Puppet MastersS


Eye 1

Top-secret document reveals NSA spied on porn habits as part of plan to discredit 'radicalizers'

Ryan Grim
Huff Post Politics
Thu, 23 Jan 2014 17:58 UTC
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The National Security Agency has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches, according to a top-secret NSA document. The document, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, identifies six targets, all Muslims, as "exemplars" of how "personal vulnerabilities" can be learned through electronic surveillance, and then exploited to undermine a target's credibility, reputation and authority.

The NSA document, dated Oct. 3, 2012, repeatedly refers to the power of charges of hypocrisy to undermine such a messenger. "A previous SIGINT" -- or signals intelligence, the interception of communications -- "assessment report on radicalization indicated that radicalizers appear to be particularly vulnerable in the area of authority when their private and public behaviors are not consistent," the document argues.

Among the vulnerabilities listed by the NSA that can be effectively exploited are "viewing sexually explicit material online" and "using sexually explicit persuasive language when communicating with inexperienced young girls."
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Arrow Down

Dow suffers worst weekly loss since Sept. 2011

Matt Jarzemsky
The Wall Street Journal
Fri, 24 Jan 2014 16:35 UTC
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© Westhavenmanagement.comNew York Stock Exchange
The Dow industrials took their biggest daily tumble in more than seven months Friday, caught up in a two-day selloff in emerging-market stocks and currencies.

Traders said that despite the scope of the decline, fund managers weren't overly urgent in selling. Rather, they pointed to short-term players selling baskets of stocks, such as index futures or exchange-traded funds, as a way to protect against losses elsewhere in their portfolios. Buyers, meanwhile, pulled to the sidelines, content to wait before putting money to work.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average slid 318.24 points, or 2%, to 15879.11, a five-week low. For the week, the benchmark fell 3.5%.

The S&P 500 index dropped 38.17 points, or 2.1%, to 1790.29. The Nasdaq Composite Index shed 90.70 points, or 2.2%, to 4128.17.

"There's a lack of buyers supporting the market and incremental sellers who are de-risking on the back of the macro developments," said Doug Crofton, head of U.S. cash equity trading at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. "I don't think the market was positioned for the recent events."

"We're not seeing people throw in the towel," or selling indiscriminately in a rush to get out of the market, he added.

Even with Friday's declines, the S&P 500 is up 20% from a year ago and 3% off its Jan. 15 all-time closing high.
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Dollar Gold

China's elite storing riches in Caribbean offshore haven

James Ball and Guardian U.S. Interactive Team
The Guardian
Tue, 21 Jan 2014 16:00 UTC
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© USA Today
Relatives of political leaders including China's current president and former premier named in trove of leaked documents from the British Virgin Islands

More than a dozen family members of China's top political and military leaders are making use of offshore companies based in the British Virgin Islands, leaked financial documents reveal.

The brother-in-law of China's current president, Xi Jinping, as well as the son and son-in-law of former premier Wen Jiabao are among the political relations making use of the offshore havens, financial records show.

The documents also disclose the central role of major Western banks and accountancy firms, including PricewaterhouseCoopers, Credit Suisse and UBS in the offshore world, acting as middlemen in the establishing of companies.

The Hong Kong office of Credit Suisse, for example, established the BVI company Trend Gold Consultants for Wen Yunsong, the son of Wen Jiabao, during his father's premiership - while PwC and UBS performed similar services for hundreds of other wealthy Chinese individuals.

The disclosure of China's use of secretive financial structures is the latest revelation from "Offshore Secrets", a two-year reporting effort led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which obtained more than 200 gigabytes of leaked financial data from two companies in the British Virgin Islands, and shared the information with the Guardian and other international news outlets.
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Bad Guys

Raping the planet: U.K. Fracking companies could be allowed under your home without consent


RT
Mon, 27 Jan 2014 14:29 UTC
Fracking protest manchester
© Reuters / Phil NobleA sign stands outside a protest camp at the entrance to the IGas Energy exploratory gas drilling site at Barton Moss near Manchester in northern England January 13, 2014.

Government sources have admitted that they are considering overhauling UK trespass laws to make it easier to extract shale gas. Under the plans being considered by the government, fracking could take place under homes without owners' permission.

The government sources say they are mulling over these amendments to the law to make it easier for companies to explore and extract shale gas, amid worries that landowners and other parties could hold up energy companies in costly and lengthy court proceedings, the Telegraph reports.

The plans are expected to be published in the coming months, and are likely to be the most controversial yet in Prime Minister David Cameron's plans to push through fracking regardless of the environmental cost.

Comment: See also:

Investigation confirms the evils of fracking
Opposed to fracking? Then the corporatocracy considers you to be a terrorist
Massachusetts seeks 10 year ban on gas fracking after series of Texas earthquakes
Dangerous levels of radioactivity found at fracking waste site in Pennsylvania
Is there a media blackout on the fracking flood disaster in Colorado?

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Document

Flashback New document details arguments about torture at a JSOC prison

Jeff Kaye
My Firedog Lake.com
Tue, 29 Jan 2013 00:06 UTC
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© Shrieking TreeAmnesty International projection "Torture is Wrong" outside of the Newseum during the screening of Zero Dark Thirty in Washington DC.
Journalist Michael Otterman, author of the excellent book, American Torture: From the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and Beyond, was kind enough to forward to me some months ago a document he obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. The document consists of the after-action reports made by Colonel Steven Kleinman and Terrence Russell, two of the three team members sent by the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) to a top-secret special operations facility in Iraq in September 2003.

The reports, written shortly after both JPRA officials finished their assignment, present two starkly different accounts of what took place that late summer in the depths of a JSOC torture chamber. Even more remarkable, Col. Kleinman, who famously intervened to stop torture interrogations at the facility, had his own report submitted to Russell for comment. Indeed, Kleinman's report as released contains interpolations by Russell, such that the documents become a kind of ersatz debate over torture by the JPRA team members, and at a distance, some of the Task Force members.

This extraordinary document is being posted here in full for the first time. Click here to download.
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Books

Flashback Corrupt legal system: U.S. Judge won't order inquiry over psychologist's role in Guantánamo

John Eligon
The New York Times
Mon, 11 Apr 2011 00:00 UTC
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© Virginie Montet/AFP/Getty
New York State cannot be forced to investigate a psychologist accused by a human rights organization of overseeing coercive interrogation tactics at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a judge in Manhattan ruled on Thursday.

The rights group, the Center for Justice and Accountability, had brought a suit claiming that the psychologist, John Francis Leso, helped develop a plan of coercive techniques, including sleep deprivation and isolation, to use on detainees at Guantánamo. The suit was brought on behalf of Steven Reisner, a psychologist and an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine. It sought an investigation of Dr. Leso by a professional disciplinary office in the state's Education Department that regulates psychologists' licenses.

But in a 12-page ruling filed in State Supreme Court, Justice Saliann Scarpulla wrote that Dr. Reisner had no standing to force an investigation. Nothing in state education law, Justice Scarpulla wrote, guarantees that the office "formally investigate every single complaint of professional misconduct, no matter the contents or applicability of the complaint."

The judge also ruled that Dr. Reisner did not suffer an injury as a result of the state's decision not to investigate.
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Wolf

Flashback Dr Steven Reisner on case filed against psychologist accused of torture in Guantanamo interrogations

Democracy Now
You Tube
Wed, 06 Apr 2011 00:00 UTC
The Obama administration announced Monday that key suspects in the 9/11 attacks will be tried by military commissions at the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, and not in U.S. civilian court. There will, however, be one Guantánamo case tried in New York.

Today the New York State Supreme Court will hear the case against Dr. John Leso, a psychologist accused of participating in torture during interrogation of detainees in Guantánamo. The case was brought on behalf of Dr. Steven Reisner, who is at the center of a growing group of medical professional campaigning against the participation of psychologists in the U.S. government's interrogation programs.

Democracy Now! interviews Reisner about the case right before he heads to the courtroom.

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Heart - Black

Was systematic sexual assault a political tactic in Tahrir Square?

Angelina Fanous
Vice.com
Tue, 13 Aug 2013 09:42 UTC
Mohammed Mahmoud Street
© David DegnerJust off Tahrir Square, Mohammed Mahmoud Street is where Yasmine El Baramawy was beaten and raped.
It was almost 11 PM on Friday, November 23, 2012, when from the window of her apartment in downtown Cairo, not far from Tahrir Square, Ghada heard a crowd screaming, "She has a bomb strapped to her stomach!" Ghada (who wishes to be known only by her first name) immediately thought of her children who were outside among those who had gathered. She ran to the balcony to search for them, but her terror shifted into action when she saw a naked woman pinned against the hood of a car, with a circle of men around her. Ghada grabbed her husband and some clothes for the stranger, and they sprinted downstairs to rescue her. They pushed through the crowd and into the circle, pulling the girl to safety.
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Star of David

Ariel Sharon: The legacy of a psychopath

Mohammad Fadhel
Gulfnews
Sun, 26 Jan 2014 00:00 UTC
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In a display of political and diplomatic hypocrisy, most western leaders praised the late Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon for his transformation from a fierce fighter for Israel to a man who took initiatives to make peace with the Palestinians.

Israeli President Shimon Peres described him as a "brave military leader", while Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt tweeted that Sharon was "a great leader of Israel. A brilliant military commander, but also a wise statesman seeing the necessity of peace". As Sharon had been marketed long ago as a military "hero", most western newspapers couldn't avoid reminding readers of his responsibility for the massacre of Sabra and Shatila following Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982. And the Israeli newspaper, Jerusalem Post, said on January 12 that "his escapades earned him simultaneous adulation and criticism, most notably from prime minister David Ben-Gurion".

"Escapades" is a very polite euphemism for describing Sharon's record as a military man because he, like many Israelis, had one definition of victory: "The number of their victims." That's why Sharon was always associated with massacres and mass killings. In 1948, he started his career through a gruesome massacre in the town of Lydda (Al Lid) that took the lives of 426 Palestinians who were caught up in a mosque. And in 1953, he was a major heading the special unit "101" and carried out another massacre in the village of Qibya in the West Bank, which claimed the lives of 170 Palestinian civilians. It wasn't a mistake but a strict implementation of a military order encapsulated in document No. 207/56/644 of the Israeli army archive: "Implement the demolition and inflict blows paramount in lives in order to push the villagers to flee their homes".
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Pirates

Best of the Web: America's real welfare queens

The Big Picture RT
RT America
Mon, 27 Jan 2014 07:48 UTC
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No only do Zombie Corporations and Zombie Banks not actually produce anything useful for the real economy, they just take and take and take from it...
When Republicans talk about "welfare queens," they're really talking about their buddies in big banks, Big Oil, and giant transnational corporations. It's time to cut off the corporate welfare pipeline, and use those billions of dollars to help our economy recover, and to help those Americans who need it the most.
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