Puppet MastersS


Vader

US Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: "We're turning into a country that knows only one way to achieve its purpose and that is to kill people"

US Army colonel, former War College instructor and former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell Lawrence Wilkerson tells Real News: "I don't know if our grandchildren will live in a democratic republic."


Eye 2

Best of the Web: Hersh: Obama administration lied about gas attack in Syria

hersh
Prominent American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh says US President Barack Obama did not tell the whole story about a chemical weapons attack near the Syrian capital of Damascus in August.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, in a new report published in the London Review of Books, wrote that the administration of President Obama was aware of the fact that the militants fighting against the Syrian government had the ability to make chemical weapons but did not inform the public about it.

"Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts," he wrote in the article.

Comment: Syria, Chemical Weapons and the Britam Defence emails
BBC and doctors in Syria: shilling for Western Psychopaths in Power?
Top 45 lies in Obama's speech at UN


Bug

Best of the Web: Patriot Act author: Obama's intel czar should be prosecuted

The clapper
© Greg NashJames Clapper
Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the original author of the Patriot Act, says Director of National Intelligence James Clapper should be prosecuted for lying to Congress.

"Lying to Congress is a federal offense, and Clapper ought to be fired and prosecuted for it," the Wisconsin Republican said in an interview with The Hill.

He said the Justice Department should prosecute Clapper for giving false testimony during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in March.

During that hearing, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper whether the National Security Agency (NSA) collects data on millions of Americans. Clapper insisted that the NSA does not - or at least does "not wittingly" - collect information on Americans in bulk.

Che Guevara

12 Mandela quotes you won't see in the corporate media as they sanitize the legacy of this anti-apartheid leader

Nelson Mandela
On "sanitizing" the legacy of anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela, who died yesterday at age 95, was a South African anti-apartheid revolutionary who served as President of South Africa from 1994-1999.

During the 1950's, while working as an anti-apartheid lawyer, Mandela was repeatedly arrested for 'seditious activities' and 'treason.' In 1963 he was convicted of sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the government, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Mandela served 27 years in prison before an international lobbying campaign finally won his release in 1990.

In 1994, Mandela was elected President and formed a Government of National Unity in an attempt to defuse ethnic tensions. As President, he established a new constitution and initiated the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate past human rights abuses and to uncover the truth about crimes of the South African government, using amnesty as a mechanism.

Nelson Mandela was a powerful and inspirational leader who eloquently and forcefully spoke truth to power. As tributes are published over the coming days, the corporate media will paint a sanitized portrait of Mandela that leaves out much of who he was. We expect to see 'safe' Mandela quotes such as "education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world" or "after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb."

Eye 1

FBI's powerful surveillance software can covertly download files, photographs, stored e-mails and activate computer cameras

internet surveillance
© Shutterstock.com
The man who called himself "Mo" had dark hair, a foreign accent and - if the pictures he e-mailed to federal investigators could be believed - an Iranian military uniform. When he made a series of threats to detonate bombs at universities and airports across a wide swath of the United States last year, police had to scramble every time.

Mo remained elusive for months, communicating via ­e-mail, video chat and an ­Internet-based phone service without revealing his true identity or location, court documents show. So with no house to search or telephone to tap, investigators turned to a new kind of surveillance tool delivered over the Internet.

The FBI's elite hacker team designed a piece of malicious software that was to be delivered secretly when Mo signed on to his Yahoo e-mail account, from any computer anywhere in the world, according to the documents. The goal of the software was to gather a range of information - Web sites he had visited and indicators of the location of the computer - that would allow investigators to find Mo and tie him to the bomb threats.

Such high-tech search tools, which the FBI calls "network investigative techniques," have been used when authorities struggle to track suspects who are adept at covering their tracks online. The most powerful FBI surveillance software can covertly download files, photographs and stored e-mails, or even gather real-time images by activating cameras connected to computers, say court documents and people familiar with this technology.

Online surveillance pushes the boundaries of the constitution's limits on searches and seizures by gathering a broad range of information, some of it without direct connection to any crime. Critics compare it to a physical search in which the entire contents of a home are seized, not just those items suspected to offer evidence of a particular offense.

Bad Guys

ATF uses rogue tactics in storefront stings across nation

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© Illustration by Lou Saldivar
Documents, interviews show agents employed tactics similar to those used in Milwaukee

Aaron Key wasn't sure he wanted a tattoo on his neck. Especially one of a giant squid smoking a joint.

But the guys running Squid's Smoke Shop in Portland, Ore., convinced him: It would be a perfect way to promote their store.They would even pay him and a friend $150 apiece if they agreed to turn their bodies into walking billboards. Key, who is mentally disabled, was swayed. He and his friend, Marquis Glover, liked Squid's. It was their hangout. The 19-year-olds spent many afternoons there playing Xbox and chatting with the owner, "Squid," and the store clerks.

So they took the money and got the ink etched on their necks, tentacles creeping down to their collarbones. It would be months before the young men learned the whole thing was a setup. The guys running Squid's were actually undercover ATF agents conducting a sting to get guns away from criminals and drugs off the street.

The tattoos had been sponsored by the U.S. government; advertisements for a fake storefront. The teens found out as they were arrested and booked into jail.

Arrow Down

ATF uses children and low IQ people in their sting operations

ATF
© Associated Press

ATF agents have been exploiting mentally disabled people, allowing children to use drugs, teaching criminals new tricks, and even employing female agents to hit on underaged males as part of their storefront sting operations, a new investigative report charges.

Yesterday, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published a damning "Watchdog report" on the ATF's activities, conclusions that they say are based on thousands of pages of court documents, police reports, and interviews with dozens of people who were involved in six different ATF operations.

According to the Journal's findings, the ATF routinely uses storefront sting operations, where they open up undercover storefronts in an effort to ferret out guns and drugs.

The high-tech AV-wired fronts take the shape of one of two forms - as stores that sell items like "hip-hop clothing and shoes," cigarettes, and drug paraphernalia, and as pawn shops with reputations for buying anything.

But to make these storefronts seem more legitimate, the ATF apparently regularly employs children and mentally handicapped people, some of whom are later arrested for their involvement in the stings.

In April, the Journal exposed an ATF sting operation that went sour after they used a brain damaged man named Chaucey Wright to hand out fliers to attract people to one of their fake storefronts. The ATF paid Wright - who had an IQ in the 50's - in cigarettes and cash. They never told him the store was a front, although his girlfriend suspected something wasn't right.

Light Saber

Best of the Web: Conspiracy theorists sane and government dupes crazy, hostile according to recent studies

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Is this building falling or exploding? If you say “falling” you need to take your meds
Recent studies by psychologists and social scientists in the US and UK suggest that contrary to mainstream media stereotypes, those labeled "conspiracy theorists" appear to be saner than those who accept the official versions of contested events.

The most recent study was published on July 8th by psychologists Michael J. Wood and Karen M. Douglas of the University of Kent (UK). Entitled "What about Building 7? A social psychological study of online discussion of 9/11 conspiracy theories," the study compared "conspiracist" (pro-conspiracy theory) and "conventionalist" (anti-conspiracy) comments at news websites.

The authors were surprised to discover that it is now more conventional to leave so-called conspiracist comments than conventionalist ones: "Of the 2174 comments collected, 1459 were coded as conspiracist and 715 as conventionalist." In other words, among people who comment on news articles, those who disbelieve government accounts of such events as 9/11 and the JFK assassination outnumber believers by more than two to one. That means it is the pro-conspiracy commenters who are expressing what is now the conventional wisdom, while the anti-conspiracy commenters are becoming a small, beleaguered minority.

Perhaps because their supposedly mainstream views no longer represent the majority, the anti-conspiracy commenters often displayed anger and hostility: "The research... showed that people who favoured the official account of 9/11 were generally more hostile when trying to persuade their rivals."

No Entry

AT&T: We don't have to disclose NSA dealings

att
© Thomas Coex, AFP/Getty ImagesTelecom network cables pictured in Paris.
AT&T, under fire for ongoing revelations that it shares and sells customers' communications records to the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence offices, says it isn't required to disclose to shareholders what it does with customers' data.

In a letter sent Thursday to the Securities and Exchange Commission, AT&T said it protects customer information and complies with government requests for records "only to the extent required by law."

The telecom giant's letter was a response to a shareholder revolt sparked on Nov. 20 by the New York State Common Retirement Fund, the ACLU of Northern California and others. The groups are demanding that AT&T and Verizon be more transparent about their dealings with the NSA.

In the letter, AT&T said information about assisting foreign intelligence surveillance activities is almost certainly classified. The company said it should not have to address the issue at its annual shareholders meeting this spring.

Dollar Gold

Amend the Fed: the U.S. needs a bank that serves Main Street, not Wall Street

US Federal Reserve logo
© Inconnu
December 23rd marks the 100th anniversary of the Federal Reserve. Dissatisfaction with its track record has prompted calls to audit the Fed and end the Fed. At the least, Congress needs to amend the Fed, modifying the Federal Reserve Act to give the central bank the tools necessary to carry out its mandates.

The Federal Reserve is the only central bank with a dual mandate. It is charged not only with maintaining low, stable inflation but with promoting maximum sustainable employment. Yet unemployment remains stubbornly high, despite four years of radical tinkering with interest rates and quantitative easing (creating money on the Fed's books). After pushing interest rates as low as they can go, the Fed has admitted that it has run out of tools.