Puppet MastersS


Wolf

Blaming the victim: GOP lawmaker says Europe should be grateful for US spying on them


Press TV
Mon, 28 Oct 2013 06:53 UTC
Mike Rogers
© UnknownHouse Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers blames the victims
A key Republican lawmaker says European citizens must be grateful that US National Security Agency spied on them because the American surveillance activities are keeping them safe.

"If the French citizens knew exactly what that was about, they would be applauding and popping champagne corks. It's a good thing. It keeps the French safe. It keeps the US safe. It keeps our European allies safe," said House Intelligence Committee chairman, Representative Mike Rogers, (R-Mich.)

The GOP congressman made the incendiary remarks in an interview with CNN as outrage grows around the globe over reports of US spying on both the ordinary people and world leaders.

Rogers described the anger of foreign governments over the controversial surveillance activities as "disingenuous."

"This whole notion that we're going to go after each other on what is really legitimate protection of nation-state interest, I think is disingenuous."


Comment: A sickbag is needed:



Comment: This is similar to the rapist blaming the victim of the rape. But what else to expect from a US lawmaker these days.

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War Whore

Psycho wishful thinking: Dick Cheney thinks military action on Iran is unavoidable


Press TV
Sun, 27 Oct 2013 15:33 UTC
Cheney
Former US Vice President Dick Cheney
Former US Vice President Dick Cheney said on Sunday that military action in Iran is likely unavoidable in order to stop Iran's nuclear energy program.

Cheney, who served from 2001 to 2009 under President George W. Bush, made the remarks after George Stephanopoulos, host of ABC's 'This Week' program, asked him, "is military action against Iran inevitable?"

"I have trouble seeing how we're going to achieve our objective short of that (military action)," Cheney said.

"I doubt very much that the diplomacy will be effective if there's not the prospect that, if diplomacy fails, that we will, in fact, resort to military force," he added. "I don't have a lot of confidence in the administration to be able to negotiate an agreement."
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Bomb

56 killed in day of carnage as 11 car bombs rip through Iraq


RT News
Sun, 27 Oct 2013 13:24 UTC
Iraq car bomb
© AFP Photo / Sabah ArarIraqis look at the remains of a vehicle following an explosion at a small bus station on October 27, 2013, in the the Mashtal district of the capital Baghdad.
Ten car bombs ripped through the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, killing at least 42 and wounding dozens more, officials said. A separate blast targeting soldiers in the northern city of Mosul reportedly killed 14 more, bringing Sunday's death toll to 56.

Nine of the blasts targeted predominantly Shiite Muslim districts over the course of half an hour, police said.

The most violent of those blasts occurred in the town of Nahrawan, south of the capital, where two back-to-back car bombs exploded near a busy market, killing seven people and injured 15 others.

Attacks in the northern Shaab and southern Abu Dshir neighborhoods killed six people each. Other explosions hit the neighborhoods of Mashtal, Baladiyat and Ur in eastern Baghdad and the northern Sab al-Bor and Hurriyah districts.

Six medical officials confirmed the casualty figures to AP. All spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the press.

Comment:
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, although such coordinated attacks have in the past been a hallmark of The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant - al-Qaeda's local branch.
This is an assumption like not other. For all we know, the wave of violence in Iraq may be a strategy to divide an already battered country into Shiite and Sunni regions to make them more manageable and less likely to be a real competitor to other countries in the region.

Shiite and Sunnis shared this country in peace for years before the US invasion. Now we are lead to believe that the war pushed them to hate each other instead of hating the invaders. As always, who benefits?

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Vader

Fear mongering: War of words in Asia as Japan hints at defence changes with China firing a warning action


Euronews
Sun, 27 Oct 2013 10:03 UTC
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
© EuronewsJapanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
The role of Japan's Self-Defence Force could be set to change. That was the message to troops on parade in Asaka at its annual review.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said he will not tolerate the use of force to change the region's status quo.

It is a coded expression widely understood by analysts to refer to what Tokyo sees as China's aggressive maritime expansion. It could lead to a change in Japan's defence policy.

Comment: More fear mongering to keep people distracted and under control. For more on how to control the public see this article.

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Che Guevara

SOTT Focus: Behind the Headlines: Russell Brand, NSA Leaks, U.S. government shutdown

Sott Editors
Sott.net
Sun, 27 Oct 2013 19:00 UTC
Image
'All and Everything' returns this week as we discuss the attention a British celebrity has brought to the dire state of affairs for people and planet, the latest NSA Leaks, the narrowly-avoided U.S. dollar default and more!

Russell Brand on revolution: hero or villain? And what about Ed Snowden? Sincere people speaking truth to power, a case of the blind leading the blind, or is something else afoot?

NSA-gate continues courtesy of The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald and Le Monde, through which it emerged this week that Israeli signals intelligence, and not the NSA, was behind massive electronic spying on the French government and people.

America narrowly avoided a currency default, but in the meantime the rest of the world is preparing for life after the petro-dollar... what are you doing to prepare for global systemic collapse?

Meanwhile, Japan has been smacked by dozens of typhoons in quick succession, record early snowfalls have hit northern U.S. states, a(nother) record-breaking heatwave is frying everything in Australia, and fireballs continue raining down from space - NASA's All-Sky Fireball Network captured 15 of them over the U.S. on October 16 alone...

Running Time: 02:05:00

Download: MP3

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Bad Guys

US Counter-insurgency: Roadside bomb 'kills 18 civilians' in central Afghanistan


AFP
Sun, 27 Oct 2013 10:30 UTC
Wedding party bombing
© APAfghan men offer funeral prayers near the bodies of 7 civilians killed, by a roadside bomb in the Alingar district of Laghman province, east of Kabul, Afghanistan, June 03, 2013.
A roadside bomb blast on Sunday killed at least 18 civilians, mostly women, as they were heading to a wedding party in central Afghanistan, provincial officials said.

"A roadside bomb planted by the enemies of Afghanistan in Andar district of Ghazni province hit a civilian vehicle around 4:30pm," Mosa Khan Akbarzada, Ghazni provincial governor, told AFP.

"Unfortunately, we have 14 women, three men, and a child onboard martyred in this tragic incident," Akbarzada said.

Deputy provincial police chief Asadullah Insafi confirmed the attack and gave a similar account. He also said five women had been taken to hospital.

Roadside bombs have in the past been planted by Taliban militants to target Afghan security forces and NATO-led US troops.

Often they miss the targets, and civilians pay the price.

There was no immediate comment from the Taliban Sunday.

Ghazni is a volatile province in central Afghanistan.

Comment: The key aim of counter-insurgency is to make the enemy so hated by the local population that they will not get any support
from there. This has long been a deliberate strategy by the US in Afghanistan and Iraq.It is hoped that the government and the local people will then beg the US troops to stay and give the US troops immunity from any crimes that they commit while there.

From Suicide Bombings - A Favourite US Counter-Insurgency Tactic:
Roger Trinquier, an immensely influential French counter-insurgency expert, suggested in his book Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency (1961) (Available online here) three simple principles of Counter Insurgency:
1. separate the guerrilla from the population that supports him;

2. occupy the zones that the guerrillas previously operated from, making them dangerous for him and turning the people against the guerrilla movement;

3. coordinate actions over a wide area and for a long enough time that the guerrilla is denied access to the population centers that could support him.
Remote controlled bombings masquerading as "suicide bombings" that are carried out by the US, British and Israeli occupation forces fit these principles very neatly. By detonating bombs on a daily basis across Iraq and Afghanistan and via the propaganda organs touting them as being the work of Iraqi/Afghani "suicide bombers" belonging to the insurgency, the occupying military hopes to achieve several goals:

cut off the widespread support base that the insurgency have amongst the Iraqis

create tensions between religious lines, especially by ascribing the faked "suicide attacks" to either Shias or Sunnis.

In other words divide and conquer.


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Question

Will the House of Saud pivot to China?

Pepe Escobar
Asia Times Online
Sun, 27 Oct 2013 10:08 UTC
China and Saudi Arabia
© Elaine Meinel Supkis
The favorite geopolitical sport du jour is to deconstruct the reasons why the House of Saud - that marriage of hyper-absolute monarchy and Wahhabi fanatics - has gone completely bonkers, with the ineffable Bandar Bush in the frontline.

They are terrified with the possibility that the 34-year Wall of Mistrust between Washington and Tehran finally tumbles down. They are terrified that those American infidels refused to fight "our" regime change war on Syria. They were horrified by (mild) criticism about hardcore repression in Bahrain (which was invaded by Saudi in 2011, by the way). They abhor the American worshipping of that weird deity - democracy - that allowed friendly tyrants in Tunisia and Egypt to be abandoned (Libya is different; King Abdullah had wanted Gaddafi snuffed since at least 2002).

The House of Saud is so mad as hell at the Obama administration that even "all options" are supposed to be "on the table". Which begs the question; what if Riyadh is actually dreaming of pivoting to China?
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Dollar Gold

Bank of America liable for mortgage "Hustle" program

Jason M. Breslow
PBS
Thu, 24 Oct 2013 15:17 UTC
Bank of America sign
© PBS

For the first time, a major U.S. bank has been found liable for fraud in the sale of defective mortgages during the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis.

On Wednesday, a federal jury in New York found Bank of America guilty of defrauding taxpayers in the sale of thousands of defective home loans from its Countrywide Financial unit to the government-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The civil suit centered on a lending program referred to within Countrywide as "the Hustle." According to prosecutors, the program was designed to process mortgages at rapid speed without adequate checks on risk. Bankers were allegedly awarded bonuses based on how quickly they were able to originate loans. Countrywide earned $165 million on the program, but when the mortgages later soured, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were left with more than $1 billion in losses.

The jury of six women and four men also found a former Countrywide executive, Rebecca Mairone, liable for her role in leading the Hustle initiative. An attorney for Mairone, who now works for JPMorgan Chase, told The New York Times that his client "never engaged in any fraud because there was no fraud. We'll fight on."
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Sherlock

Armed agents seize records of reporter, Washington Times prepares legal action

Gut Taylor
The Washington Times
Fri, 25 Oct 2013 00:01 UTC
U.S. Department of Homeland Security seal
© Associated Press
Maryland state police and federal agents used a search warrant in an unrelated criminal investigation to seize the private reporting files of an award-winning former investigative journalist for The Washington Times who had exposed problems in the Homeland Security Department's Federal Air Marshal Service.

Reporter Audrey Hudson said the investigators, who included an agent for Homeland's Coast Guard service, took her private notes and government documents that she had obtained under the Freedom of Information Act during a predawn raid of her family home on Aug. 6.

The documents, some which chronicled her sources and her work at the Times about problems inside the Homeland Security Department, were seized under a warrant to search for unregistered firearms and a "potato gun" suspected of belonging to her husband, Paul Flanagan, a Coast Guard employee. Mr. Flanagan has not been charged with any wrongdoing since the raid.
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Eye 1

NSA and CIA have been tapping all communication in Berlin's government district for at least 10 years: Der Spiegel

Kevin Rawlinson
The Observer
Sun, 27 Oct 2013 05:46 UTC
Image
Obama pretending he isn't already familiar with the content of Merkel's speech.
Move comes as Der Spiegel reports that Angela Merkel's phone might have been monitored for more than 10 years

New claims emerged last night over the extent that US intelligence agencies have been monitoring the mobile phone of Angela Merkel. The allegations were made after German secret service officials were already preparing to travel to Washington to seek explanations into the alleged surveillance of its chancellor.

A report in Der Spiegel said Merkel's mobile number had been listed by the NSA's Special Collection Service (SCS) since 2002 and may have been monitored for more than 10 years. It was still on the list - marked as "GE Chancellor Merkel" - weeks before President Barack Obama visited Berlin in June.

In an SCS document cited by the magazine, the agency said it had a "not legally registered spying branch" in the US embassy in Berlin, the exposure of which would lead to "grave damage for the relations of the United States to another government".
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