Puppet Masters
© Unknown
Lloyd Blankfein
The chief executive of Goldman Sachs, which has attracted widespread media attention over the size of its staff bonuses, believes banks serve a social purpose and are doing "God's work".
In an interview with London's
Sunday Times newspaper, Lloyd Blankfein also said he believed big profits and bonuses at banks were a sign that the world economy was recovering.
"We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. We have a social purpose," the head of Goldman Sachs [GS 175.00 3.22 (+1.87%) ] told the paper.
Comment: Evidently loaning money at 'lofty' interest rates is Goldmans idea of being nearer to their god.
Part 1: Welcome to Pashtunistan
There must be some way out of here
Said the joker to the thief
There's too much confusion
I can't get no relief, - Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower
As Washington mashes up the "Taliban" - be they Afghan neo-Taliban or Pakistani Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP) - in Empire of Chaos logic to justify perennial United States/North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops stationed in AfPak, an increasing number of Pashtuns living on both sides of the border have seized the opportunity and started to look to the Taliban as a convenient facilitator for the emergence of Pashtunistan.
But the Pentagon, make no mistake, knows exactly how to play its New Great Game in Eurasia. Balkanization of AfPak - the break-up of both Afghanistan and Pakistan - will engineer, among other states, an independent Pashtunistan and an independent Balochistan. Empire of Chaos logic is still British imperial divide-and-rule, remixed; and, at least in theory, yields territories much easier to control.
What sort of privacy do you expect when you send an email? As Americans increasingly rely on the Internet for communication, Justice Department lawyers increasingly argue that Americans have no right to privacy there - notwithstanding repeated congressional efforts to bolster these rights. A recent case out of Oregon shows how the privacy expectation associated with emails and other Internet communications is being frittered away.
The government sought to subpoena the emails of a suspect in a criminal investigation. It issued a subpoena to Google, but it failed to give notice to the subscriber as the federal rules and statute would appear to require. The purpose of notice is fairly straightforward: it gives the subject the opportunity to contest the subpoena and puts him on notice of the government's investigation. Implementing the protections of the Fourth Amendment, isn't the subscriber entitled to notice? Not in the view of
Judge Michael Mosman:
"When the history of this distinguished court is written, today's majority decision will be viewed with dismay," writes Guido Calabresi, the former Yale Law dean and a man widely viewed as the most illustrious living member of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. He is lodging his dissent in a 7-4 decision of the en banc court concluding that a Canadian software engineer named Maher Arar has no right to sue government officials. What has Calabresi so worked up?
Fasten your seat belts; it's gonna be a bumpy ride. As a crucial subplot of the New Great Game in Eurasia, Balochistan - on both sides of the Iran-Pakistan border - promises turbulence aplenty. Welcome to United States General Stanley McChrystal's self-fulfillment prophecy - "Chaos-istan" in action.
There are few doubts the deadly (as many as 49 fatalities) suicide bombing on Sunday in Pishin, near Sarbaz, in the deserted, impoverished Iranian province of Sistan-Balochistan, was carried out by Pakistani Balochistan-based Jundallah ("Soldiers of God").
This is being billed by Iranian state-controlled media as the worst suicide bombing ever in the country. Key casualties include the number two of the armed forces of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Brigadier Nour-Ali Shoushtari, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, the provincial IRGC commander and assorted Sunni and Shi'ite tribal leaders.
The IRGC - the key component of the dictatorship of the mullahtariat currently in power in Tehran - is seething, to say the least. It is one thing to repress student protests in Tehran; but how could they not see this coming, and how could they not prevent it, considering their allegedly good ground intelligence on Jundallah's support by the US, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia?
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Israel's Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Ya'alon has confirmed that Israel is running intelligence-gathering networks in Lebanon.
"When we are in conflict with an enemy, we gather information about them,"
Haaretz quoted Ya'alon as saying on Saturday.
"The moment Hezbollah renewed their attacks, we began to collect intelligence. We will stop when Hezbollah disarms itself and the [Israel-Lebanon] border is a border of peace," he added.
In October, two explosions over occurred in southern Lebanon after Lebanon's Hezbollah discovered cables used for spying in the al-Abbad area near an Israeli border post.
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Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani
In the wake of a terrorist attack in southeastern Iran, Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani has accused the United States of helping terrorist carry out acts of violence in Iran.
"Reliable evidence shows the US played a role in the recent move," Larijani said referring to the recent bomb blast in Sistan-Baluchistan Province.
At least 41 people, including seven senior commanders of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), were killed in the bombing on October 18 during a unity gathering of Shia and Sunni tribal leaders in the town of Pishin on the Iran-Pakistan border. The Jundallah terrorist group claimed responsibility for the deadly attack.
Larijani criticized Washington's policies on Iran and said the US acts against Iranian interests despite making offers to hold talks with the country.
An extraordinary thirty-five MI5 agents are to be called to court to give evidence evidence behind screens against three men accused of dissident republican activity.
The spies will be allowed to give their evidence behind screens to protect their identities at Belfast crown court.
The court was told that British Crown forces had gathered 90 hours of bugged conversations of the three men.
The charges involve conspiring to possess arms and membership of an illegal organisation. There also charges of making a Portuguese restaurant "available for terrorism".
It is understood that the legal papers are "voluminous" and the tapes will take months to transcribe.
The full trial, which will begin in April, is expected to last three months.
A former Central Intelligence Agency officer has confirmed US' relations with the terrorist group Jundullah, despite the CIA knowing that the group has close links with the al-Qaeda.
"American intelligence has also had contact with Jundullah. But that contact, as Iran almost certainly knows, was confined to intelligence-gathering on the country," Robert Baer, a former Middle East CIA field officer wrote on the Time.com, IRNA reported early on Saturday.
However, he noted that the US-Jundullah relationship "was never formalized, and contact was sporadic."
The news comes amid US denial of any involvement in a recent terrorist attack in Sistan-Baluchestan province in southeastern Iran, which Jundullah claimed responsibility for.
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The
New York Times, on October 17, published a page-one story by Scott Shane about the CIA's defiance of a court order to release documents pertaining to the John F. Kennedy assassination, in its so-called Joannides file. George Joannides was the CIA case officer for a Cuban exile group that made headlines in 1963 by its public engagements with Lee Harvey Oswald, just a few weeks before Oswald allegedly killed Kennedy. For over six years a former
Washington Post reporter, Jefferson Morley, has been suing the CIA for the release of these documents.
1
Sometimes the way that a news item is reported can be more newsworthy than the item itself. A notorious example was the 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers (documents far too detailed for most people to read) on the front page of the
New York Times.
The October 17
Times story was another such example.
It revealed, perhaps for the first time in any major U.S. newspaper, that the CIA has been deceiving the public about its own relationship to the JFK assassination.
On the Kennedy assassination, the deceptions began in 1964 with the Warren Commission. The C.I.A. hid its schemes to kill Fidel Castro and its ties to the anti-Castro Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil, or Cuban Student Directorate, which received $50,000 a month in C.I.A. support during 1963.
In August 1963, Oswald visited a New Orleans shop owned by a directorate official, feigning sympathy with the group's goal of ousting Mr. Castro. A few days later, directorate members found Oswald handing out pro-Castro pamphlets and got into a brawl with him. Later that month, he debated the anti-Castro Cubans on a local radio station.
Comment: Evidently loaning money at 'lofty' interest rates is Goldmans idea of being nearer to their god.