Puppet MastersS


Eye 1

NGO head: CIA shares blame for murdered health workers

Nick Schifrin
ABC News
Thu, 03 Jan 2013 19:24 UTC
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© Hasham Ahmed/AFP/Getty ImagesMourners carry a coffin of a Pakistani charity worker, Jan. 2, 2013, who was killed with other colleagues during an attack by gunmen in Swabi. Seven charity workers were ambushed by gunmen on motorbikes as they were returning from a community centre in northwestern district Swabi, Pakistan.
Two days after gunmen killed seven of his employees, the head of a Pakistani aid organization blamed their deaths not only on the militants who pulled the trigger, but also on America's Central Intelligence Agency.

"The militants are taking revenge for the fake [vaccination] program in Abbottabad," Javed Akhtar, the executive director of the non-governmental organization (NGO) Support With Working Solution, told ABC News in a telephone interview.

Akhtar was referring to a hepatitis vaccination program created by the CIA and run by Pakistani Dr. Shakil Afridi in the town where Osama bin Laden lived. Afridi and a team of Pakistani nurses worked in the town, hoping to obtain a DNA sample from a bin Laden family member to prove he was living there. The campaign failed to get bin Laden DNA, admitted a senior U.S. official at the time, although Afridi did speak on the phone with Osama bin Laden's courier, whom the CIA used to track down the terror leader.

Bin Laden was killed on May 1, 2011 in a nighttime raid by America's elite Naval Special Warfare Development Group, commonly known as SEAL Team Six. Afridi was arrested after the raid and remains in Pakistani custody, convicted of treason. He never finished administering the vaccination regimen he started on some of the town's children.
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Pistol

States have subsidized makers of assault rifles to tune of $19 million

John Christie, Naomi Schalit, Theresa Sullivan Barger and Nathaniel Herz
Huffington Post
Thu, 03 Jan 2013 17:53 UTC
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Taxpayers across the country are subsidizing the manufacturers of assault rifles used in multiple mass killings, including the massacre of 20 children and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. last month.

A Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting examination of tax records shows that five companies that make semi-automatic rifles have received more than $19 million in tax breaks, most within with the past five years.

"I feel horrified at the power of the gun industry over our political system, that it could exert such influence," said Newtown resident Barbara Richardson, who lives between the homes of one of the 6-year-old victims and the shooter.

Saying she respects hunters who are ethical and good neighbors, she "absolutely [does] not" support taxpayer subsidies to help manufacture assault rifles: "They're weapons of mass destruction."
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Snakes in Suits

Obama signs NDAA again, disappoints on Gitmo and civil liberties again

Natasha Lennard
Salon
Thu, 03 Jan 2013 17:14 UTC
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© Credit: AP/ Evan Vucci
For the second year in a row, the president signs into law a bill he purports to have major problems with

This time last year, President Obama said that he had "serious reservations" about certain provisions of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. But he signed it anyway. This year, the same provisions over which he was so reserved remain in the 2013 version of the bill, along with a number of brand-new problematic amendments. The president threatened a veto on the new bill's prohibitions on closing Guantánamo Bay detention center. But he didn't veto; he signed the bill again on Thursday.

Once again, Obama expressed his misgivings in a signing statement, but stressed that "the need to renew critical defense authorities and funding was too great" to reject the bill, which approved a $633 billion armed forces budget for the 2013 fiscal year. Also approved in the NDAA are controversial provisions that will likely make closing Guantánamo Bay detention center impossible in Obama's presidency, and provisions elsewhere in the act that allow for the indefinite military detention of U.S. citizens.

"It's the second time that the president has promised to veto a piece of a very controversial national security legislation only to sign it," said Shahid Buttar, executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, according to HuffPo. "He has a habit of promising resistance to national security initiatives that he ultimately ends up supporting and enabling."
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Bad Guys

A Model for Europe and the U.S.? Latvia's Economic Disaster as a Neoliberal Success Story

Jeffrey Sommers and Michael Hudson
Counter Punch
Thu, 03 Jan 2013 16:50 UTC
financial tornado
A generation ago the Chicago Boys and their financial supporters applauded General Pinochet's anti-labor Chile as a success story, thanks mainly to its transformation of their Social Security into Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) that almost universally were looted by the employer grupos by the end of the 1970s. In the last decade, the Bush Administration, seeking a Trojan Horse to privatize Social Security in the United States, applauded Chile's disastrous privatization of pension accounts (turning many over to US financial institutions) even as that nation's voters rejected the Pinochetistas largely out of anger at the vast pension rip-off by high finance.

Today's most highly celebrated anti-labor success story is Latvia. Latvia is portrayed as the country where labor did not fight back, but simply emigrated politely and quietly. No general strikes, nor destruction of private property or violence, Latvia is presented as a country where labor had the good sense to not make a fuss when faced with austerity. Latvians gave up protest and simply began voting with their backsides (emigration) as the economy shrank, wage levels were scaled down, and where tax burdens remained decidedly on the backs of labor, even though recent token efforts have been made to increase taxes on real estate. The World Bank applauds Latvia and its Baltic neighbors by placing them high on its list of "business friendly" economies, even though at times scolding their social regimes as even too harsh for the Victorian tastes of the international financial institutions.

Can this really be a model for the United States or Europe's remaining social democracies? Or is it simply a cruel experiment that cannot readily be emulated in larger countries un-traumatized by Soviet era memories of occupation? One can only dream ...
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Dollars

8 huge corporate handouts in the fiscal cliff bill

Matt Stroller
Alter Net
Tue, 01 Jan 2013 16:50 UTC
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Here are the corporate subsidies in the fiscal cliff bill that you may not know about.

Throughout the months of November and December, a steady stream of corporate CEOs flowed in and out of the White House to discuss the impending fiscal cliff. Many of them, such as Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, would then publicly come out and talk about how modest increases of tax rates on the wealthy were reasonable in order to deal with the deficit problem. What wasn't mentioned is what these leaders wanted, which is what's known as "tax extenders", or roughly $205B of tax breaks for corporations. With such a banal name, and boring and difficult to read line items in the bill, few political operatives have bothered to pay attention to this part of the bill. But it is critical to understanding what is going on.
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Bad Guys

Apocalypse When? The U.S. Intelligence Community's New Year's Wish

Tom Engelhardt
Tom Dispatch
Thu, 03 Jan 2013 16:21 UTC
war on terror poster

Megatrends, Game-Changers, Black Swans, Tectonic Shifts, and a World Not That Different From 2012

Think of it as a simple formula: if you've been hired (and paid handsomely) to protect what is, you're going to be congenitally ill-equipped to imagine what might be. And yet the urge not just to know the contours of the future, but to plant the Stars and Stripes in that future has had the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) in its grip since the mid-1990s. That was the moment when it first occurred to some in Washington that U.S. power might be capable of controlling just about everything worth the bother globally for, if not an eternity, then long enough to make the future American property.

Ever since, every few years the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the IC's "center for long-term strategic analysis," has been intent on producing a document it calls serially Global Trends [fill in the future year]. The latest edition, out just in time for Barack Obama's second term, is Global Trends 2030. Here's one utterly predictable thing about it: it's bigger and more elaborate than Global Trends 2025. And here's a prediction that, hard as it is to get anything right about the future, has a 99.9% chance of being accurate: when Global Trends 2035 comes out, it'll be bigger and more elaborate yet. It'll cost more and still, like its predecessor, offer a hem for every haw, a hedge for every faintly bold possibility, a trap-door escape from any prediction that might not stick.
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Hourglass

Arab Awakening: Could Saudi Arabia be next?

Robert Fisk
The Independent
Mon, 31 Dec 2012 16:07 UTC
arab fighter
© Reuters
Nobody can predict which way the 'Arab Awakening' will turn this year. But Robert Fisk has ventured a very tentative punt or two...

Never make predictions in the Middle East.

My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. "An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance," a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, "and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam." A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that "it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca..."

So let's say this for 2013: the "Arab Awakening" (the title of George Antonius' seminal work of 1938) will continue, the demand for dignity and freedom - let us not get tramelled up here with "democracy" - will go on ravaging the pseudo-stability of the Middle East, causing as much fear in Washington as it does in the palaces of the Arab Gulf.
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Pistol

Top cop kidnapped in Libya's Benghazi


France24
Thu, 03 Jan 2013 14:55 UTC
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Libyan security officials guard a checkpoint in the eastern coastal city of Benghazi on July 5, 2012. The acting head of the criminal investigations department in Libya's second city Benghazi has been kidnapped at gunpoint.
The acting head of the criminal investigations department in Libya's second city Benghazi has been kidnapped at gunpoint, officials told AFP on Thursday.

"Abdelsalam al-Mahdawi was kidnapped late Wednesday when travelling from his farm to the criminal investigations department," a security official told AFP.

"Bearded men stopped him at a traffic light on Venezia Street and kidnapped him at gunpoint," the official said on condition of anonymity, recalling that the police chief had been abducted before.

He said he believed hardline Islamists were behind the kidnapping.
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Stormtrooper

NYPD loses crucial evidence, guns and drugs to Sandy


RT.com
Thu, 03 Jan 2013 14:45 UTC
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© Reuters / Mike Segar
The New York Police Department lost tons of crucial DNA and other evidence when two of its warehouses were destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. Now, Gotham's justice system is struggling to produce the materials in court.

Located in New York Harbor, the Erie Basin auto pound and evidence warehouse housed hundreds of seized cars, 9,846 barrels of evidence containing sensitive DNA, and thousands of guns. As the storm battered the city, the surge ruptured the warehouse's doors and plunged its content into the water.

According to the NYPD, this included 1,177 barrels of DNA evidence at the Kingsland Avenue location. Approximately 5,000 "narcotics items" and 3,250 firearms were also stored at the Erie Basin warehouse, Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the Police Department revealed to the New York Times.

The disaster is now affecting the US court system, where on at least six occasions an officer had to testify that evidence was inaccessible, but still existed, according to the police department. That number is feared to rise.
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Vader

Putin preps Russian navy for biggest exercise since the Soviet Union

Robert Beckhusen
Wired.com
Tue, 01 Jan 2013 12:36 UTC
Putin
© Associated PressRussian President Vladimir Putin aboard the nuclear submarine Arkhangelsk in 2004.
The Russian navy is about to stage its largest war exercise in a long time - possibly the largest since before the breakup of the Soviet Union. It's a chance for President Vladimir Putin to show off his military might, of course. But the exercise may also be a subtle warning to the United States: Stay clear of waters that traditionally lie in Russia's sphere of influence.

The Russian defense ministry says its the "first time in decades" it's launched naval exercises on this scale. The drills involve warships from all of Russia's fleets: "the Northern, Baltic, Black Sea and Pacific," noted a statement from the ministry. The exercise will be reportedly held in late January, and involve amphibious landings in the Caucasus and naval exercises in the Mediterranean.

Putin has undertaken a major $659 billion arms buildup through 2020. On Thursday, the Defense Ministry in Moscow also announced the scale of its ongoing naval increase. By 2016, a statement noted, Russia will have 18 new warships, "and also 30 special-purpose and counter-subversion vessels," along with six new submarines. One of these vessels, the Borei class ballistic missile sub Yuri Dolgoruky, joined the fleet this week.
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