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Eye 2

Harry Reid, under scrutiny for cronyism & complicity in ranch siege, labels Bundy supporters "domestic terrorists"

Jay Syrmopoulos
Ben Swann Newsletter
Fri, 18 Apr 2014 08:04 UTC
Sen. Harry Reid - Dem NV
Sen. Harry Reid - Dem NV
In a sensationalist move Senator Harry Reid has labeled supporters of Nevada cattle rancher Cliven Bundy "domestic terrorists" during an event held in Las Vegas on Thursday.

While speaking at the 'Hashtags & Headlines' event, Reid called Bundy supporters:
"Nothing more than domestic terrorists" saying, "I repeat: what happened there was domestic terrorism."
He accused the Bundy supporters of inciting violence claiming, "There were hundreds, hundreds of people from around the country that came there," adding, "They had sniper rifles in the freeway. They had weapons, automatic weapons. They had children lined up. They wanted to make sure they got hurt first ... What if others tried the same thing?"

These claims were made in reference to the standoff, reported on by us last week, in Clarke County, Nevada at the Bundy Ranch, in which the feds brought in over 200 armed agents with sniper teams to confiscate cattle, allegedly due to unpaid grazing fees. Perhaps Senator Reid had forgotten that the only violence that commenced during the standoff was when BLM agents tazed Bundy supporters, threw a 57-year-old woman recovering from cancer to the ground, and attempted to allow a dog to attack a pregnant woman.

The mischaracterization of the Bundy supporters as "domestic terrorists" is the continuation of a narrative that has been forwarded by the federal government for a number of years. First there is the MIAC report, which claimed that potential terrorists include people who own gold, Ron Paul supporters, libertarians, and even people who fly the U.S. flag. Then in 2012 there was a leaked Homeland Security study that claimed Americans who are "reverent of individual liberty," and "suspicious of centralized federal authority" are possible "extreme right-wing" terrorists.

Reid has promised that the BLM fight with the Bundy family is "not over." Perhaps his possible complicity in the BLM siege that has been reported extensively, questions of cronyism, as his longtime senior advisor Neil Kornze was confirmed by the Senate last Tuesday as the Director of the BLM, along with his involvement in the Moapa Southern Paiute Solar Project, which is about 35 miles from the Bundy homestead in Bunkerville, Nevada, is causing him consternation.
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Dollars

Flashback Senator Harry Reid's trail of corruption in Utah

Stephanie Mencimer
Mother Jones
Wed, 30 Jan 2013 12:46 UTC
Image
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.)
Utah may be best known for its clean-living, teetotaling Mormon culture, but the state has long had a reputation as the home for less savory activity: financial fraud. Long known as the "scam capital" of the world, Utah has the dubious distinction of producing large numbers of con artists, penny stock scammers and other charlatans - so many that the Securities and Exchange Commission has an office in Salt Lake City (which is unusual for the agency). Yet another one of these sordid stories is underway in the state right now, and this time, an accused scammer has said he tried to bribe a big name: the highest ranking Democrat in the US Senate, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), himself a Mormon with many ties to Utah.

The tale is a convoluted one. But it starts with Jeremy Johnson, a St. George businessman and high-profile political donor in the state who has been indicted on a variety of fraud charges stemming from his running of an internet marketing company. In 2010, the Federal Trade Commission sued Johnson's company, iWorks, alleging it had engaged in a far-reaching scam to defraud consumers through bogus money-making offers online. The company was the source of lots of those ads promising free money from government grants after the 2009 stimulus bill passed. Instead of making money, the FTC has alleged, consumers who responded to the ads ended up with unwanted charges on their credit cards that netted iWorks and its principals more than $275 million in ill-gotten gains. (The case is still ongoing.)
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Bad Guys

Psychopath James Mitchell: CIA psychologist who developed torture program defends tactics


RT
Sat, 19 Apr 2014 03:38 UTC
Guantanamo Bay
© AFP Photo / Michelle Shephard
The Guantanamo Bay US Naval Base in Cuba

A psychologist considered integral to crafting the CIA's post-9/11 "enhanced interrogation" tactics slammed an unreleased Senate report on CIA torture as inaccurate while defending his role in working with the spy agency amid a volatile era in US history.

In his first interview in seven years, James Mitchell told freelance reporter Jason Leopold, writing for the Guardian, that he has nothing to apologize for regarding his place in the post-9/11 abuse of prisoners that, as he points out, was legal at the time.

"The people on the ground did the best they could with the way they understood the law at the time," he said. "You can't ask someone to put their life on the line and think and make a decision without the benefit of hindsight and then eviscerate them in the press 10 years later."

According to the Senate Intelligence Committee's vast, unreleased report on the CIA's capture and interrogation program, Mitchell, along with another contractor, psychologist Bruce Jessen, is responsible for developing the torture program by "reverse engineering" coercive interrogation tactics that US airmen are taught to resist through the military's survival evasion resistance escape (SERE) training.

"The whole Guantánamo issue that came up...all of the abuses that they did in Guantánamo they tried to attribute to me and Bruce," Mitchell said. "It wasn't us. We didn't do any of that stuff. We didn't have a damn thing to do with that. I think that what happened was the Senate armed services committee believed that the agency [CIA] was behind it."

Mitchell denies involvement in abusive practices, as was alleged by a Senate Armed Services Committee report in 2009.

"We didn't have a damn thing to do with that," Mitchell said. He blames Pentagon contractors and civilian staff "who wanted to help out and made some dumb mistakes."
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Better Earth

Putin and Russia: The thing which everybody seems to be missing

The Saker
The Vineyard of the Saker
Fri, 18 Apr 2014 18:53 UTC
putin thinking
Does Putin have a grand plan? What is it?
Okay, I decided to squeeze in one more post before taking time off for Holy Paskha, this is well worth it.

Some of you have asked about China's role in all this, in what the real interests of the USA are, how the EU is positioning itself and what Russia does or does not want. And, somehow, bogged down by the minutiae of the unfolding events I managed to never mention something which Putin, Lavrov and many other top Russian politicians have repeatedly said:

What is happening today before our eyes is the end of one international system and the birth of a qualitatively different one.

Interestingly, Putin has declared that for him the point of no return was reached when the USA and its allies at the UNSC and NATO clearly and grossly twisted the intention of the UNSC on Libya and "upgraded" what should have been a "no fly" zone to a free-fire zone to attack and bomb Libya [of course, it was pretty darn clear to Putin that the "all necessary means to protect civilians" of the resolution was an open ended invitation for the AngloZionists to "interpret" it in any way they wanted; now his says that Russia was "lied to" in order to not blame Medvedev for walking into a 10 foot wide hole. But that is irrelevant here]. Putin says that from then on he had acquired the conviction that the West could not be negotiated with and had to be simply stopped. Then Syria happened: for the first time since the end of WWII the USA had decided to do something and was stopped by an outside power in the most humiliating way possible.
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Propaganda

More Ridiculous Propaganda: Snowden defends Putin question

Hadas Gold
Politico
Fri, 18 Apr 2014 18:45 UTC
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Edward Snowden defended his participation in an annual Russian telecast with Vladimir Putin on Thursday, a move that many described as a clear propaganda effort by the Russians, with Snowden as their pawn.

In an op-ed for The Guardian, the newspaper that originally published his first leaks, Snowden said he asked about Russia's surveillence in order to push the conversation and Putin's response into the public dialogue.

"I expected that some would object to my participation in an annual forum that is largely comprised of softball questions to a leader unaccustomed to being challenged," he wrote. "But to me, the rare opportunity to lift a taboo on discussion of state surveillance before an audience that primarily views state media outweighed that risk. Moreover, I hoped that Putin's answer - whatever it was - would provide opportunities for serious journalists and civil society to push the discussion further."
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Propaganda

Ridiculous Propaganda: Is Snowden Putin's puppet?

Julian Hattem
The Hill
Fri, 18 Apr 2014 16:56 UTC
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Experts say Edward Snowden's public questioning of Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested the former National Security Agency contractor is firmly in the Kremlin's grasp.

They said it is hard to imagine that Snowden was not prompted and coached to pose his question about domestic surveillance in Russia to the country's leader.

And the answer he got in return, they said - that none of Russia's programs reached the size and scope of anything at the National Security Agency (NSA) - was most likely a lie.

"They've got him by the shorthairs," said James Lewis, director of the strategic technologies program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"He knows from his NSA days that their surveillance system - their domestic surveillance system - puts ours to shame, and the fact that he's calling in with these questions, he's [got to be] sitting in the room with a guy with a gun."

Others suggested the pitch would be an easier sell for Snowden, who has not been shy about appearing in the spotlight in recent weeks, even while staying in Russia to avoid U.S. espionage charges.

"I know how all these conversations go with these guys," said Thomas Nichols, a professor at the Naval War College who has focused on Russia and national security issues.
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War Whore

Flashback China tests hypersonic missile vehicle


Business Insider
Thu, 16 Jan 2014 16:47 UTC
Image
© AFP PhotoAn artist's rendering provided by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), on April 23, 2012 shows the Hypersonic Technology Vehicle (HVT-2) which failed just minutes into a test flight in 2011.
China for the first time has tested a hypersonic missile vehicle designed to travel several times the speed of sound, the Pentagon said Wednesday.

The test makes China the second country after the United States to conduct experimental flights with hypersonic vehicles, a technology that could allow armies to rapidly strike distant targets anywhere around the globe.

"We're aware of the test of the hypersonic vehicle but we are not commenting on it," said Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Pool, a Pentagon spokesman.

The flight was conducted on January 9 and the Chinese vehicle, dubbed the WU-14, is supposed to travel at Mach 10, or 10 times the speed of sound, according to a report in The Washington Free Beacon, an online publication.
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Stormtrooper

Is joining NATO going to be Scotland's first mistake as an independent state?


RIA Novosti
Fri, 18 Apr 2014 15:17 UTC
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Britain's biggest missile range is of more strategic importance to NATO and the UK than its nuclear submarine fleet based at Faslane, Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond has claimed.

The missile facility, based in the Outer Hebrides on Scotland's extreme west coast, was established in 1950 and employs around 200 staff.

Concerns have been raised locally over its future if Scotland chooses independence in an upcoming referendum.

But during a visit to the Isle of Lewis, First Minister Alex Salmond dismissed concerns claiming the facility would be even more important to the local economy if Scotland declared independence.
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Eye 1

Pro-Russian protesters say three dead in Ukraine's Slavyansk


Voice of Russia
Sun, 13 Apr 2014 15:01 UTC
Image
© Vesti.ru
Protesters rallying in support of federalization said one their activist and two members of the ultra-nationalist Right Sector group were killed in the operation in east Ukraine's town of Slavyansk on Sunday. A total of three people have been killed: two from the so-called Right Sector and one on our side, Nikolai Solntsev, an activist of the protest movement, told, RIA reports.

Two other pro-federalization protesters were injured, he said adding that protesters in neighboring Donetsk were preparing to transport the injured people from Slavyansk to the local hospitals.

Earlier reports said some 150 armed men from the radical Right Sector movement had arrived in Slavyansk to participate in the special operation against pro-federalization protesters.
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Pistol

Big surprise: CIA Director Brennan's trip to Ukraine initiates use of force

Daria Chernyshova
RIA Novosti
Tue, 15 Apr 2014 12:45 UTC
brennan cia
© U.S GovernmentCIA Director John Brennan
The recent visit of CIA Director John Brennan to Ukraine was likely an attempt to initiate the use of force against pro-federalization protests, Brandon Turbeville, an American international affairs expert, told RIA Novosti.

"It's clear that the CIA director's presence in Kiev is much more than mere coincidence," Turbeville said.

"Despite the denials by the White House, it seems that Brennan's visit was an attempt to, at the very least, express support for a violent crackdown on pro-Russian protesters and militants in Eastern Ukraine. It is more likely, however, that Brennan's trip was an attempt to formulate, encourage and initiate that use of force," he added.

CIA Director John Brennan visited Ukraine over the weekend, information that was confirmed by White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on Monday, after being reported by media on Sunday.

Over the same weekend, Kiev authorities cracked down on pro-federalization protests in eastern Ukraine. Regime troops advanced toward a number of cities in eastern Ukraine Tuesday to attack the protesters.

"Brennan's appearance in Kiev just before the announcement of a violent crackdown in eastern Ukraine is just too timely to assume that it is a coincidence," Turbeville said.

"Brennan, who has been actively involved in arming insurgents in Libya, Syria and Venezuela, has a reputation for using thuggish tactics in pursuit of CIA goals," Wayne Madsen, an American investigative journalist told RIA Novosti.
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