Roger Stone claims Johnson 'micro-managed' Kennedy's Dallas motorcade, demanding it pass through Dealy Plaza on the afternoon he was shot

He also says that Johnson, instructed Richard Nixon to hire Jack Ruby several years before he shot Lee Harvey Oswald

The revelations are made in his book 'The man who killed Kennedy - the case against LBJ' out later this year

A renowned Republican strategist and lobbyist has claimed that former president Lyndon B. Johnson set up John F. Kennedy's assassination, which occurred on November 22, 1963.

Roger Stone, 61, makes the claim in his upcoming book 'The Man who killed Kennedy - the case against LBJ,' which is set to be published in October.

He also writes that Richard Nixon and Johnson had a documented relationship with Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald's killer, years before he shot Oswald in the basement of Dallas police headquarters in 1963, reports The Daily Caller.

You'd think that a nation that has allowed the shredding of the civil liberties enshrined in its founding document might deserve to know who the dastardly enemy is to justify such a dramatic transgression, right?

Wrong. Amazingly, Carl Levin (D-Michigan) asked the Pentagon to define who exactly the "Al-Qaeda affiliates" we are at war with are. While Mr. Levin received and answer, guess what he told the public? Yep, you guessed it. It's classified.

From ProPublica:

In a major national security speech this spring, President Obama said again and again that the U.S. is at war with "Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces."

So who exactly are those associated forces? It's a secret.

The twin bomb attack which hit a market in a Shi'ite-dominated region of northwest Pakistan killed 57 people, officials said.

Up to 167 people were also wounded in the attack late last night, in the northern town of Parachinar, right on the Afghan border.

It struck as the market was busy ahead of the iftar meal, that breaks the daytime fast during Ramadan.

Police believe one bomb was planted on a motorbike. The second bomb detonated about four minutes later, about 400 yards away from the first, according to government official Javed Ali.

One man, Said Hussain, who was in the area where the second blast struck, reported seeing a teenage boy shout "God is great!" just moments before the explosion.

Hospital official Shabir Hussain said almost all the dead and wounded were Shi'ites. There was no claim of responsibility, but authorities have blamed militant groups belonging to the Sunni Muslim majority for previous gun and bomb attacks against the troubled country's Shi'ite minority.

Shi'ite leader Hamid Ali said:"We demand protection. We request the government to take action against those who routinely kill our people."

A doctor, Zahid Hussain, said the dead bodies quickly overwhelmed Parachinar's main hospital. Late on Friday he said: "We have no place to keep the wounded. Many of them are lying on the hospital floor and on the lawn."

The political circus this week narrowly voted down an amendment to 'rein in the NSA's mass surveillance infrastructure'. As if senators can - or would sincerely wish to - negatively influence the behemoth that is the Global Security State! Ever since NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked 'Top Secret' documents to the UK's Guardian newspaper, favorable comparisons have been made with Daniel Ellsberg, whose leaked 'Pentagon Papers' in 1971 revealed that the U.S. government knew, early on, that the Vietnam War could most likely not be 'won' (whatever 'won' means because its strategic goals were never defined), and that continuing the war would lead to many times more casualties than was ever admitted publicly.

Like today's circumspect avoidance when it comes to blowing the whistle on 9/11 (with a few honorable exceptions that do not receive widespread coverage), the 'greatest whistleblowers ever' (and I include Julian Assange and WikiLeaks in this category) don't leak the names behind purchases of pre-9/11 airline company 'put options'; they don't leak the voluminous diplomatic cables that would sorely expose the NeoCon-Israeli scheming in the run-up to America's 'New Pearl Harbor'; they don't leak the satellite images that would rubbish the fairytale that 'al Qaeda' was responsible for 'dustifying' the World Trade Center, firing that missile at the Pentagon, and downing Flight 93.

Commissioned in 1967 by then U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who was concerned about the disastrous course of the war in Vietnam - or rather, the disastrous press coverage it was receiving - the report that became known as the 'Pentagon Papers' was ostensibly "a comprehensive history of the United States involvement in Vietnam from World War II [1945] to the present [1968, when the report was completed]."

Daniel Ellsberg served in the Pentagon from August 1964 under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. In one of those curious synchronicities of history, Ellsberg's first full day as special assistant to McNamara saw the captain of USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin claim that it was under fire from North Vietnamese patrol boats. No such thing happened. According to his Wikipedia page, Ellsberg personally reported the 'incident' to McNamara. The subsequent Gulf of Tonkin Resolution resulted in a huge escalation of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. In fact, it transformed the situation from a 20-year long CIA 'covert war' to a full-scale military invasion and occupation.

Japan should bolster its marine force and introduce surveillance drones, a defence review paper says, highlighting concerns over China and North Korea.

The paper also called for better defences against missile attacks and the potential to attack enemy bases.

Japan's military is constitutionally limited to a self-defence role.

But PM Shinzo Abe is looking to expand the scope of its activities - potentially a highly controversial move that would anger its neighbours.

Japan is embroiled in a bitter row over islands with China and is deeply concerned by North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

The interim report is part of a defence review ordered by Mr Abe, with final proposals due by December.

On Sunday, Mr Abe won back control of Japan's Upper House, meaning he now controls parliament and would be in a stronger position to reshape Japan's current defence strategy.

One of the worst myths Democratic partisans love to tell themselves - and everyone else - is that the GOP refuses to support President Obama no matter what he does. Like its close cousin - the massively deceitful inside-DC grievance that the two parties refuse to cooperate on anything - it's hard to overstate how false this Democratic myth is. When it comes to foreign policy, war, assassinations, drones, surveillance, secrecy, and civil liberties, President Obama's most stalwart, enthusiastic defenders are often found among the most radical precincts of the Republican Party.

The rabidly pro-war and anti-Muslim GOP former Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Peter King, has repeatedly lavished Obama with all sorts of praise and support for his policies in those areas. The Obama White House frequently needs, and receives, large amounts of GOP Congressional support to have its measures enacted or bills its dislikes defeated. The Obama DOJ often prevails before the US Supreme Court solely because the Roberts/Scalia/Thomas faction adopts its view while the Ginsburg/Sotomayor/Breyer faction rejects it (as happened in February when the Court, by a 5-4 ruling, dismissed a lawsuit brought by Amnesty and the ACLU which argued that the NSA's domestic warrantless eavesdropping activities violate the Fourth Amendment; the Roberts/Scalia wing accepted the Obama DOJ's argument that the plaintiffs lack standing to sue because the NSA successfully conceals the identity of which Americans are subjected to the surveillance). As Wired put it at the time about that NSA ruling:

Former commander of the US Central Command James Mattis has said that he 'paid a military security price every day' over the American support for the Israeli regime.

On Thursday, the Times of Israel quoted Mattis as saying last week, "I paid a military security price every day as the commander of CentCom (Central Command) because the Americans were seen as biased in support of Israel."

The retired US commander made the comments at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado in response to a question regarding the talks between the Tel Aviv regime and the Palestinian Authority.

Diplomat says move is part of Israeli response to new settlement guidelines; Ashton's spokesperson: EU hasn't received official communication on orders to limit work with EU on the ground, is seeking 'urgent clarifications.'

Several European aid staff have been barred from entering Gaza as part of Israeli measures in the wake of new EU guidelines barring cooperation with settlements, a western diplomat said Friday.

The diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the humanitarian aid staff had failed to receive permits to enter the Gaza Strip.

On Thursday, Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon ordered defense officials to halt cooperation on the ground with EU representatives. This includes any assistance to EU infrastructure projects in Area C, which is under full Israeli civilian and military control. Ya'alon also reportedly planned to make it more difficult for EU officials to pass through the Erez Crossing, to the Gaza Strip or back to Israel.

An assessment produced by the Pakistan government on dozens of drone strikes conducted by the CIA that was not intended to be released to the public has leaked. The document shows that dozens of children were killed by drones between 2006 and 2009.

The report titled, "Details of Attacks by NATO Forces/Predators in FATA," was "obtained from three independent sources," according to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ). It covers seventy-five drone strikes that occurred from January 13, 2006, to October 24, 2009.

TBIJ details:

Drawn from field reports by local officials in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the document lists over 70 drone strikes between 2006 and late 2009, alongside a small number of other incidents such as alleged Nato attacks and strikes by unspecified forces.

Of 746 people listed as killed in the drone strikes, at least 147 of the dead are clearly stated by the leaked report to be civilian victims. Some 94 of these are said to be children.

Some CIA strikes are missing from the document. None of the five reported strikes for 2007 are listed, for example. Also missing are any biographical details of those killed, although the genders of many victims are reported and - where known - whether any children died.

The document also fails to mention details of a number of senior militant commanders known to have died in the attacks. [emphasis added]

Yet again, here is an example of how a leak can be immensely valuable to the public's understanding of government operations.

The US, as the TBIJ rightfully points out,

The numbers recorded are much higher than those provided by the US administration, which continues to insist that no more than 50 to 60 'non-combatants' have been killed by the CIA across the entire nine years of Pakistan bombings. New CIA director John Brennan has described claims to the contrary as 'intentional misrepresentations'.

He works at one of the three-letter intelligence agencies and oversees construction of a $1.2 billion surveillance data center in Utah that is 15 times the size of MetLife Stadium, home to the New York Giants and Jets. Long Island native Harvey Davis, a top National Security Agency official, needs that commanding presence. His role is to supervise infrastructure construction worldwide for NSA, which is part of the Defense Department. That involves tending to logistics, military installations, as well as power, space and cooling for all NSA data centers.

In May, crews broke ground on a $792 million computing center at the agency's headquarters near Baltimore that will complement the Utah site. Together the Utah center and Maryland's 28-acre computer farm span 228 acres - more than seven times the size of the Pentagon.

During an interview with Government Executive in June, amid the uproar over leaked details of NSA's domestic espionage activities, Davis describes the 200-acre Utah facility as very transparent: "Only brick and mortar." A data center just provides energy and chills machines, he says.

About 6,500 contractors, along with more than 150 Army Corps of Engineers and NSA workers, including some with special needs, are assigned to the project. Davis perks up when he talks about the hundreds of individuals with disabilities he has steered into NSA.

But ask him why the facility is so big and what's inside, and he is less forthcoming. "I think we're crossing into content. It's big because it's required to be big," says Davis, a 30-year veteran of the spy agency.