.

Madsen said the countries had "formal second and third party status" under signal intelligence (sigint) agreements that compels them to hand over data, including mobile phone and internet information to the NSA if requested.

Under international intelligence agreements, confirmed by declassified documents, nations are categorised by the US according to their trust level. The US is first party while the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand enjoy second party relationships. Germany and France have third party relationships.

Comment: So now Wayne Madsen, ridiculed to date as a 'conspiracy theorist' by mainstream commentators, is being cited as an authority in the Guardian?

Apparently the Guardian/Observer is already backtracking on this story because the article has been taken down, "pending an investigation."


Cult

Vatican rentboy and satanism claims revealed by paedophile priest Don Patrizio Poggi

Serving and former priests hired rentboys for sex in churches from pimp who sold consecrated hosts to satanists, says defrocked clergyman.

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© ReutersThe Vatican has denied Don Patrizio Poggi’s allegations over the existence of an underage prostitution ring.
Italian investigators have opened an inquiry into claims by a convicted paedophile priest that an underage prostitution ring has been operating inside the Holy Roman Church with clergymen hiring rentboys for sex inside churches.

Don Patrizio Poggi, 46, told Italian authorities that a former Carabinieri pimped boys for nine clergymen.

Poggi, who served a five-year sentence for abusing teenage boys while he was a parish priest at the San Filippo Neri church in Rome, said he made the allegations to "protect the Holy Church and the Christian community."

The boys were chosen because they were starving and desperate, he claimed, according to Il Messaggero newspaper.

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.