Puppet Masters

U.S. Army faces massive recruiting fraud scandal

Yahoo! News
Tue, 04 Feb 2014 20:33 UTC

Criminal investigators suspect hundreds of US Army soldiers exploited a recruitment program to receive illegal kickbacks worth more than $29 million, lawmakers and officials said.

The scale of the potential fraud was "astounding" and ranks as one of the largest criminal probes in the Army's history, said Senator Claire McCaskill, who held a hearing on the scandal.

An Army audit has found that more than 1,200 recruiters had received payments that were potentially fraudulent, defense officials said.

"We now know that thousands of service members, their families and friends, may have participated in schemes to defraud the government they served and the taxpayers," McCaskill said.

The kickbacks grew out of a 2005 project launched at a time when the US Army and National Guard were struggling to secure new recruits amid heavy casualties in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The National Guard program, which was eventually extended to the active-duty Army, essentially paid troops for referrals of recruits.

These "recruiting assistants," which included National Guard soldiers and civilians, were allowed to earn between $2,000 to $7,500 for each person they persuaded to enlist.

David Wildstein has flipped on Christie as spectacularly as John Dean flipped on Nixon

Tom Moran/ Star-Ledger Editorial Board
The Raw Story
Sun, 02 Feb 2014 15:58 UTC

Of all the arrows fired at Gov. Chris Christie over the years, the one that inflicted the deepest wound came not from a rival, but from an ally.

David Wildstein, by all accounts, was thrilled to be part of the governor's inner circle. He was known as a loyal member of the palace guard, the governor's eyes and ears at the Port Authority, a buddy of Christie's since their high school days.

And now he has flipped, as spectacularly as John Dean flipped on Richard Nixon. And in the end, Wildstein could do just as much damage.

"This guy is really mad," says one leading Democrat who asked not to be named. "The way the letter is written is almost rambling, throwing everything in the kitchen sink. There's a lot of anger there. He feels dissed."

Why would Wildstein be so angry with his old boss? Look at it through his eyes. He closed those access lanes on orders from the governor's office after receiving the infamous message from Bridget Anne Kelly, the governor's deputy chief of staff: "Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee."

His reward for that loyal service? He was forced to resign from his job in disgrace. And then the governor, for no good reasons, belittled Wildstein at a press conference when asked about their friendship in high school.

Edward Snowden speaks: U.S. blackout of interview

Charlton Stanley
JonathanTurley.org
Sat, 01 Feb 2014 00:00 UTC

Last Sunday, former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden was interviewed for the German television network ARD. The interview was big news in Germany and much of the world in both print and broadcast media. However, the interview appears to have been blocked intentionally by US government authorities. In fact, the media in the US appears to have gone to 'radio silence' about it. It has been posted on YouTube several times, but is taken down almost immediately. The video site Vimeo has it embedded, but as I write this, Vimeo is under a DDoS attack. LiveLeak also has it, and that video is embedded in this report by Jay Syrmopoulos for Ben Swann's news page.

Mr. Snowden spoke candidly in a thirty-minute English language interview with the reporter from ARD.

He says his "breaking point" was "seeing Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress." That was when Clapper denied the existence of a domestic spying programs when he testified before Congress in March of last year. Snowden added, "The public had a right to know about these programs. The public had a right to know that which the government is doing in its name, and that which the government is doing against the public."

In case Ben Swann's page is taken down, along with the LiveLeak video, here is the interview on Vimeo. Offered without commentary, since Edward Snowden can speak for himself.

Update: An internet search revealed the Edward Snowden interview is up on Rutube. It is a Russian video site somewhat similar to YouTube. The text is in Russian and doesn't have an English language version. I have a feeling Rutube will not be as knee-jerk responsive to take-down orders from western countries. Here is the Snowden interview as presented on Rutube. WordPress does not support Rutube for embedding, but this link will take you to the interview:

Behind the Headlines: State of the world: Revolution, winter olympics, French anti-semitism

Sott Editor
Sott.net
Sun, 09 Feb 2014 19:00 UTC

Are you watching the Winter Olympics? Or are you boycotting them like the morally righteous US, UK and French leaders, who are disgusted that Putin won't promote pedophilia?

Will the most expensive Olympic Games ever be a triumph for Russian peace over Western war, or will a CIA/Saudi-directed terror attack attempt to poke the Bear into a violent reaction before the world's watching media?

What's really happening next door in Ukraine? Will the people there soon be liberated from the 'yolk of Putinism' and be free to join the glorious future envisioned by the EU? Or is it too just another CIA-led revolution? And what about the real revolution in France, why is no one reporting on that?

This week on SOTT Talk Radio we discussed all this and more, not least the weird weather. What could be causing wildfires in Alaska while it snows in Georgia? Or prolonged drought and raging wildfires in Arctic Norway while hurricane force storms drown Britain for months on end?

Running Time: 02:25:00

Download: MP3

Morocco bans judges' protest, riot police close streets in capital‏

Zakia Abdennebi
Chicago Tribune
Sat, 08 Feb 2014 09:27 UTC

© AFP
Moroccan magistrates make victory signs during a sit-in outside the Court of Cassation in Rabat on October 6, 2012 to demand an end to corruption in the judicial system. The government banned a similarly planned sit-in scheduled today.

Moroccan authorities banned a sit-in on Saturday by hundreds of judges who want greater independence for the judiciary, deploying dozens of riot police to central Rabat and closing off streets around the Justice Ministry.

Nearly three years after protests inspired by the Arab Spring prompted King Mohamed to undertake limited reforms and propelled an Islamist party to power, his government is now re-asserting its authority in what rights groups describe as a step backwards.

Since independence in 1956, Morocco's justice system has been seen by critics as largely under the control of the North African country's powerful monarchy.

The reforms introduced by the king in 2011 did award the judiciary more autonomy, but the opposition says it is still not fully independent.

The Anglo-American axis: Losing Ukraine, losing Europe

Umberto Pascali
Global Research
Sun, 09 Feb 2014 02:49 UTC

What is it that really "scared the hell" out of the Anglo-Americans?

Could Ukraine become an area of cooperation between Russia and Europe? Could European countries break free?

Concerning Ukraine, it now appears that the fury shown by the Anglo-Americans (that seems really too excessive and reckless even considering recent standards) is due not simply to the danger of losing Ukraine, but to the danger of losing Europe.

This issue was brought to the forefront in a speech given by the Russian president Vladimir Putin in the Armenian capital Yerevan on Dec 2:

"The events in Ukraine, they remind me less of a revolution than of a pogrom. And strange as it is, this all has little to do with Ukraine-EU relations... As I already said, everything that is happening is not directly related to cooperation between Ukraine and the European Union..." http://eng.kremlin.ru/transcripts/636

Trilateral Agreement

I have the impression that Putin is not just aiming at "taking back" Ukraine from the West. Actually he intends to use the Ukraine issue in a very subtle way to establish a trilateral agreement - EU (or at least part of it), Ukraine, Russia.

New drone technology "equivalent to the capabilities of 100 Predator drones"

Police State USA
Sat, 08 Feb 2014 19:39 UTC

To understand the extent to which the federal government has the ability to spy on us, we must attempt to understand the technologies it has at its disposal. Through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Defense Department has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on one particular project alone. Known as ARGUS, it is a surveillance platform with the capability to maintain continuous 24/7 surveillance, day or night; able to track multiple moving targets miles apart in high definition without refocusing the camera; and with a resolution so astounding that it can detect objects as small as a cellular phone from several miles in the sky. It quite literally provides ubiquitous surveillance over a whole city from one drone.

"This is the next generation of surveillance," said Yiannis Antonaides, an engineer for BAE Systems who led the design of the project. "It is important for the public to know that some of these capabilities exist."

The Government's All-Seeing Eye

ARGUS stands for Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance. Its alternative designation is Wide Area Persistent Stare (WAPS). The project integrates many sophisticated technologies into a formidable surveillance system, combining images from 368 independent into a single mosaic image. The result is a video with a combined resolution of reportedly 1.8 gigapixels.

The massive collection of data is equivalent to having 100 Predator Drones hover over a medium-sized city at once.

The truth about the criminal bloodbath in Iraq can't be 'countered' indefinitely

John Pilger
The Guardian
Fri, 07 Feb 2014 11:30 UTC

© Joseph Barrak/AFP/Getty Images
A baby in a Baghdad hospital in July 2003. 'Half a million Iraqi infants died as a result of sanctions, according to Unicef.

The media cover-up has been a weapon in the crimes of western states since the first world war. But a reckoning is coming for those paid to keep the record straight

The BBC's Today programme is enjoying high ratings, and the Mail and Telegraph are, as usual, attacking the corporation as leftwing. Last month a single edition of the Radio 4 show was edited by the artist and musician PJ Harvey. What happened was illuminating.

Harvey's guests caused panic from the moment she proposed the likes of Mark Curtis, a historian rarely heard on the BBC who chronicles the crimes of the British state; the lawyer Phil Shiner and the Guardian journalist Ian Cobain, who reveal how the British kidnap and torture; the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange; and myself.

There were weeks of absurd negotiation at Broadcasting House about ways of "countering" us and whether or not we could be allowed to speak without interruption from Today's establishment choristers. What this brief insurrection demonstrated was the fear of a reckoning. The crimes of western states like Britain have made accessories of those in the media who suppress or minimise the carnage.

The Faustian pacts that contrived a world war a century ago resonate today across the Middle East and Asia, from Syria to Japan. Then, as now, cover-up was the principal weapon. In 1917 David Lloyd George, the British prime minister, declared: "If people knew the truth, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know and can't know."

On Harvey's Today programme I referred to a poll conducted by ComRes last year that asked people in Britain how many Iraqis had been killed as a result of the 2003 invasion. A majority said that fewer than 10,000 had been killed: a figure so shockingly low it was a profanity.

Nairobi Westgate Mall massacre 'mastermind' was given cash, weapons and training by CIA and MI6 - Also served as regional recruiter for 'War on Terror' fodder

Wills Robinson
Daily Mail, UK
Tue, 04 Nov 2014 15:03 UTC

Danish spy Morten Storm - who just happened to convert to Islam - was recruited by MI6 and the CIA and served as an Al Qaeda recruitment officer in Africa for Western intelligence. He was also very probably one of the regional handlers for the Nairobi Mall Massacre in November 2013.

Morten Storm was an informant for intelligence agencies for five years
Met Abdukadir Mohamed Abdukadir, or Ikirma, in Nairobi in 2008
At the time, the Somali terrorist was only a messenger in Al-Shabab
Storm believes CIA gave him the resources to become a mastermind
Ikrima is also believed to have lived in London for six to 12 months

The CIA inadvertently gave a terrorist leader the finances and credibility he needed to mastermind a major attack, claims a former spy.

Comment: "Inadvertently"! Wink, wink! ;)

Intelligence officer Morten Storm from Denmark was asked by the CIA to build a relationship with the head of militant group Al-Shabab, the group behind September's attack, and handed over money and equipment on behalf of Western intelligence agencies to cultivate the group's trust.

In 2008 he started to forge close contacts with the leader Abdukadir Mohamed Abdukadir, also known as Ikirma, in a bid to uncover information on potential targets and planned attacks.

U.S. mint gold-coin sales jump 63% in January; silver triples

Debarati Roy
Bloomberg
Sat, 01 Feb 2014 15:04 UTC

Sales of gold coins by the U.S. Mint rose 63 percent in January to the highest since April as futures rebounded.

The volume climbed to 91,500 ounces from 56,000 ounces in December, while sales of silver coins almost tripled to 4.78 million ounces, the highest in a year, mint data showed yesterday.

In January, gold futures rose 3.1 percent, snapping a four-month slump, as a rout in emerging-market currencies increased demand for the metal as a haven. Mints from the U.S., the world's biggest, to Australia boosted sales with Austria's Muenze Oesterreich AG operation running 24 hours a day to meet a surge in demand.

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Puppet Masters

U.S. Army faces massive recruiting fraud scandal

David Wildstein has flipped on Christie as spectacularly as John Dean flipped on Nixon

Edward Snowden speaks: U.S. blackout of interview

Behind the Headlines: State of the world: Revolution, winter olympics, French anti-semitism

Morocco bans judges' protest, riot police close streets in capital‏

The Anglo-American axis: Losing Ukraine, losing Europe

New drone technology "equivalent to the capabilities of 100 Predator drones"

The truth about the criminal bloodbath in Iraq can't be 'countered' indefinitely

Nairobi Westgate Mall massacre 'mastermind' was given cash, weapons and training by CIA and MI6 - Also served as regional recruiter for 'War on Terror' fodder

U.S. mint gold-coin sales jump 63% in January; silver triples

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