Puppet MastersS


Radar

Propaganda Buildup: US sends F-22 fighter jets to UAE to threaten Iran

F-22-Raptor
© Desconocido
The Pentagon has dispatched F-22 Raptors, the most advanced American warplanes, to the United Arab Emirates in a provocative escalation of US war threats against Iran.

The deployment of the stealth fighter-bombers to the UAE's Al-Dhafra air base was first reported by the journal Aviation Week. The Pentagon's official announcement mentioned only that the "United States Air Force has deployed F-22s to Southwest Asia" and that the action was intended to "strengthen military-to-military relationships, promote sovereign and regional security, improve combined tactical air operations, and enhance interoperability of forces ...."

On Monday, however, US military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed to the French news agency AFP that the deployment was to the air base in the UAE.

Stormtrooper

Private Police State: US military-industrial giant KBR in bidding to privatize British police forces

London police, UK
© unknown
Giant US military-industrial company Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) is in the running to win a slice of a controversial £1.5 billion (US$2.43 billion) contract to transform the West Midlands and Surrey police forces in Britain, The (London) Times reported.

Hailed as the largest police privatization scheme in the UK, it has been suggested the private companies who win the contract will be tasked to perform several police functions -- including patrols, detention and criminal investigation.

KBR, a former subsidiary of the Halliburton group, has attracted its share of criticism over the large contracts it won with the US government during the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The corporation also helped to build the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

Comment: "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.


Cheeseburger

New FBI Sting Operation Targets White American Idiots as 'Terrorists'

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Lookout! It's the 'Route 82 patsy bridge bombers'! Collective IQ: 100. Just the kind of guys the FBI are looking for.
CLEVELAND - Five men suspected of plotting to bomb an Ohio bridge were indicted Thursday on three counts each, including a new charge of attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction to destroy property in interstate commerce.

The indictment was announced by U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach, who said the men also were charged with conspiracy and attempted use of an explosive device to destroy property in interstate commerce.

The men could face life in prison if convicted of trying to bomb the soaring bridge over the Cuyahoga Valley National Park at Brecksville, south of Cleveland. The bridge also crosses a scenic railway line and a canal tow path popular with joggers and bikers.

The five men, all described as anarchists, were arrested Monday night when they allegedly tried to detonate what turned out to be a dud bomb provided by an FBI undercover informant.

Comment: So the FBI is at it again. This time trolling the OWS movement for the most gullible people to set up as patsies to keep the bogus 'terror threat' alive, and even expand it to 'homegrown terrorism' and anyone "angry at corporate America".

For a history of the many similar cases of the FBI entrapping intellectually challenged Americans to frame as 'terrorist' patsies, check out the following Sott Report.




Bizarro Earth

Singapore Elite Caught in Underage Prostitution Scandal

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© Anderw Biraj / ReutersSixteen-year-old prostitute Maya waits for a customer inside her small room at Kandapara brothel in Tangail, a northeastern city of Bangladesh, March 5, 2012. An unfolding scandal over an under-age call girl has shaken Singapore's political and economic elite after businessmen, civil servants and uniformed officers were charged in the case.
An unfolding scandal over an under-age call girl has shaken Singapore's political and economic elite after businessmen, civil servants and uniformed officers were charged in the case.

Prostitution is legal in Singapore, but 48 men ranging in age from their early 20s to late 40s have so far been charged under a 2008 law making it a crime to pay for sex with a girl under 18.

Singapore has long been perceived as a conservative, even prudish, city-state but it has a thriving sex industry dating back to its beginnings as a key trading port of the then British empire.

The latest case has shone a spotlight on its pragmatic approach, which instead of seeking to close down the sex industry aims to tightly regulate the trade to protect minors and ward off criminal involvement.

An elementary school principal who pleaded guilty to engaging the under-aged girl's services became the first to be punished when a district court on Friday sentenced him to nine weeks in jail for the offence.

Alarm Clock

Hasidic Pedophiles Exempt from Public Disclosure

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© UnknownCharles Hynes
If anyone had dared to suggest that Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes' office has an official policy giving preferential treatment to Orthodox Jewish sex criminals, the critic would probably be knee-deep in editorials charging him with anti-Semitism.

Alas, what's an Orthodox Jewish lawyer like me to say when the DA's lieutenants themselves announce just such a policy?

I'll say this: Hynes' refusal to disclose almost any information about the arrest or prosecution of alleged sex offenders from the politically powerful Orthodox community is not only discriminatory; it's also a cynical insult to the victims his office is pledged to support.

Mind you, the discrimination is no mere allegation; it's a matter of record. In letters this month to reporters Paul Berger, of Forward, and Hella Winston, of The Jewish Week, Assistant DA Morgan Dennehy explicitly affirmed that his boss' policy for suppressing information about sex abuse is "unique" to the "Hasidic" community.

Footprints

NYTimes Realizes That The FBI Keeps Celebrating Breaking Up Its Own Terrorist Plots

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© unk
Over the last few years, we've noticed that nearly every victory the FBI celebrates against terrorism is actually about stopping its own terrorist plots that it feeds to hapless individuals, often nudging them and pushing them down the road to "become" terrorists, despite commonly displaying little to no aptitude for actual terrorism.

Add the NY Times to the newspapers who are beginning to question the FBI's penchant for setting up its own plots for the sake of a high profile arrest of some clueless individuals.
The United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years - or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts.

But all these dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naïvely played their parts until they were arrested.

Candy Cane

Religion and Atheism


Bad Guys

Chen Guangcheng's US-brokered deal unravels after leaving embassy

Chen Guangcheng, left, with the US ambassador to China, Gary Locke, before leaving the embassy where he spent six days after fleeing from house arrest.
© AFPChen Guangcheng, left, with the US ambassador to China, Gary Locke, before leaving the embassy where he spent six days after fleeing from house arrest.
Chinese activist now pleads for help to leave China with family as US denies officials relayed threats from authorities

Blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng has pleaded for help to let him leave the country with his family, with a US-brokered deal for his future unravelling within hours of his leaving the Beijing embassy where he had taken shelter.

Chen said he never asked to leave China in his six days at the mission, which followed his incredible escape from a brutal 19-month regime of illegal house arrest. But he said he only left the embassy because US officials told him Chinese authorities would send his wife and children back to their home province - where they have been watched around the clock and harassed by a team of 100 guards - if he remained inside. He added that, at one point, an American official told him his wife would have been beaten to death - a claim denied by the US.

"I think we'd like to rest in a place outside of China," Chen told Associated Press, in an interview from a hospital room in the capital. "Help my family and me leave safely."

His appeal was in stark contrast to the US secretary of state Hillary Clinton's statement hours earlier, which said the handling of his stay and departure "reflected his choices and our values". She said that China had offered Chen understandings that he could pursue higher education in a safe environment. "Making these commitments a reality is the next crucial task," added Clinton, who arrived in Beijing on Wednesday morning. A friend said Barack Obama was due to make a statement on Chen's case as part of the deal, and the activist initially told his lawyer that he had "received clear assurances".

Bad Guys

The Constitutional Crimes of Barack Obama

Constitution burning graphic
© n/a
As we slog towards another vapid, largely meaningless exercise in pretend democracy with the selection of a new president and Congress this November, it is time to make it clear that the current president, elected four years ago by so many people with such inflated expectations four years ago (myself included, as I had hoped, vainly it turned out, that those who elected him would then press him to act in progressive ways), is not only a betrayer of those hopes, but is a serial violator of his oath of office. He is, in truth, a war criminal easily the equal of his predecessor, George W. Bush, and perhaps even of Bush's regent, former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Let me count the ways:

* For starters, in vowing to "preserve, protect and defend the US Constitution of the United States," President Obama, upon taking office, had a sacred obligation to prosecute the people who had gravely wounded that document prior to his assuming office. It was clear, as I wrote in my book The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office (St. Martin's Press, 2006), that Bush and Cheney had ordered and condoned and covered up torture of captives in their so-called "War" on Terror, as well as in the very real wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, committing grievous war crimes that are not only violations of international law, but of the US Criminal Code, given that the US is a leading author and signatory of the Geneva Accords). They also were war criminals of the first degree for orchestrating, through lies to both the UN Security Council and the US Congress and the American people, about the alleged threat and imminence of any threat by Iraq to the US or its allies. President Obama, under the UN Charter and under US law, as the president, commander in chief and top law officer in the nation, was bound to investigate and prosecute those crimes. Instead, he ordered that there would be no prosecutions.

* A federal court also ruled that President Bush had committed a felony in using the National Security Agency and several complicit telecommunications companies to spy on massive numbers of Americans with no warrants. Again, instead of prosecuting the president once he replaced him, President Obama said there would be no prosecution, and he went on to expand that spying program exponentially, effectively shredding beyond recognition the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable searches and seizures, which had been a leading rallying issue for the revolutionists of 1776.

Attention

Flashback Fox News, 26 December 2001: Bin Laden Dead

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Usama bin Laden has died a peaceful death due to an untreated lung complication, the Pakistan Observer reported, citing a Taliban leader who allegedly attended the funeral of the Al Qaeda leader.

"The Coalition troops are engaged in a mad search operation but they would never be able to fulfill their cherished goal of getting Usama alive or dead," the source said.

Bin Laden, according to the source, was suffering from a serious lung complication and succumbed to the disease in mid-December, in the vicinity of the Tora Bora mountains. The source claimed that bin Laden was laid to rest honorably in his last abode and his grave was made as per his Wahabi belief.

About 30 close associates of bin Laden in Al Qaeda, including his most trusted and personal bodyguards, his family members and some "Taliban friends," attended the funeral rites. A volley of bullets was also fired to pay final tribute to the "great leader."