Justice Department Memo Justifies Targeted Killing of American Citizens

The president’s partisan lawyers purport to vest him with the most extreme power a political leader can seize

The most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in practice. In September 2011, it killed US citizen Anwar Awlaki in a drone strike in Yemen, along with US citizen Samir Khan, and then, in circumstances that are still unexplained, two weeks later killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son Abdulrahman with a separate drone strike in Yemen.

Since then, senior Obama officials including Attorney General Eric Holder and John Brennan, Obama’s top terrorism adviser and his current nominee to lead the CIA, have explicitly argued that the president is and should be vested with this power. Meanwhile, a Washington Post article from October reported that the administration is formally institutionalizing this president’s power to decide who dies under the Orwellian title “disposition matrix”.

[Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qa’ida or An Associated Force - MEMO ]

When the New York Times back in April, 2010 first confirmed the existence of Obama’s hit list, it made clear just what an extremist power this is, noting: “It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing.” The NYT quoted a Bush intelligence official as saying “he did not know of any American who was approved for targeted killing under the former president”. When the existence of Obama’s hit list was first reported several months earlier by the Washington Post’s Dana Priest, she wrote that the “list includes three Americans”.

What has made these actions all the more radical is the absolute secrecy with which Obama has draped all of this. Not only is the entire process carried out solely within the Executive branch – with no checks or oversight of any kind – but there is zero transparency and zero accountability. The president’s underlings compile their proposed lists of who should be executed, and the president – at a charming weekly event dubbed by White House aides as “Terror Tuesday” – then chooses from “baseball cards” and decrees in total secrecy who should die. The power of accuser, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner are all consolidated in this one man, and those powers are exercised in the dark.

In fact, The Most Transparent Administration Ever™ has been so fixated on secrecy that they have refused even to disclose the legal memoranda prepared by Obama lawyers setting forth their legal rationale for why the president has this power. During the Bush years, when Bush refused to disclose the memoranda from his Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that legally authorized torture, rendition, warrantless eavesdropping and the like, leading Democratic lawyers such as Dawn Johnsen (Obama’s first choice to lead the OLC) vehemently denounced this practice as a grave threat, warning that “the Bush Administration’s excessive reliance on ’secret law’ threatens the effective functioning of American democracy” and “the withholding from Congress and the public of legal interpretations by the [OLC] upsets the system of checks and balances between the executive and legislative branches of government.”

But when it comes to Obama’s assassination power, this is exactly what his administration has done. It has repeatedly refused to disclose the principal legal memoranda prepared by Obama OLC lawyers that justified his kill list. It is, right now, vigorously resisting lawsuits from the New York Times and the ACLU to obtain that OLC memorandum. In sum, Obama not only claims he has the power to order US citizens killed with no transparency, but that even the documents explaining the legal rationale for this power are to be concealed. He’s maintaining secret law on the most extremist power he can assert.

Last night, NBC News’ Michael Isikoff released a 16-page “white paper” prepared by the Obama DOJ that purports to justify Obama’s power to target even Americans for assassination without due process (the memo is embedded in full below). This is not the primary OLC memo justifying Obama’s kill list – that is still concealed – but it appears to track the reasoning of that memo as anonymously described to the New York Times in October 2011.

This new memo is entitled: “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a US Citizen Who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa’ida or An Associated Force”. It claims its conclusion is “reached with recognition of the extraordinary seriousness of a lethal operation by the United States against a US citizen”. Yet it is every bit as chilling as the Bush OLC torture memos in how its clinical, legalistic tone completely sanitizes the radical and dangerous power it purports to authorize.

I’ve written many times at length about why the Obama assassination program is such an extreme and radical threat – see here for one of the most comprehensive discussions, with documentation of how completely all of this violates Obama and Holder’s statements before obtaining power – and won’t repeat those arguments here. Instead, there are numerous points that should be emphasized about the fundamentally misleading nature of this new memo:

1. Equating government accusations with guilt

The core distortion of the War on Terror under both Bush and Obama is the Orwellian practice of equating government accusations of terrorism with proof of guilt. One constantly hears US government defenders referring to “terrorists” when what they actually mean is: those accused by the government of terrorism. This entire memo is grounded in this deceit.

Time and again, it emphasizes that the authorized assassinations are carried out “against a senior operational leader of al-Qaida or its associated forces who poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States.” Undoubtedly fearing that this document would one day be public, Obama lawyers made certain to incorporate this deceit into the title itself: “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a US Citizen Who is a Senior Operational Leader of al-Qaida or An Associated Force.”

This ensures that huge numbers of citizens – those who spend little time thinking about such things and/or authoritarians who assume all government claims are true – will instinctively justify what is being done here on the ground that we must kill the Terrorists or joining al-Qaida means you should be killed. That’s the “reasoning” process that has driven the War on Terror since it commenced: if the US government simply asserts without evidence or trial that someone is a terrorist, then they are assumed to be, and they can then be punished as such – with indefinite imprisonment or death.

But of course, when this memo refers to “a Senior Operational Leader of al-Qaida”, what it actually means is this: someone whom the President – in total secrecy and with no due process – has accused of being that. Indeed, the memo itself makes this clear, as it baldly states that presidential assassinations are justified when “an informed, high-level official of the US government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the US”.

This is the crucial point: the memo isn’t justifying the due-process-free execution of senior al-Qaida leaders who pose an imminent threat to the US. It is justifying the due-process-free execution of people secretly accused by the president and his underlings, with no due process, of being that. The distinction between (a) government accusations and (b) proof of guilt is central to every free society, by definition, yet this memo – and those who defend Obama’s assassination power – willfully ignore it.

Those who justify all of this by arguing that Obama can and should kill al-Qaida leaders who are trying to kill Americans are engaged in supreme question-begging. Without any due process, transparency or oversight, there is no way to know who is a “senior al-Qaida leader” and who is posing an “imminent threat” to Americans. All that can be known is who Obama, in total secrecy, accuses of this.

(Indeed, membership in al-Qaida is not even required to be assassinated, as one can be a member of a group deemed to be an “associated force” of al-Qaida, whatever that might mean: a formulation so broad and ill-defined that, as Law Professor Kevin Jon Heller argues, it means the memo “authorizes the use of lethal force against individuals whose targeting is, without more, prohibited by international law”.)

The definition of an extreme authoritarian is one who is willing blindly to assume that government accusations are true without any evidence presented or opportunity to contest those accusations. This memo – and the entire theory justifying Obama’s kill list – centrally relies on this authoritarian conflation of government accusations and valid proof of guilt.

They are not the same and never have been. Political leaders who decree guilt in secret and with no oversight inevitably succumb to error and/or abuse of power. Such unchecked accusatory decrees are inherently untrustworthy (indeed, Yemen experts have vehemently contested the claim that Awlaki himself was a senior al-Qaida leader posing an imminent threat to the US). That’s why due process is guaranteed in the Constitution and why judicial review of government accusations has been a staple of western justice since the Magna Carta: because leaders can’t be trusted to decree guilt and punish citizens without evidence and an adversarial process. That is the age-old basic right on which this memo, and the Obama presidency, is waging war.

2. Creating a ceiling, not a floor

The most vital fact to note about this memorandum is that it is not purporting to impose requirements on the president’s power to assassinate US citizens. When it concludes that the president has the authority to assassinate “a Senior Operational Leader of al-Qaida” who “poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the US” where capture is “infeasible”, it is not concluding that assassinations are permissible only in those circumstances.

To the contrary, the memo expressly makes clear that presidential assassinations may be permitted even when none of those circumstances prevail: “This paper does not attempt to determine the minimum requirements necessary to render such an operation lawful.” Instead, as the last line of the memo states: “it concludes only that the stated conditions would be sufficient to make lawful a lethal operation” – not that such conditions are necessary to find these assassinations legal. The memo explicitly leaves open the possibility that presidential assassinations of US citizens may be permissible even when the target is not a senior al-Qaida leader posing an imminent threat and/or when capture is feasible.

Critically, the rationale of the memo – that the US is engaged in a global war against al-Qaida and “associated forces” – can be easily used to justify presidential assassinations of US citizens in circumstances far beyond the ones described in this memo. If you believe the president has the power to execute US citizens based on the accusation that the citizen has joined al-Qaida, what possible limiting principle can you cite as to why that shouldn’t apply to a low-level al-Qaida member, including ones found in places where capture may be feasible (including US soil)? The purported limitations on this power set forth in this memo, aside from being incredibly vague, can be easily discarded once the central theory of presidential power is embraced.

3. Relies on the core Bush/Cheney theory of a global battlefield

The primary theory embraced by the Bush administration to justify its War on Terror policies was that the “battlefield” is no longer confined to identifiable geographical areas, but instead, the entire globe is now one big, unlimited “battlefield”. That theory is both radical and dangerous because a president’s powers are basically omnipotent on a “battlefield”. There, state power is shielded from law, from courts, from constitutional guarantees, from all forms of accountability: anyone on a battlefield can be killed or imprisoned without charges. Thus, to posit the world as a battlefield is, by definition, to create an imperial, omnipotent presidency. That is the radical theory that unleashed all the rest of the controversial and lawless Bush/Cheney policies.

This “world-is-a-battlefield” theory was once highly controversial among Democrats. John Kerry famously denounced it when running for president, arguing instead that the effort against terrorism is “primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world”.

But this global-war theory is exactly what lies at heart of the Obama approach to Terrorism generally and this memo specifically. It is impossible to defend Obama’s assassination powers without embracing it (which is why key Obama officials have consistently done so). That’s because these assassinations are taking place in countries far from any war zone, such as Yemen and Somalia. You can’t defend the application of “war powers” in these countries without embracing the once-very-controversial Bush/Cheney view that the whole is now a “battlefield” and the president’s war powers thus exist without geographic limits.

This new memo makes clear that this Bush/Cheney worldview is at the heart of the Obama presidency. The president, it claims, “retains authority to use force against al-Qaida and associated forces outside the area of active hostilities”. In other words: there are, subject to the entirely optional “feasibility of capture” element, no geographic limits to the president’s authority to kill anyone he wants. This power applies not only to war zones, but everywhere in the world that he claims a member of al-Qaida is found. This memo embraces and institutionalizes the core Bush/Cheney theory that justified the entire panoply of policies Democrats back then pretended to find so objectionable.

4. Expanding the concept of “imminence” beyond recognition

The memo claims that the president’s assassination power applies to a senior al-Qaida member who “poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States”. That is designed to convince citizens to accept this power by leading them to believe it’s similar to common and familiar domestic uses of lethal force on US soil: if, for instance, an armed criminal is in the process of robbing a bank or is about to shoot hostages, then the “imminence” of the threat he poses justifies the use of lethal force against him by the police.

But this rhetorical tactic is totally misleading. The memo is authorizing assassinations against citizens in circumstances far beyond this understanding of “imminence”. Indeed, the memo expressly states that it is inventing “a broader concept of imminence” than is typically used in domestic law. Specifically, the president’s assassination power “does not require that the US have clear evidence that a specific attack . . . will take place in the immediate future”. The US routinely assassinates its targets not when they are engaged in or plotting attacks but when they are at home, with family members, riding in a car, at work, at funerals, rescuing other drone victims, etc.

Many of the early objections to this new memo have focused on this warped and incredibly broad definition of “imminence”. The ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer told Isikoff that the memo “redefines the word imminence in a way that deprives the word of its ordinary meaning”. Law Professor Kevin Jon Heller called Jaffer’s objection “an understatement”, noting that the memo’s understanding of “imminence” is “wildly overbroad” under international law.

Crucially, Heller points out what I noted above: once you accept the memo’s reasoning – that the US is engaged in a global war, that the world is a battlefield, and the president has the power to assassinate any member of al-Qaida or associated forces – then there is no way coherent way to limit this power to places where capture is infeasible or to persons posing an “imminent” threat. The legal framework adopted by the memo means the president can kill anyone he claims is a member of al-Qaida regardless of where they are found or what they are doing.

The only reason to add these limitations of “imminence” and “feasibility of capture” is, as Heller said, purely political: to make the theories more politically palatable. But the definitions for these terms are so vague and broad that they provide no real limits on the president’s assassination power. As the ACLU’s Jaffer says: “This is a chilling document” because “it argues that the government has the right to carry out the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen” and the purported limits “are elastic and vaguely defined, and it’s easy to see how they could be manipulated.”

5. Converting Obama underlings into objective courts

This memo is not a judicial opinion. It was not written by anyone independent of the president. To the contrary, it was written by life-long partisan lackeys: lawyers whose careerist interests depend upon staying in the good graces of Obama and the Democrats, almost certainly Marty Lederman and David Barron. Treating this document as though it confers any authority on Obama is like treating the statements of one’s lawyer as a judicial finding or jury verdict.

Indeed, recall the primary excuse used to shield Bush officials from prosecution for their crimes of torture and illegal eavesdropping: namely, they got Bush-appointed lawyers in the DOJ to say that their conduct was legal, and therefore, it should be treated as such. This tactic – getting partisan lawyers and underlings of the president to say that the president’s conduct is legal – was appropriately treated with scorn when invoked by Bush officials to justify their radical programs. As Digby wroteabout Bush officials who pointed to the OLC memos it got its lawyers to issue about torture and eavesdropping, such a practice amounts to:

“validating the idea that obscure Justice Department officials can be granted the authority to essentially immunize officials at all levels of the government, from the president down to the lowest field officer, by issuing a secret memo. This is a very important new development in western jurisprudence and one that surely requires more study and consideration. If Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had known about this, they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble.”

Life-long Democratic Party lawyers are not going to oppose the terrorism policies of the president who appointed them. A president can always find underlings and political appointees to endorse whatever he wants to do. That’s all this memo is: the by-product of obsequious lawyers telling their Party’s leader that he is (of course) free to do exactly that which he wants to do, in exactly the same way that Bush got John Yoo to tell him that torture was not torture, and that even it if were, it was legal.

That’s why courts, not the president’s partisan lawyers, should be making these determinations. But when the ACLU tried to obtain a judicial determination as to whether Obama is actually authorized to assassinate US citizens, the Obama DOJ went to extreme lengths to block the court from ruling on that question. They didn’t want independent judges to determine the law. They wanted their own lawyers to do so.

That’s all this memo is: Obama-loyal appointees telling their leader that he has the authority to do what he wants. But in the warped world of US politics, this – secret memos from partisan lackeys – has replaced judicial review as the means to determine the legality of the president’s conduct.

6. Making a mockery of “due process”

The core freedom most under attack by the War on Terror is the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process. It provides that “no person shall be . . . deprived of life . . . without due process of law”. Like putting people in cages for life on island prisons with no trial, claiming that the president has the right to assassinate US citizens far from any battlefield without any charges or trial is the supreme evisceration of this right.

The memo pays lip service to the right it is destroying: “Under the traditional due process balancing analysis . . . . we recognize that there is no private interest more weighty than a person’s interest in his life.” But it nonetheless argues that a “balancing test” is necessary to determine the extent of the process that is due before the president can deprive someone of their life, and further argues that, as the New York Times put it when this theory was first unveiled: “while the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process applied, it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.”

Stephen Colbert  this theory when Eric Holder first unveiled it to defend the president’s assassination program. At the time, Holder actually said: “due process and judicial process are not one and the same.” Colbert interpreted that claim as follows:

“Trial by jury, trial by fire, rock, paper scissors, who cares? Due process just means that there is a process that you do. The current process is apparently, first the president meets with his advisers and decides who he can kill. Then he kills them.”

It is fitting indeed that the memo expressly embraces two core Bush/Cheney theories to justify this view of what “due process” requires. First, it cites the Bush DOJ’s core view, as enunciated by John Yoo, that courts have no role to play in what the president does in the War on Terror because judicial review constitutes “judicial encroachment” on the “judgments by the President and his national security advisers as to when and how to use force”. And then it cites the Bush DOJ’s mostly successful arguments in the 2004 Hamdi case that the president has the authority even to imprison US citizens without trial provided that he accuses them of being a terrorist.

The reason this is so fitting is because, as I’ve detailed many times, it was these same early Bush/Cheney theories that made me want to begin writing about politics, all driven by my perception that the US government was becoming extremist and dangerous. During the early Bush years, the very idea that the US government asserted the power to imprison US citizens without charges and due process (or to eavesdrop on them) was so radical that, at the time, I could hardly believe they were being asserted out in the open.

Yet here we are almost a full decade later. And we have the current president asserting the power not merely to imprison or eavesdrop on US citizens without charges or trial, but to order them executed – and to do so in total secrecy, with no checks or oversight. If you believe the president has the power to order US citizens executed far from any battlefield with no charges or trial, then it’s truly hard to conceive of any asserted power you would find objectionable.

DOJ white paper

Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Q… by Mike Riggs

Source: Glenn Greenwald | Guardian.co.uk

All That Pivots Is Gold

To quote the immortal line in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, as filmed by John Huston, “Let’s talk about the black bird” – let’s talk about a mysterious bird made out of gold. Oh yes, because this is a film noir worthy of Dashiell Hammett – involving the Pentagon, Beijing, shadow wars, pivoting and a lot of gold.

Let’s start with Beijing’s official position; “We don’t have enough gold”. That leads to China’s current, frenetic buying spree – which particularly in Hong Kong anyone can follow live, in real time. China is already the top gold producing and the top gold importing nation in the world.

Gold accounts for roughly 70% of reserves held by the US and Germany – and more or less the same for France and Italy. Russia – also on a buying spree – is slightly over 10%. But China’s percentage of gold among its whopping US$3.2 trillion reserves is only 2%.

Beijing is carefully following the current shenanigans of the New York Federal Reserve, which, asked by the German Bundesbank to return the German gold it is holding, replied it would take at least seven years.

German financial journalist Lars Schall has been following the story since the beginning, and virtually alone has made the crucial connection between gold, paper money, energy resources and the abyss facing the petrodollar.

Whenever Beijing says it needs more gold, this is justified as a hedge “against risks in foreign reserves” – aka US dollar fluctuation – but especially to “promote yuan globalization”. As in, suavely, having the yuan compete with the US dollar and the euro “fairly” in the “international market”.

And here’s the (elusive) heart of the matter. What Beijing actually wants is to get rid of the US dollar peg. For that to happen, it needs vast gold reserves. So here’s Beijing pivoting from the US dollar to the yuan – and trying to sway vast swathes of the global economy to follow the path. This golden rule is Beijing’s Maltese Falcon: “The stuff dreams are made of”.

Have drone, will travel

Qatar also does pivoting – but of the MENA (Middle East-Northern Africa) kind. Doha has been financing Wahhabis and Salafis – and even Salafi-jihadis – as in North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) rebels in Libya, Free Syrian Army gangs in Syria, and the pan-Islamic gang that took over northern Mali.

The State Department – and later the Pentagon – may have woken up to it, as in the arrangement brokered by Doha and Washington together to spawn a new, more palatable Syria “coalition”. But still very potent are those dangerous liaisons between the francophile Emir of Qatar and the Quai d’Orsay in Paris – which gathered plenty of steam already during the reign of King Sarko, aka former French president Nicolas Sarkozy.

Every informed geopolitical observer has tracked leak after leak by former French intelligence operatives to the deliciously wicked satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaine, detailing Qatar’s modus operandi. It’s a no-brainer. Qatar’s foreign policy reads as Muslim Brotherhood Here, There and Everywhere (but not inside the neo-feudal emirate); this is Qatar’s Maltese Falcon. At the same time Doha – to the delight of French elites – is an avid practitioner of hardcore neoliberalism, and a top investor in France’s economy.

So their interests may coalesce in promoting disaster capitalism – successfully – in Libya and then – still unsuccessfully – in Syria. Yet Mali is something else; classic blowback – and that’s where the interests of Doha and Paris diverge (not to mention Doha and Washington; at least if one does not assume that Mali has been the perfect pretext for a renewed AFRICOM drive.)

Algerian media is awash in outrage, questioning Qatar’s agenda (in French). Yet the pretext – as predicted – worked perfectly.

AFRICOM – surprise! – is on a roll, as the Pentagon gets ready to set up a drone base in Niger. That’s the practical result of a visit by AFRICOM’s commander, General Carter Ham, to Niger’s capital Niamey only a few days ago.

Forget about those outdated PC-12 turbo props that have been spying on Mali and Western Africa for years. Now it’s Predator time. Translation: chief-in-waiting John Brennan plans a Central Intelligence Agency shadow war all across the Sahara-Sahel. With permission from Mick Jagger/Keith Richards, it’s time to start humming a remixed hit: “I see a grey drone/ and I want it painted black”.

AFRICOM does Niger is indeed sweeter than cherry pie. Northwest Niger is the site of all those uranium mines supplying the French nuclear industry. And it’s very close to Mali’s gold reserves. Imagine all that gold in an “unstable” area falling into the hands of … Chinese companies. Beijing’s Maltese Falcon moment of finally having enough gold to dump the US dollar peg would be at hand.

The Pentagon even got permission for all its surveillance gear to refuel in – of all places – crucial Agadez. The French legion may have been doing the hard work on the ground in Mali, but it’s AFRICOM which will ultimately reap the profits all across the Sahara-Sahel.

Don’t you know about the (Asian) bird?

And that brings us to that famous pivoting to Asia – which was supposed to be the number one geopolitical theme of the Obama 2.0 administration. It may well be. But certainly alongside AFRICOM pivoting all over the Sahara/Sahel in drone mode, to Beijing’s growing irritation; and Doha-Washington pivoting in their support of the former “terrorist” turned “freedom fighter”, and vice-versa.

And we did not even mention the non-pivoting involved in this noir plot; the Obama 2.0 administration keeping its appalling embrace of the medieval House of Saud and “stability in the Arabian peninsula”, as recommended by an usual suspect, a mediocre – yet influential – “veteran intelligence official“.

Play it again, Sam. In that outstanding Maltese Falcon scene at the start of our plot between Humphrey Bogart (let’s say he plays the Pentagon) and Sydney Greenstreet (let’s say he plays Beijing), the official is the goon, the third guy in the picture. The pivoting to Asia is essentially a product of Andrew Marshall, an allegedly Yoda-like totem of US national security.

Marshall has been behind the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) – all of you Donald Rumsfeld freaks know about it – failed Shock and Awe (which only served to destroy Iraq almost beyond repair, even with disaster capitalism involved); and now the concept calledAir Sea Battle.

Air Sea Battle’s premise is that Beijing will attack US forces in the Pacific, which is, frankly, ridiculous (even with help from a monster false-flag operation). The US would then retaliate via a “blinding campaign” – the naval equivalent of Shock and Awe. Both the US Air Force and the US Navy loved the concept because it implies a lot of hardware spending to be stationed in plenty of sophisticated Pacific bases, and in the high seas.

So even as David Petraeus-style counterinsurgency has pivoted to John Brennan’s CIA shadow wars, the real deal is the pivoting to Asia; a pseudo-strategy, concocted to keep the Pentagon budget at exorbitant levels, promoting a new cold war with China. “They will never amass enough gold to impose their evil plans”, one could hear Marshall say about China (without Bogart or Greenstreet’s aplomb, of course). Hammett would be appalled; Marshall’s Maltese Falcon is the stuff (war) dreams are made of.

Pepe Escobar is the author of  (Nimble Books, 2008). He may be reached at .

Source:  Asia Times

Extraterrestrial Life: Exopolitics Being Discussed At Davos?

In December 2012 the Prime Minster of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, caused a stir by speaking straight-faced to reporters about extraterrestrial beings.

In a candid moment after a televised interview, he made statements to a reporter that instantly got the attention of many.

ExoNews.org reports:

After completing an on-air interview with five television reporters on December 7, 2012, Prime Minister Medvedev continued to respond to reporters and made some off-air comments without realizing that the microphone was still on. He was then asked by one reporter if “the president is handed secret files on aliens when he receives the briefcase needed to activate Russia’s nuclear arsenal,” Medvedev responded:

Along with the briefcase with nuclear codes, the president of the country is given a special ‘top secret’ folder. This folder in its entirety contains information about aliens who visited our planet… Along with this, you are given a report of the absolutely secret special service that exercises control over aliens on the territory of our country… More detailed information on this topic you can get from a well-known movie called Men In Black… I will not tell you how many of them are among us because it may cause panic.

News reports treated the admission as a joke, especially with the assumed reference to the well known Hollywood ’Men in Black’ film. However many speculate at Medvedev’s frank, ’matter-of-fact’ attitude, and also that he called “Men in Black” a documentary film.

The “Men In Black” documentary is a well known film in Russia that details UFO cases:

In the Russian Men In Black (MIB) documentary, a number of prominent UFO cases in Russia and the USA are discussed. The Roswell UFO crash is covered, along with a number of extraterrestrial abduction cases, and UFOs disabling nuclear weapons facilities. The documentary examines testimony that extraterrestrial bases have been established on Earth, and that some are in restricted US military areas with the full knowledge of the Pentagon. The documentary even goes on to seriously discuss President Eisenhower’s alleged meeting with extraterrestrials, where agreements were reached with some of the visitors giving them permission to take some of the Earth’s resources in exchange for advanced technology.

Source

While these statements by Prime Minister Medvedev are remarkable, either for his surprisingly dry teasing, or for his unexpected disclosure, it should be noted that he’s not the first high-profile source to speak on extraterrestrials and what finding life could mean to humanity.

Indeed the Vatican has already publicly discussed their plan for extraterrestrial life, and former Canadian Cabinet Minister Paul Hellyer is well known for his stance on UFOs. These sources can be added to the list of former astronauts that detail their experiences with unexplained phenomena and military and government coverups.

[RedIceRadio speaks with Paul Hellyer to discuss UFO issues, shadow government, and more]

What makes Medvedev’s words more interesting is a newly released document that is to be covered at Davos – the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting of world leaders in business, banking, and politics. They’re meeting in Switzerland from the 23rd to 27th of January not only to discuss economics, but also to address financial crises, environmental challenges, and global government. 
Apparently, aliens are ALSO on the agenda.

The EUTimes.net writes:

Medvedev is scheduled to open this years Forum where as many as 50 heads of government, including Germany’s Angela Merkel and Britain’s David Cameron, will attend the five-day meeting that begins on 23 January.

Critical to note about this years Forum is that the WEF, in their 2013 Executive Summary, scheduled for debate and discussion a number of items under their X Factors from Nature category, and which includes the “discovery of alien life” of which they state: “Proof of life elsewhere in the universe could have profound psychological implications for human belief systems.”

From the Summary:

X Factors from Nature

Developed in partnership with the editors of Nature, a leading science journal, the chapter on “X Factors” looks beyond the landscape of 50 global risks to alert decision-makers to five emerging game-changers:

- Runaway climate change: Is it possible that we have already passed a point of no return and that Earth’s atmosphere is tipping rapidly into an inhospitable state?

- Significant cognitive enhancement: Ethical dilemmas akin to doping in sports could start to extend into daily working life; an arms race in the neural “enhancement” of combat troops could also ensue.

- Rogue deployment of geoengineering: Technology is now being developed to manipulate the climate; a state or private individual could use it unilaterally.

- Costs of living longer: Medical advances are prolonging life, but long-term palliative care is expensive. Covering the costs associated with old age could be a struggle.

- Discovery of alien life: Proof of life elsewhere in the universe could have profound psychological implications for human belief systems.

The Global Risks report is the flagship research publication of the World Economic Forum’s Risk Response Network, which provides an independent platform for stakeholders to explore ways to collaborate on building resilience to global risks. Further information can be found at www.weforum.org/risk

For the millions of people pressing for disclosure of the existence of extraterrestrial life and an end to the secrecy and coverup involved, this Davos ’Executive Summary’, and remarks by the PM of Russia, might mark yet another ’small step for mankind’ towards admission.

Source: Elizabeth Leafloor | RedIceCreations.com

The CIA

And The Genre of American Society…

“We are no more free citizens in modern nations; for there are no nations and no free citizens. We are just grey and febrile pawns, volatile and nervous ants and cyber-cockroaches – name it as you want – lodging in a big technological concentration camp named the American matrix. An individual will be by no mean himself, for the old Christian subject is dead. For our ruling elites, who always lament the Russian resilience and threaten strangulated Iran, there are no nations, no races, no spirituality and no soul: there is just a cyber-personality in search of an ergonomic perfection and a global network of electronic prisons and ecological surveillance. As foresaw Job, the current man is cast into a net by his own feet, and he walks upon a snare” Nicolas Bonnal, Pravda.

Many Americans are adamant about obedience to the United States Constitution.  Our beloved country which is feeling the encumbrance of the elite power structure clamors for Constitutionalism and seeks redress in the courts.  When Christians support a document that forbids allegiance to The One True God and ignores His writing they invite His wrath.  The Constitution opens wide the door for pagan government by forbidding a Christian oath and making it legal for infidels to rule over the nation.

When I expressed doubts about the efficacy of the United States Constitution I was shunned by some of my readers.  Many thought I had become a disciple of Reverend Ted Weiland (He has done excellent work in analyzing the pernicious nature of the United States Constitution.)  or had forsaken R. J. Rushdoony.  Neither is true.  I began to question the Constitution when I learned who supported it, who wrote it, the secrecy and duplicity that was involved in the Philadelphia Convention and the tragic results of some of its content.

The wickedness of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is at least to some extent a result of the failure of the United States Constitution to set forth proper moral restraints. Diane Spignola writes: “The CIA’s activities, per the official government directive, included the following:  propaganda; economic warfare; preventive direct action, including industrial sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrilla and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist or now anti-nationalist elements in countries around the world.  Such operations should not include armed conflict by recognized military forces, espionage, counter-espionage, and cover and deception for military operations.”   She claims that, ”At least six million people had perished by 1987 as a result of the CIA’s covert operations. Not only is the CIA not an intelligence agency, it distorts information and perpetuates misinformation and disinformation to justify its own goals. This wide-range deception has resulted in organized terrorism throughout the world. Using the CIA, our government routinely dismisses or ignores national and international laws under the guise of ‘national security.’”

Wall Street and the money interests had their hand in the formation of the CIA.   According to Kai Bird’s biography “The Chairman”, in1941 John J. McCloy asked Attorney General Robert Jackson for authorization to use wire taps to ferret out potential saboteurs.  Jackson was against unauthorized snooping on private citizens and turned him down.  McCloy actually envisioned an even more extensive organization that would operate secretly dispensing propaganda, collecting intelligence, and manipulating people and governments.  He said, “I am somewhat obsessed with the necessity of establishing a propaganda or information bureau for our defense….It is more essential than artillery”.

McCloy’s request for wire tap authorization was backed by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.  An attempt to get congressional approval was defeated by a vote of 154 to 146.  At about the same time William J. Donovan who had first-hand experience with the British intelligence system and the ear of President Franklin D. Roosevelt was appointed Coordinator of Information (A name Bird attributes to McCloy.)  a new function described as a means of bringing together the variety of intelligence gathering functions of the FBI, Army, Navy, and U. S. Department of State.  The coordination effort met with considerable resistance but the organization provided a platform for another intelligence organization called the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

Both John J. McCloy and William Donovan were bright, industrious men from poor families; McCloy from Philadelphia and Donovan from Buffalo.  Both were Wall Street lawyers.  Both were studious and both were amoral.

Donovan played football in high school and was a star at Columbia University where he was known as “Wild Bill Donovan”.  His undergraduate and law degree were both from Columbia.  He was a war hero and a revered leader who rose to the rank of Lieutenant General.  President Roosevelt, a sports fan, admired Donovan’s athletic ability and his war record.  He gave Donovan wide authority in forming a new intelligence organization.   In 1914 Donovan married Ruth, a member of the wealthy Rumsey family.   He was seldom home and his dalliances became so common that his hosts often provided him with women.

President Bush, the younger, was not the first high ranking politician to refer to the Constitution as “just a piece of paper”, McCloy did it first.  When McCloy and Robert Lovett worked for War Secretary Henry Stimpson he referred to them as the “Imps of Satan”.  McCloy visited Adolph Hitler and for a time was an advisor to Benito Mussolini.  He graduated from Harvard Law School and launched his career from the powerful law firm of Cravath, Henderson & de Gersdorff.  Cravath’s partners included Otto H. Kuhn; Jacob Schiff’s son, Mortimer; Jerome J. Hanauer; Paul M. Warburg, married to Solomon Loeb’sdaughter, Nina; and Felix M. Warburg, married to Jacob Schiff’s daughter, Frieda.  Paul Cravath, the firm’s founder, was an Anglophile internationalist who became a director and vice-president of the newly formed Council on Foreign Relations.  Ultimately McCloy left the Cravath law firm and became a partner in Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy.  The Milbank firm was associated with the Rockefellers who were friends since his days at Harvard Law.  Throughout his life McCloy maintained a close relationship with powerful Jewish bankers.

Allen Dulles was a third key figure in the CIA.  Dulles headed the organization from 1953 to 1961 and under his direction it began to conform to the image Donovan and McCloy envisioned.  Dulles began MK Ultra, a secret organization that makes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein look like child’s play.  With extensive CIA financing it did experiments in torture and mind control that truly boggle the mind.  He also financed Operation Mockingbird that successfully influenced the content of 25 or more strategic news sources.

Dulles was a libertine who was famous for his extramarital affairs.  Under his leadership the governments of sovereign nations were disrupted with propaganda and economic sabotage.    Democratic elections were disrupted, leaders were assassinated, military coups were launched, governments were undermined, genocide, scorched earth, and torture were all part of a frenzy of illegal activity.

In 1975 the Church Committee succeeded In reigning in some of the CIA excesses but the power to gain control over country after country was too good to be relinquished and other secret organizations were formed that took them up.

The brutal, Satanic policies carried out by the CIA mark the tenor of the elite money powers who are slowly bringing the world under their control.  McCloy and Donovan were agents of those powers as is our President, our media, and many of our politicians.  The United States of America and the War on Terror is being used as a tool to bring the remaining independent nations under the reigning world financial straight jacket.  Our nation is being purposely destroyed in the process.

When comparing the conduct of our society with God’s legal requirements it is difficult to know where to start.  Dishonesty is the main ingredient of our everyday life.  Our personal conversations are inhibited by deception; our media distorts and edits the news; businesses regularly deceive customers with phony sales, exorbitant prices, and inferior merchandise; our political leaders lie to us, deceive us, and betray us.  Our preachers describe a god that doesn’t exist and fail to mention the One that does. Our schools teach a debilitating humanism while we live, breathe, and have our being in a sea of mendacity with little effort to correct it.

Justice has vanished.  It is a fearful experience to come before our courts.  Receiving justice is like playing the lottery.  Without the immutable anchor of God’s Law, justice is absent. Human law is always a product of diverse opinion and is enforced by power.  Our legal system is as badly deteriorated as our honesty.  God cannot be honored when crimes are against the State instead of against His Divine Majesty and justice is never served when restitution is forsaken.  An adversarial system that ignores God’s Law cannot produce a just result.   Adversity must be between behavior and His Law.

R. J. Rushdoony wrote: “All law is based upon morality, and morality is itself based upon religion. Therefore, when the religion of a people is weakened, so also is its morality undermined.  The result is a progressive collapse of law and order, and the breakdown of society.  Men, though, see law as a limitation on their liberty, and Christianity is held to be the most restrictive with its emphasis upon Biblical law as the foundation for morality and liberty.  Humanistic man wants total liberty, but he does not realize that total liberty leads only to total anarchy, and that leads to the death of law and liberty. Unless every man’s liberty is limited by law, no liberty is possible for anyone.”

This is where we are going.  We are slowly being brought under the control of the elite money powers and in the process our liberty is being lost in increments.

We need to take a personal inventory.  Following is a shocking excerpt from a book by Nick Turse about atrocities our soldiers too often committed during the Vietnam War:

“The company stumbled upon an unarmed young boy.  ‘Someone caught him up on a hill, and they brought him down and the lieutenant asked who wanted to kill him…’ medic Jamie Henry later told army investigators. A radioman and another medic volunteered for the job. The radioman… ’kicked the boy in the stomach and the medic took him around behind a rock and I heard one magazine go off complete on automatic…’

“A few days after this incident, members of that same unit brutalized an elderly man to the point of collapse and then threw him off a cliff without even knowing whether he was dead or alive…

“A couple of days after that, they used an unarmed man for target practice…

“And less than two weeks later, members of Company B reportedly killed five unarmed women…

“Unit members rattled off a litany of other brutal acts committed by the company… [including] a living woman who had an ear cut off while her baby was thrown to the ground and stomped on…”

This is a weeping wound of sin in our nation, the sin of our soldiers, and the sin of our people.   We support the savagery and murder that is fostered by unnecessary war.  Soldiers are taught to be callus and cruel and the uncertainties of combat require they kill or be killed.   As long as we don’t see it and our finger is not on the trigger we are happy to support murder’s macho image.  Our women slither into abortion clinics and with impunity murder their helpless, unborn babies.  We sanction murder in the name of selfishness.  Our young men are urged to join the army and assist in the torture and mass murder that is part of modern warfare.

The United States Constitution allows men and women of disobedient character to be elected to leadership and not surprisingly these disobedient men and women disobey the law they have sworn to uphold.   We protest disobedience to our Constitution but make no protest against disobedience to God’s Commandments.  We go to church on Sunday; pray for our soldiers, profess the greatness of our nation, and wonder why we are losing our freedoms and why our leaders lie to us.

We have been deceived.  Mendacity has invaded every nook and cranny of our nation.  We live a lie in a sea of lies.

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.  And he said to the woman, “Indeed, has God said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?”  And the woman said to the serpent, “From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; but the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it or touch it, lest you die.’” And the serpent said to the woman, “You surely shall not die!  For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”  From the Word of God.

The Silence From Liberals On The Drone War

Remember when President Obama said four years ago that he would helm “the most transparent administration in history”? So much for that.

I’m amazed that so few Americans — most notably, so few liberals — have protested his secretive remote-control assassination program. Drones have killed 3,000 people in Yemen and Pakistan, including collateral-damage civilians, but the actual numbers are secret. So is the process. We don’t know anything about the rules of engagement, how people wind up on Obama’s hit list, who reviews the evidence, and what criteria are applied to that evidence.

The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution states that “No person shall be . . . deprived of life . . . without due process of law.” Drones are inimical to due process. It would be nice to know how the administration’s lawyers have addressed that conundrum in legal memos. Those memos exist, but they remain classified. The Obama team is reportedly writing rules for itself, a set of standards and procedures, but we may never know whether these rules are scrupulously followed, or even what they are.

Back in May 2009, Obama vowed that his national security actions would be transparent, so that Americans could “make informed judgments and hold us accountable.” But nearly four years and hundreds of drone strikes later, his actions bring to mind the remark Michael Corleone utters near the end of The Godfather Part II: “If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it’s that you can kill anybody.”

Granted, we’re waging a global shadow war against bad actors who don’t wear uniforms. Drones often kill known terrorists who might otherwise murder innocent Americans. No weapon is flawless. And in war, even the good guys inadvertently kill civilians; during the D-Day invasion, the Allies killed an estimated 12,000 French and Belgian civilians who lived close to Nazi-controlled railroads.

But if George W. Bush were whacking thousands of foreigners (plus a few American citizens) using a hit list shrouded in secrecy, in apparent violation of the Fifth Amendment and in blatant violation of transparency promises, rest assured that liberal Democrats would be holding hearings and denouncing him on MSNBC.

They don’t seem disturbed, however, that Obama has tripled down on Bush’s nascent drone program, and that this president is doing so on the fly and in secret. Their partisan instincts appear to be trumping adherence to principle. But all presidents, regardless of party, need to be held accountable.

Speaking of drones on The Daily Show in October, Obama said that “one of the things we’ve got to do is put a legal architecture in place . . . to make sure that not only am I reined in, but any president is reined in.” It was a scary remark: It suggested that Obama has been waging unchecked war without that legal basis — with nothing to rein him in.

We don’t know what we don’t know. Obama said in September that the drones target known terrorists who pose “an imminent threat to the United States” (allowing us to invoke the doctrine of self-defense), but “imminent” appears to be a slippery term. Obama has reportedly authorized the use of drones in what the CIA calls “signature strikes” — those conducted against unidentified people who brandish guns in regions where militants are strong. In other words, drones are sometimes used preemptively, to kill those who might be a threat in the future. Obama is judge, jury, and executioner.

But who cares, right? This is all happening far away, to Muslims we will never know. Many liberals are fine with it because Obama is one of them, and many conservatives are mute because they know there’s no percentage in attacking a president for being too tough on terrorism. That also explains why Congress hasn’t lifted a finger to conduct any oversight. And most Americans would probably rather watch football than weigh the implications of drone warfare.

At least a few million Americans have also been watching the hot cable show Homeland, which is all about the unintended domestic consequences of a drone attack. The Showtime series features a hawkish vice president, in cahoots with the CIA, who authorizes a drone strike that destroys a Muslim school and kills the son of a known terrorist. The terrorist retaliates by plotting acts of revenge on American soil. Yeah, it’s just a TV show, but Homeland prompts the viewer to consider whether drones might inspire blowback and perpetuate the cycle of violence.

So, at a minimum, let’s ask: Is Obama authorized to kill anybody? Under what criteria? What’s in the legal memos? How is the evidence weighed? What checks and balances have been established to ensure that drones are not abused by this president and those to follow?

We don’t really know whether drones are the answer in the war against terrorism. But more of us should at least ask the questions.

Source: The Miami Herald

Shadow Forces Behind Government

Let no man or woman dare speak of a shadow government. The crony corruptocrats that make up the ruling elites of the world must maintain the illusion, that elected governments are based upon willful consent and have the legitimate authority to establish rules of conduct that their citizen are obligated to obey. For those regimes that maintain their grip of power by undemocratic means, the apologists for the international community give a wide berth of acceptance in order to maintain the appearance of individual national sovereignty.

In the essay, There Is No Conspiracy – Only Official Policy provides a study in power politics when a banana republic dares defy the moneychangers.

“The lesson for world leaders is you don’t cross the masters of power. But for Americans it is that a world run by the IMF never benefits us, the people. The enactment of the FTAA is just one more element in the grand scheme of global rule. There is no need to dapple in extraordinary theories; it is all in the open for everyone to see. The policy is clear – the nations of the world are mere colonies to the interests of the ruling elites. Citizens of countries and their elected leaders are mere subjects of the international community. Not exactly the revered Republic that we all owe allegiance, is it?”

The pattern of retribution against any tin horn leaders that refuse to succumb to the boot of the World Bank or the IMF is in plain sight. Just ask the mutilated and deceased Muhammad al-Gaddafi for testimony of the enforcement treatment one can expect for opposing the world financial plutocracy. While the imperium empire of drone warfare, targets governments that oppose the global hegemony, the behind the screens discord among varied vying factions often goes unnoticed.

 The Constitution Society sees the nature of The Shadow Government differently from most popular interpretations of the power elite.

Some of the best indications that the Shadow Government is not centered in the financial sector are the things it has to do to finance itself. Shadow Government is expensive. We can identify the main sources of its revenue:

(1) Black budgets. This is the core of its operations, but is not enough to secure its control over the country and the world.

(2) Drug trade. It has seized control of the major part of the illegal traffic in addictive substances, in part by using the organs of law enforcement to eliminate competition, and by gaining control of the money and the ways it gets re-introduced into the economy.

(3) Raiding financial institutions. This is what was done with the S&Ls, and is being done, more slowly, with the banks. It involves several aspects: diversion of the funds, seizure of smaller institutions by a few large ones under Shadow Government control, with the seizure financed by the taxpayers, and acquisition under distressed prices of the assets of those institutions, many of which are well-positioned business enterprises that give the Shadow Government both control of the key enterprises in most business sectors and sources of revenue. The Savings & Loan raid was used to finance a major expansion of the Shadow Government. However, it is not a method that can be repeated.

(4) Public authorities. These are quasi-governmental enterprises that control substantial assets, often taxpayer-subsidized, without effective accountability. They include housing, port, energy, water, transportation, and educational authorities. To this might also be added various utilities, and both public and publicly-regulated private monopolies, like local telephone and cable companies. They are also a major source of government contracts.

(5) Government contracts. Major source of diverted funds, but must often be shared with others involved.

(6) Arms trade. Another major source of funds, both direct and diverted. But requires payoffs to local officials.

What this viewpoint ignores is that the tactics of subversive operations frequently demand undercover execution and plausible deniability. The methods of covert operations conducted by black bag operatives avoid the question; who really controls the intelligence agencies? It is a fatal error to reject the prevalent role of the money center institutions and central banks in the unified network of financial control and global integration.

A more perceptive breakdown by Richard Boylan Ph.D. offers a structural analysis of the secret “shadow” government.

In the Shadow Government five branches may be identified. These branches are: the Executive Branch, the Intelligence Branch, the War Department, the Weapons Industry Branch, and the Financial Department.

An analysis of the overall purposes of these five branches suggests that the overall purpose of the Shadow Government is to exercise covert control by:

1. Collecting comprehensive institutional and personal information

2. By establishing national and international policy independently of the established Government

3. By developing high-tech arms and equipment, and, with these, establishing small, specialized, highly mobile, elite military units to effect these covert policies, when need arises, without having to rely on the official (and “unreliable”) Armed Services, (whose subservience to the Shadow Government is reasonably suspect)

4. By developing an armed capability to repel any threat to the status quo, (including the uncertain ontological, social, and economic impacts of any revelation of the reality of UFO and extraterrestrial presence) through the development of a Star Wars/BMDO ground and space-based surveillance and SDI weapons network

5. By denying information compromising to the Shadow Government from all those outside “need-to-know” policy-making levels

6. By exercising control on the money supply, availability of credit, and the worth of money, through policy decisions made outside of the official Government

The essential political planetary threat that faces humanity is rooted in the globalist drive to accelerate their NWO plans for a neo-colonial feudal hierarchy. The New World Order Feudal Enslavement System outlines the plot. However, the elements that comprise the surreptitious functions and assignments of shadow government missions need to maintain a clandestine secrecy to be effective. Stealth practices often foster perpetual public ignorance.

 

Contrast this with maybe the best example of the most visible globalist institution that is used by the shadow elites as their private administration tool for worldwide compliance. The John Birch video presents the argument that Americanism is incompatible with the international community of collectivists that the United Nations is based upon.

The interminable public feuding in General Assembly sessions are sheer spectacle for the uninformed. The real dirty work is done behind the scenes through coerced implementation of programs like Agenda 21.The best way to come out of the shadows is to strip back the curtain. Effectiveness dictates that the banksters and corporatists use the dark art of intrigue and subterfuge to manipulate the systems of governance, which they put in place, to serve their own interests.

The destruction of the unique American experiment falls upon the treason of the ruling class. Human Depravity, James Madison, and The Founding Fathers explains the nature of the existential internal threat that destroyed the essence of the old Republic. Madison wrote:

“If we were all like angels, blameless and freely able to exercise perfect control, we would not need rules or regulations. Why, then, do we have so many laws and statutes? Because of man’s wickedness, for he is constantly overflowing with evil; this is why a remedy is required.”

When the shadow government usurps the stated original limited authorities and separations of powers, the citizens of the country are relegated to a menu entrée on the feasting table of the power elites. The globalism agenda is the objective of the shadow government. Participates need not be spooks or machinates. Those who influence the operations of the sub-rosa establishment may wear the garb of Illuminati or use the signals of secret societies, but most are pure button down internationalists.

The populace is viewed as useless eaters to the elites, who labor to drive a wedge between government and the ordinary man. The privileged oligarchs see themselves as the ennobled in the entitlement enslavement society of their creation. Keeping the masses dependent until the ultimate elimination of dissenters is the objective.

The specter of the shadow government has always been part of the inner conflict for national integrity. The difference at this time is that it is all pervasive. The United States has become a global empire designed to impose an internationalist monitory yoke around the neck of subservient serfs.

The money machine of shadow banking practiced by the Bank for International Settlements on Big Banks is a prime component of the definitive ruling elite comradeship. Governments are no longer sovereign entities. They function as subsidiaries of the global satanic New World Order conglomerate. The crony corruptocrats bury deep their crimes and give new meaning to being above the law. Without a widespread public awakening, the forces of wickedness will triumph.

Less we forget . . . “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” Ephesians 6:12

Puppet State America

The United States government and its subject peoples think of the US as “the world’s only superpower.” But how is a country a superpower when its entire government and a majority of the subjects, especially those members of evangelical churches, grovel at the feet of the Israeli Prime Minister? How is a country a superpower when it lacks the power to determine its own foreign policy in the Middle East? Such a country is not a superpower. It is a puppet state.

In the past few days we have witnessed, yet again, the “American superpower” groveling at Netanyahu’s feet. When Netanyahu decided to again murder the Palestinian women and children of Gaza, to further destroy what remains of thesocial infrastructure of the Gaza Ghetto, and to declare Israeli war crimes and Israeli crimes against humanity to be merely the exercise of “self-defense,” the US Senate, the US House of Representatives, the White House, and the US media all promptly declared their support for Netanyahu’s crimes.

On November 16 the Congress of the “superpower,” both House and Senate, passed overwhelmingly the resolutions written for them by AIPAC, the Israel Lobby known as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the only foreign agent that is not required to register as a foreign agent. The Global News Service of the Jewish People reported their power over Washington with pride. Both Democrats and Republicans shared the dishonor of serving Israel and evil instead of America and justice for the Palestinians.

The White House quickly obeyed the summons from the Israel Lobby. President Obama announced that he is “fully supportive” of Israel’s assault on Gaza. Ben Rhodes, White House deputy national security adviser, told the media on November 17 that the White House “wants the same thing as the Israelis want.” This is an overstatement as many Israelis oppose the crimes of the Israeli government, which is not the government of Israel but the government of the “settlers,” that is, the crazed land-hungry immigrants who are illegally, with Netanyahu’s support, stealing the lands of the Palestinians.

Netanyahu’s Israel is the equivalent of the Lincoln Republicans 150 years ago. Then there was no international law to protect Southern states, who left the voluntary union, a right under the Constitution, in order to avoid being exploited by Northern business interests. Subsequently, the Union army, after devastating the South, turned on the American Indians, and there was no international law to protect American Indians from being murdered and dispossessed by Washington’s armies.

Washington claimed that its invasion forces were threatened by the Indian’s bows and arrows. Today there is international law to protect the Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza. However, every time that the world tries to hold the Israeli government accountable for its crimes, Israel’s Washington puppet vetoes the UN decision.

The notion that Israel is threatened by Palestinians is as absurd as the notion that the US is threatened by Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Pakistan, and Iran. No government of any of these countries has ever made a threatening statement against the US. Even had such a statement been made, it would be meaningless. If a Superpower can be threatened by such impotent and distant counties, then it is not a superpower.

Demonizing a victim is a way of hiding state crimes. The American print and TV media is useless as a check on state crimes. The only crimes reported by the media are assigned to “terrorists,” that is, those who resist US hegemony, and to Americans, such as Bradley Manning and Sibel Edmonds, who liberate truth from official secrecy. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks remains in danger despite the asylum granted to him by the President of Ecuador, as Washington has little regard for international law.

In the US the exercise of the First Amendment is coming to be regarded as a crime against the state. The purpose of the media is no longer to find the truth, but to protect official lies. Speaking the truth has essentially disappeared as it is too costly to journalist who dare to do so. To keep one’s job, one serves Washington and the private interest groups that Washington serves.

In his November 19 defense of Israel’s latest war crimes, President Obama said: “no country on earth would tolerate missiles raining down from outside its borders.” But, of course, numerous countries do tolerate missiles raining down from the US. The war criminal Obama is raining down missiles in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, and has rained missiles on Libya, Somalia, Iraq and Syria as well. Iran might be next.

The German assault on the Warsaw Ghetto is one of the horror stories of Jewish history. Such an event is happening again, only this time Jews are perpetrators instead of victims. No hand has been raised to stay Israel from the goal of the operationdeclared by Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai to be “to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages.”

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following.

Source: Paul Craig Roberts

Jackals of Jekyll Island – Federal Reserve Audit

The supreme illicit fraud of central banking embodied in the Federal Reserve, acts as a private piggybank for favored cartel thieves. The liquidity of unlimited credit transfers to banksters, especially at zero interest, financed by unimaginable new Treasury Bonds, indebting the American public; is a crime committed by outlaws. The significance of the evidence for the extent of the crony financial manipulations, that the controllers of international capital use to maintain their power strangle hold on humanity, needs to be fully exposed. Only when the beleaguered and downtrodden become sufficiently indignant to usury incarceration, will heads start to roll.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders announces on his web site page, The Fed Audit.

“The first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve uncovered eye-popping new details about how the U.S. provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. An amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders to the Wall Street reform law passed one year ago this week directed the Government Accountability Office to conduct the study. “As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world,” said Sanders. “This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else.”

Yes, you read that correct, 16 TRILLION DOLLARS. When originally disclosed, there was minimal outrage.

The United States Government Accountability Office report on the Federal Reserve Audit on page 203-204 reveals proof positive of the magnitude of the transfer of trillions in bailout credit to the money center international banks.

“The FOMC approved these swap line arrangements to help address challenges in the global market for interbank lending in U.S. dollars. Many foreign banks held U.S. dollar-denominated assets and faced challenges borrowing in dollars to fund these assets. In contrast to U.S. commercial banks, foreign banks did not hold significant U.S. dollar deposits, and as a result, dollar funding strains were particularly acute for many foreign banks. The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (Federal Reserve Board) staff memos recommending that the FOMC approve swap lines noted that continuing strains in dollar funding markets abroad could further exacerbate strains in U.S. funding markets. For example, foreign banks facing difficulties borrowing against U.S. dollar assets may have faced increased pressure to sell these assets at a time of stress, potentially putting downward pressure on prices for these assets. The dollar swap lines allowed foreign central banks to make dollar loans to banks in their jurisdictions without being forced to draw down dollar holdings of foreign exchange reserves or to acquire dollars directly in the foreign exchange market. An FRBNY staff paper noted that the dollar reserves of many foreign central banks at the start of the crisis were smaller than the amounts they borrowed under the swap lines and that efforts by foreign central banks to buy dollars in the market could have crowded out private transactions, making it more difficult for foreign banks to obtain dollars. This paper further noted that the Federal Reserve System (the Federal Reserve Board and Reserve Banks collectively) was in a unique position to provide dollars needed by foreign central banks to provide lender-of-last-resort liquidity to banks in their jurisdictions. The increase in reserves was offset through sales of Treasury securities and increasing incentives for depository institutions to hold excess reserves at FRBNY.”

The last statement regarding using Treasury securities to increase banking reserves admits that monetizing the balance sheet of the FED, to unheard of levels, continues unabated. The absence of mainstream media reports on this historic, more than doubling, of the officially disclosed debt is beyond belief. Now that the Federal Reserve openly acknowledges that, the privately held banking cabal is buying up Treasury Notes, because the marketplace has refused to accept and buy the excessive float of new Treasury obligations, should be the most sobering consequence of the greatest bubble of all time.

This off the books concealment reporting by the FED illustrates the importance of the audit.

 

Watch the video,  that provides a short analysis of the Fed audit.

The Wall Street Journal, in The Federal Reserve’s cult of secrecy is unmasked, reveals a disgusting culture of self-aggrandizement.

“The recent audit of the Federal Reserve by the Government Accountability Office is particularly disturbing if read alongside the last report to Congress by the Fed’s Inspector General.

The GAO audit found a huge number of serious conflicts of interest at the Fed. Employees and contractors were allowed to own stock in the companies receiving financial assistance from the central bank.”

The fact that the FED and their enablers in Congress prevented a complete and comprehensive forensic audit of the books of the “Jackals of Jekyll Island” indicates just how much is at stake.

None other than the formidable blog, The Economic Collapse, expresses the sentiment that most of us should share.

“Another mystery that I would like to see addressed is the trillions of dollars of “off balance sheet transactions” that are unaccounted for at the Federal Reserve. This was brought up once during a Congressional hearing, but nobody seemed to have any answers.”

 

The  YouTube captures the absurdity of Congressional oversight. The financial community that created fractional reserve banking is in total control of the political election process. As long as there is no accountability and consequences for outright theft, the money magicians continue to operate their fraudulent scheme of deception as the cornerstone of international economic transactions.

The FED’s grip on the global moneychangers’ racket is based upon maintaining the U.S. Federal Reserve funny money, as the reserve currency for the planet. The value and worth of Treasury Bills and Bonds are on the path to have the value of Reichsbank marks. Recognize the enemy that is destroying the country and world economy.

The Law. Vs. The Law: Is Another Murder Taking Place Now In San Bernardino County?

Actually, in the doublespeak of conservatorship lingo, the conservator doesn’t actually “kill” or “murder” the conservatee. What she does is make an “end of life decision” for her ward.

Such a decision may involve the disallowal of medicine for a ward who is ill with a treatable disease. When Elizabeth Fairbanks fell ill with pneumonia, conservator Melodie Scott made an “end of life decision” and ordered the withholding of antibiotics and, just to give that little extra push into the grave, okayed that the elderly woman be dosed with morphine. Morphine retards respiration and may, in fact, stop breathing. (http://www.estateofdenial.com/2009/02/13/the-probate-murders-part-two/)

Helpless and without legal standing to intervene, Fairbanks’ children watched in horror as their mother struggled to breathe, then stopped breathing forever.

Fairbanks’ last breath was drawn at a Braswell’s facility. The Braswell’s homes are scattered throughout San Bernardino County and many of Melodie Scott’s wards have drawn their final breath at one of Braswell’s facilities. (http://www.braswellshealth.com/)

After her attempt to anonymously admit conservatee Charlie Castle into San Gabriel Valley Medical Center was derailed (his whereabouts were discovered and a line of contact with him was established, thereby overriding the anonymity of the admit), Melodie Scott appears to have made one of those “special” decisions about where Charlie’s ride would end and on August 5 she admitted him into Braswell’s Desert Manor in Yucca Valley. (https://veracityvoice.com/?p=15599)

Immediately, the first step in the “Isolate-Medicate-Euthanize” protocol was invoked. Charlie’s legal right to make and receive phone calls, guaranteed under C.F.R. 483.10 (k) and California Welfare and Institutions Code 5325 (d), was terminated “on the order of the conservator,” according to Megan at Braswell’s. In a case such as Charlie Castle’s, these phone calls may constitute a life-line.

A call was then made to San Bernardino Adult Protective Services and the screener, Tania, refused to take the report, stating that APS has no dominion over those in long term care facilities.

A call to the San Bernardino County Ombudsman produced an immediate result. A woman who identified herself as Barbara took the report and within a couple of hours, someone from the Ombudsman’s office visited Desert Manor. However, according to the Social Services Director, Megan, the Ombudsman supported the decision of the facility to deny Charlie’s rights to make and receive phone calls.

Another effort to lodge a report with APS was then made and the supervisor, Tatiana Khokhold, stated that the report would not be investigated because Charlie is under a conservatorship. There is no law prohibiting APS from investigating these cases, however.

Ron Buttram, Deputy Director of the San Bernardino County Office on Aging, has declined to comment on either the behavior of the Ombudsman or the refusal of APS to investigate this report and has referred all calls to the Public Information officer, who is out of the office and will return next week.

Calls to the San Bernardino County Courthouse revealed that no one could reveal whether Charlie Castle’s writ of habeas corpus, filed last week, was granted or not. The reason for all this secrecy is that Charlie is under a mental health conservatorship and all this hush- hush business—it is all to protect his privacy. You can thank HIPPA for that perversion of rights and oversight.

In the Administration office of Braswell’s, Chris (who declined to provide his last name) waxed somewhat philosophical over the plight of Charlie Castle and others in his situation. “The facility must make difficult decisions in cases like this,” he said. He admitted awareness of the laws which guarantee the right to make and receive phone calls for residents at facilities like Desert Manor, but asked, “What do you do when a judge issues an order counter to the law?”

You follow the law, I replied.

“But the judge is the law,” said Chris.

Actually, the judge is a man in a long black robe who has taken an oath to uphold the law, but Chris would hear nothing concerning this perception and suddenly reversed his previous statements.

“We do not block a resident from making or receiving phone calls,” he announced cheerfully.

At day’s end, I turned on the tube and listened to Obama’s nomination acceptance speech at the DNC in Charlotte. Repeatedly, President Obama affirmed that we are a country where “everyone plays by the same rules,” as the crowd roared its approval.

He must not have heard about the way they are playing the game out in San Berdo.

The Modern US Army: Unfit For Service?

Gone are the days of the all-American army hero. These days, the US military is more like a sanctuary for racists, gang members and the chronically unfit…

My journey into the dark underworld of the US military begins on a rainy Tuesday morning in March 2008, with a visit to Tampa, Florida. I am here to meet Forrest Fogarty, an American patriot who served in the US army for two years in Iraq. Fogarty is also a white supremacist of the serious Hitler-worshipping type.

We meet in his favourite hangout, the Winghouse Bar & Grill. In our brief phone call, I’d asked how I would recognise him. “Just look for the skinhead with the tattoos,” he said. And sure enough, sitting straight to my right as I walk in is a youngish-looking man, plastered in tattoos, with cropped hair and bulging biceps. “You’re British, right,” he says, as we order. “I remember seeing black guys with British accents in Iraq, shit was so crazy.”

Fogarty tells me he was bullied at his LA high school by Mexican and African-American children, and was just 14 when he decided he wanted to be a Nazi. He has no qualms about flaunting his prejudice. When black people come into the bar, he emits a hiss of disapproval. “I just don’t want to be around them,” he tells me. “I don’t want to look at them, I don’t want them near me.”

As a young man, Fogarty was obsessed withIan Stuart Donaldson, the legendary singer in the British band Skrewdriver, who is hero-worshipped in the neo-Nazi music scene. At 16, he had an image from one of Skrewdriver’s album covers – a Viking carrying an axe, an icon among white nationalists – tattooed on his left forearm. Soon after, he had a Celtic cross, an Irish symbol appropriated by neo-Nazis, emblazoned on his stomach. A few years later, he started his own band, Attack, now one of the biggest Nazi bands in the US. But it was never his day job. “I was a landscaper when I left school,” he says. “I kind of fell into it. I didn’t give a shit what I was doing, I was just drinking and fighting.”

For the next eight years he drifted through jobs in construction and landscaping, and began hanging out with the National Alliance, at the time one of the biggest neo-Nazi organisations in the US. He soon became a member. He had always seen himself as a fighter and warrior, so he resolved to do what two generations of Fogartys had done before him: join the military.

Fogarty was not the first extremist to enter the armed forces. The neo-Nazi movement has had a long and tense relationship with the US military. Since its inception, the leaders of the white supremacist movement have encouraged their members to enlist. They see it as a way for their followers to receive combat and weapons training, courtesy of the US government, and then to bring what they learn home to undertake a domestic race war. Not all far-right groups subscribe to this vision – some, such as the Ku Klux Klan, claim to prefer a democratic approach – but a large portion see themselves as insurrectionary forces. To that end, professional training in warfare is a must.The US military has long been aware of these groups’ attempts at infiltration, but it wasn’t until 1996 that supremacist and neo-Nazi groups were specifically banned from the military, after the murder in 1995 of two African-Americans by a neo-Nazi paratrooper stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Fogarty was recruited the year after.

He knew that the tattoo he had riding up his forearm could be a problem when it came to enlistment. In a neo-Nazi underworld obsessed with secrecy, racist tattoos remain one of the clearest indicators of extremism for a recruiter, and in an effort to police the matter, the US military requires recruits to explain any tattoos. “They just told me to write an explanation of each tattoo and I made up some stuff and that was that,” he says.

Soon after Fogarty was approved, his ex-girlfriend and mother of his eldest child contacted the military. According to Fogarty, she sent a dossier of pictures to his military command that showed him at white supremacist and neo-Nazi rallies, as well as performing his racist rock with Attack. “They hauled me before some sort of committee, and showed me the pictures. I just denied it.” The committee, he says, “knew what I was about, but they let it go because I’m a great soldier”.

Fogarty remained in the reserves, until finally, in 2004, he was sent where he had always wanted to go: Iraq. Before he left for the Middle East, he joined the Hammerskin Nation – described by the Anti-Defamation League as the “the most violent and best-organised neo-Nazi skinhead group in the United States“.

Fogarty maintains that a good portion of those around him were aware of his neo-Nazism. “They all knew in my unit,” he says. “They would always kid around and say, ‘Hey, you’re that skinhead!’” He was confident enough of his carte blanche from the military that during his break from service in 2004, he flew not to see his family in the US but to Dresden, Germany, to give a concert to 2,500 skinheads, on the army’s budget.

When he was at Camp Victory in Baghdad, Fogarty even says a sergeant came up to him and said, “You’re one of those racist motherfuckers, aren’t you?” I ask how the sergeant knew about his racism. “The tattoo, I suppose. I can’t hide everything – people knew, even the chain of command.”

Another white supremacist soldier, James Douglas Ross, a military intelligence officer stationed at Fort Bragg, was given a bad conduct discharge from the army when he was caught trying to mail a submachine gun from Iraq to his father’s home in Spokane, Washington. Military police found a cache of white supremacist paraphernalia and several weapons hidden behind ceiling tiles in Ross’s military quarters. After his discharge, a Spokane County deputy sheriff saw Ross passing out fliers for the neo-Nazi National Alliance. And in early 2012, a photo emerged of a 10-strong US marine scout sniper unit posing for a photo with a Nazi SS bolts flag in Sangin, Afghanistan. According to the military, the symbolism was unknown to the soldiers. “Certainly, the use of the ‘SS runes’ is not acceptable and scout snipers have been addressed concerning this issue,” marine corps spokesman Captain Gregory Wolf said.

The magnitude of the problem within the military is hard to quantify. The military does not track extremists as a discrete category, coupling them with gang members, and those in the neo-Nazi movement claim different numbers. The National Socialist Movement claimed 190 of its members are inside. White Revolution claimed 12. In white supremacist incidents from 2001 to 2008, the FBI identified 203 veterans. Because the FBI focused only on reported cases, its numbers don’t include the many extremist soldiers who have managed to stay off the radar. But its report does pinpoint why the white supremacist movements seek to recruit veterans – they “may exploit their accesses to restricted areas and intelligence or apply specialised training in weapons, tactics, and organisational skills to benefit the extremist movement”. The report found that two army privates in the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg had attempted in 2007 to sell stolen property from the military – including ballistic vests, a combat helmet, and pain medications such as morphine – to an undercover FBI agent they believed was involved with the white supremacist movement (they were convicted and sentenced to six years in prison). It also found multiple examples of white supremacist recruitment among active military personnel, including a period in 2003 when six active-duty soldiers at Fort Riley were found to be members of the neo-Nazi group Aryan Nations, working to recruit their army colleagues and even serving as the Aryan Nations’ point of contact for the State of Kansas.

The degree of impunity encountered by Fogarty and countless other extremists has caused tensions within the military. The blind eye turned by the recruiters angered many investigators whose integrity was being compromised. Hunter Glass was a paratrooper in the 1980s and became a gang cop in 1999 in Fairville, North Carolina, next to Fort Bragg. “In the 1990s, the military was hard on them, they could pick and choose,” he recalls. The change came after 9/11. “The key rule nowadays is ignore it until it becomes a problem,” Glass tells me. “We need manpower. So as long as the man isn’t acting out, let’s blow it off.” He recounts one episode in early 2005 when he was requested by military police investigators at Fort Bragg to interview a soldier with blatant skinhead insignia – SS lightning bolts and hammers. Glass worked with the base’s military police investigators, who filed a report. “They recommended that he be kicked out,” he recalls, “but the commanding officers didn’t do anything.” He says there was an open culture of impunity. “We’re seeing guys with tattoos all the time … As far as hunting them down, I don’t see it. I’m seeing the opposite, where if a white supremacist has committed a crime, the military stance will be, ‘He didn’t commit a race-related crime.’ ”

By 2005, the US had 150,000 troops deployed in Iraq and 19,500 in Afghanistan. But the military wasn’t prepared in any way for this kind of extended deployment – and just two years into the war in Iraq, people were talking openly about the fact that it had reached breaking point. The slim forces needed fattening up and what followed constituted a complete re-evaluation of who was qualified to serve – a full-works facelift of the service unheard of in modern American history. In the relatively halcyon days of the first Gulf war in 1990, the US military blocked the enlistment of felons. It spurned men and women with low IQs or those without a high school diploma. It would either block the enlistment of or kick out neo-Nazis and gang members. It would treat or discharge alcoholics, drug abusers and the mentally ill. No more. While the Bush administration adopted conservative policies pretty much universally, it saved its ration of liberalism for the US military, where it scrapped many of the regulations governing recruitment.

Many of the wars’ worst atrocities are linked directly to the loosening of enlistment regulations on criminals, racist extremists, and gang members, among others. Then there are the effects on the troops themselves. Lowering standards on intelligence and body weight, for example, compromised the military’s operational readiness and undoubtedly endangered the lives of US and allied troops. Hundreds of soldiers may have paid with their lives for this folly.

On 1 December 2007, Kevin Shields was murdered in Colorado Springs in an incident involving three of his fellow soldiers, Louis Bressler, Kenneth Eastridge and Bruce Bastien Jr, who all served in Iraq as part of the Second Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division. Bressler and Bastien were each put away for 60 years for their part in the murder, alongside a litany of other crimes in Colorado Springs; Eastridge is serving a 10-year prison sentence for his part. In the aftermath of the arrests, pictures emerged of Eastridge proudly displaying his SS bolts tattoo. After his arrest, Bastien told investigators that he and Eastridge had randomly fired at civilians in Iraq during patrols through the streets of Baghdad. In broad daylight, Bastien alleged, Eastridge would use a stolen AK-47 to fire indiscriminately at Iraqi civilians. At least one was hit, he said. “We were trigger happy,” said another member of the platoon, José Barco, who is serving 52 years in jail for shooting and injuring a pregnant woman in Colorado Springs. “We’d open up on anything. They even didn’t have to be armed. We were keeping scores.” So far, no one has been charged with shooting civilians in Iraq.

The military not only ignored Eastridge’s extremism, but on his return from combat awarded him a Purple Heart and Army Achievement medals. Eastridge’s lawyer, Sheilagh McAteer, becomes palpably angry when I speak to her. She claimed that the military were now knowingly sending mentally unstable young men to Afghanistan and Iraq. “The military is to some extent desperate to get people to go to fight – soldiers who are not fit, mentally and physically sick, but they continue to send them,” she told me. “Having a tattoo was the least of his concerns.”In March 2012, a US soldier, on his fourth deployment in a decade, walked out of his base and went on a shooting spree in southern Afghanistan, murdering more than a dozen Afghan civilians, including nine children. Then news came that US army staff sergeant Robert Bales, the 38-year-old suspect, was from Joint Base Lewis-McCord, in Washington state, which just four months earlier had convicted a member of an Afghanistan “kill team” of murder via a military jury.

PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] was not a new phenomenon for the military, but sending soldiers still suffering from severe mental health problems back to the frontline in such large numbers was. “I’m concerned that people who are symptomatic are being sent back,” said Dr Arthur S Blank, Jr, a Yale-trained psychiatrist. “That has not happened before in our country.” The army’s top mental health expert, Colonel Elspeth Ritchie, explicitly accepted that the reason so many mentally ill troops were being sent back was because of the demands on the military for more and more personnel. “The challenge for us,” he said, “is that the army has a mission to fight. And, as you know, recruiting has been a challenge. And so we have to weigh the needs of the mission with the soldiers’ personal needs.”

Bradley Manning, the alleged US military source of the WikiLeaks data, is another example of the mental health of recruits being ignored. Manning was a “mess of a child” who “should never have been put through a tour of duty in Iraq”, said an officer from the Fort Leonard Wood military base in Missouri, where Manning trained in 2007. Chase Madar, the author of a recent book on Manning, told me, “He would never have been kept in the army if not for record low recruitment levels in 2007 when he enlisted.” The only reason Manning made it on to active duty in Iraq, after repeated warnings about his fitness at all three of his stateside deployments, was the army’s “utter desperation for soldiers with IT and analytic skills during its historic low in recruitment”.

New recruits were physically, as well as mentally, unfit. In 1993, around 23% of prospective recruits would have been overweight – a pretty significant tranche. By 2006, this had increased to just over 27%, or more than a quarter of potential recruits, due partly to the use of “medical waivers” to make exceptions for overweight recruits.

The three most common barriers for potential recruits were failure to graduate high school, a criminal record and physical fitness issues, including obesity. The criminal record had been dealt with by “moral waivers” and the obesity problem by “medical waivers”, but dropping the standards on educational attainment would not be so easy without seriously affecting operational readiness. There was a way for non-graduates to get into the military, however: the general equivalency degree, or GED, which can afford recruits a waiver if they score well enough on the military’s entrance exam. The army accepts about 15% of recruits without a high school diploma if they have a GED. Alive to this loophole, the military instituted another program in 2008, the so-called GED Plus, to give more of America’s youth the requisite qualifications they needed to go and fight. It opened its first prep school for the purpose, targeted at tough, inner-city areas.

In fact, during the “war on terror”, the resources poured into recruiting impressionable young people skyrocketed, with 1,000 new recruiters added in one year to bring high school kids round to the military’s way of thinking. The Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps expanded across the nation, and no child was free from their solicitations; even 11-year-olds were taking part in the programmes. One in 10 high school students in Chicago wore a military uniform to school and took classes on shooting guns from retired veterans.

One of the main incentives offered was money – a lot of money from the perspective of a 16-year-old. In 2005, the army moved to raise the average bonus given to recruits when they signed on the dotted line from $14,000 to $17,000, with the possibility of as much as $30,000 for hard-to-fill vacancies. Another of the military’s slogans was “Join the Armed Forces, get a free education”, an offer many of America’s poorest kids couldn’t turn down.

A report, Soldiers Of Misfortune, by the American Civil Liberties Union, found that the US government was actually in contravention of an international protocol prohibiting the recruitment of children into military service when they are under 18 years old. It also noted that the US military disproportionately targets poor and minority public school students, but its findings were dutifully ignored.

It took a report from the Palm Center at the University of California – a group committed to discussion of homosexuals in the military – to blow the lid on yet more figures the military was trying hard to cover up. In 2007, it published information obtained through the Freedom of Information Act that found the number of convicted criminals enlisting in the US military had nearly doubled in two years, from 824 in 2004 to 1,605 in 2006. In that period, a total of 4,230 convicted felons were enlisted, including those guilty of rape and murder. On top of this, 43,977 soldiers signed up who had been found guilty of a serious misdemeanour, which includes assault. Another 58,561 had drug-related convictions, but all were handed a gun and sent off to the Middle East. “The fact that the military has allowed more than 100,000 people with such troubled pasts to join its ranks over the past three years illustrates the problem we’re having meeting our military needs in this time of war,” said Aaron Belkin, director of the Palm Center.

One of the most horrific of the reported atrocities by the US military in Iraq, the murder of the al-Janabi family in Yusufiyah, involved a convicted criminal, Steven D Green, whose enlistment required special dispensation because of his criminal record. But research has shown that these recruitment practices engender breakdown within the ranks as well. During the “war on terror”, one in three female soldiers reported being victims of some form of sexual assault while in service. In fact, US women service members are today more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than to be killed by enemy fire. No one knows how many Iraqi or Afghan women and girls have been subjected to similar atrocities, although cases such as the rapes and murders in Yusufiyah suggest it was equally endemic, and went equally unpunished.

In 2009, the military met its recruitment targets for the first time since 2004 and once again pledged to lock out those with criminal records. Brigadier General Joseph Anderson, deputy commander of the US Army Recruiting Command, said that the “adult major misconduct” waiver, given for felony offences, was now closed and, additionally, those with a history of juvenile criminal activity would not be allowed to recruit without a high school diploma. It was an admission of guilt, but for many in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was too late.

• Extracted from Irregular Army: Irregular Army: How The US Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members, And Criminals To Fight The War On Terror, by Matt Kennard, is published by Verso Books on 24 September, priced £14.99. To order a copy for £11.99, with free UK p&p, visit the Guardian Bookshop.

Source: Matt Kennard | The Guardian

Conspiracy Realism

Anyone claiming that international bankers, multinational company executives, members of the Bilderberg Group, elite academics, senior judges, United Nations officials and European Union strategists are working together to undermine the remnants of sovereignty and identity of old Christian nations through mass Third World immigration would be dismissed by our bien pensants as a conspiracy theorist. A wacko unfit for polite society.

Enter Peter Sutherland (66), a remarkable man. Addressing the House of Lords sub-committee on immigration on June 21, Mr. Sutherland said that the EU should “do its best to undermine” the “homogeneity” of its member states in order to make them truly multicultural. He was addressing the peers in his capacity of head of the Global Forum on Migration and Development, but that is only one of Peter Sutherland’s many affiliations. He is also:

• the UN’s special representative for migration;
• non-executive chairman of Goldman Sachs International who made $200 million from the bank’s flotation in 1999;
• former chairman of Allied Irish Bank, the biggest in the country;
• former member of the European Commission;
• “Consultor of the Extraordinary Section of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See,” offering advice on the Vatican’s finances;
• former Director General of The World Trade Organization (WTO);
• former chairman of oil giant BP, with a salary of $1,000,000 a year;
• former Attorney General of Ireland;
• Chairman of the Council of the London School of Economics;
  and last but by no means least,
• a regular participant in meetings of The Bilderberg Group, which the BBC report on his remarks to the Lords tactfully described as “a top level international networking organization often criticized for its alleged secrecy.”

The future prosperity of many EU states depended on them becoming “multicultural,” Sutherland told the peers, “however difficult it may be to explain this to the citizens of those states.” An ageing or declining native population in countries like Germany or southern EU states was the “key argument … for the development of multicultural states,” he said. “It’s impossible to consider that the degree of homogeneity which is implied by the other argument can survive because states have to become more open states, in terms of the people who inhabit them,” according to Sutherland. “At the most basic level individuals should have a freedom of choice” because anyone should have the right to work or study in the country of his or her preference.

Criticizing the UK government’s current attempt to cut net immigration to “tens of thousands” a year through visa restrictions, Mr. Sutherland urged EU member states to adopt “a global approach to the issue” and “accommodate more readily those from other backgrounds.” He bewailed the fact that many Europeans “still nurse a sense of [their] homogeneity and difference from others… And that’s precisely what the European Union, in my view, should be doing its best to undermine.”

This is the most explicit statement of intent to date by an authoritative member of what is de facto world government. Nations should disappear by being cured of the sense of difference from others, dissenters should be coerced into submission, and everyone in the world is entitled to live anywhere in the world.

It is noteworthy that, in Sutherland’s view, the EU has not done enough to advance his agenda. As it happens, Brussels has decreed many years ago that countries of the European Union no longer have the power to decide on who comes or stays within their borders. In 1999, the Treaty of Amsterdam transferred responsibility for immigration policies from individual member-countries to the EU Council of Ministers, acting on proposals from the unelected European Commission. The all-out EU effort to undermine “homogeneity” is over a decade old. Its founding document is the European Council agreement signed in Tampere (Finland) in October 1999, which mandated granting immigrants all those rights enjoyed by host-country citizens. It also demanded relaxation of asylum policy, since European freedoms should not be regarded “as the exclusive preserve of the Union’s own citizens” and will not be denied to those “whose circumstances lead them justifiably to seek access to our territory.” The European Union Presidency statement on racism of March 21, 2002, declared that the EU “bases its very existence in the idea that “all peoples and individuals constitute one human family.”

With his plea that “individuals should have a freedom of choice,” Sutherland is knocking on an open EU door, and he knows it. For a cultural radical like him no given status quo is ever satisfactory, however. Brussels can and should do more, for as long as there are Britons, Germans or Italians who are still proud of who they are and who still believe that their countries should somehow belong to them and their offspring.

It is to be feared that Europeans may get physically eradicated well before their “sense of difference” is destroyed though state education and judicial fiat. Even on current form Europe is well on the way to population replacement. In France—to take the most drastic example—of close to 800,000 live births in a nation of just under 60 million, Muslim immigrants (predominantly from North Africa) and their French-born descendants currently account for close to one-third. Short of a sudden reversal of policies and demographic curves, even without Sutherland’s radical measures there will be no “Europeans” a century from now. They will literally disappear as members of ethnic groups that share the same language, culture, and ancestors, and inhabit lands associated with their names.

Peter Sutherland embodies the Western elite class: he is deracinated, authoritarian, rich, arrogant, contemptuous of the common people, powerful and dangerous. In other words, a few details of the physique notwithstanding, he is Barack Obama’s older brother. It is therefore unsurprising that in his remarks to the House of Lords he praised the United States as the model of multicultural openness that Europe would be well advised to emulate.

Julian Assange, Infinite Justice Barack Obama, His Mother, And The CIA

I’m sure most Americans are mighty proud of the fact that Julian Assange is so frightened of falling into the custody of the United States that he had to seek sanctuary in the embassy of Ecuador, a tiny and poor Third World country, without any way of knowing how it would turn out. He might be forced to be there for years. “That’ll teach him to mess with the most powerful country in the world! All you other terrorists and anti-Americans out there — Take Note! When you fuck around with God’s country you pay a price!”

How true. You do pay a price. Ask the people of Cuba, Vietnam, Chile, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Iran, Haiti, etc., etc., etc. And ask the people of Guantánamo, Diego Garcia, Bagram, and a dozen other torture centers to which God’s country offers free transportation.

You think with the whole world watching, the United States would not be so obvious as to torture Assange if they got hold of him? Ask Bradley Manning. At a bare minimum, prolonged solitary confinement is torture. Before too long the world may ban it. Not that that would keep God’s country and other police states from using it.

You think with the whole world watching, the United States would not be so obvious as to target Assange with a drone? They’ve done it with American citizens. Assange is a mere Aussie.

And Ecuador and its president, Rafael Correa, will pay a price. You think with the whole world watching, the United States would not intervene in Ecuador? In Latin America, it comes very naturally for Washington. During the Cold War it was said that the United States could cause the downfall of a government south of the border … with a frown. The dissolution of the Soviet Union didn’t bring any change in that because it was never the Soviet Union per se that the United States was fighting. It was the threat of a good example of an alternative to the capitalist model.

For example, on January 21, 2000 in Ecuador, where almost two-thirds live in poverty, a very large number of indigenous peasants rose up in desperation and marched to the capital city of Quito, where they were joined by labor unions and some junior military officers (most members of the army being of indigenous stock). This coalition presented a list of economic demands, seized the Congress and Supreme Court buildings, and forced the president to resign. He was replaced by a junta from the ranks of the new coalition. The Clinton administration was alarmed. Besides North American knee-reflex hostility to anything that look or smells like a leftist revolution, Washington had big plans for a large military base in Manta (later closed by Correa). And Colombia — already plagued by leftist movements — was next door.

The US quickly stepped in to educate the Ecuadorean coalition leaders as to the facts of Western Hemispheric imperial life. The American embassy in Quito … Peter Romero, Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America and Western Hemispheric Affairs … Sandy Berger, National Security Adviser to President Clinton … Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering … all made phone calls to Ecuadorian officials to threaten a cutoff in aid and other support, warning that “Ecuador will find itself isolated”, informing them that the United States would never recognize any new government the coalition might set up, there would be no peace in Ecuador unless the military backed the vice president as the new leader, and the vice president must continue to pursue neoliberal “reforms”, the kind of IMF structural adjustment policies which had played a major role in inciting the uprising in the first place.

Within hours the heads of the Ecuadorian army, navy and air force declared their support for the vice president. The leaders of the uprising fled into hiding. And that was the end of the Ecuadorian revolution of the year 2000.¹

Rafael Correa was first elected in 2006 with a 58% majority, and reelected in 2009 with a 55% majority; his current term runs until August 2013. The American mainstream media has been increasingly critical of him. The following letter sent in January to the Washington Post by the Ecuadoran ambassador to the United States is an attempt to clarify one of the issues.

Letter to the Editor:

We were offended by the Jan. 12 editorial “Ecuador’s bully,” which focused on a lawsuit brought by our president, Rafael Correa, after a newspaper claimed that he was guilty of ordering troops to fire on innocent citizens during a failed coup in 2010. The president asked the publishers to release their evidence or a retraction. When they refused, he sued, as any citizen should do when recklessly wronged.

No journalist has gone to prison or paid a significant fine in the five years of the Correa presidency. Media criticism — fair and unfair, sometimes with malice — of the government appears every day. The case involving the newspaper is on appeal. When the judicial process ends, the president has said, he will waive some or all of the penalties provided he gets a retraction. That is a common solution to libel and slander cases in the United States, I believe.

Your writer uses obnoxious phrases such as “banana republic,” but here is the reality of today’s Ecuador: a highly popular, stable and progressive democracy for the first time in decades.

Nathalie Cely, Washington

No shelter from the drones of infinite justice or the bacteria of enduring freedom

Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai said recently that he had had an argument with Gen. John Allen, the top US commander in Afghanistan, about the issue of American drone attacks in Afghanistan, following yet another deadly airstrike that killed a number of civilians. Karzai asked Allen an eminently reasonable question: “Do you do this in the United States?” The Afghan president added: “There is police action every day in the United States in various localities. They don’t call an airplane to bomb the place.”²

Karzai’s question to Allen was rhetorical of course, for can it be imagined that American officials would bomb a house in an American city because they suspected that certain bad guys were present there? Well, the answer to that question is that it can be imagined because they’ve already done it.

In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. On May 13, 1985, a bomb dropped by a police helicopter burned down an entire block, some 60 homes destroyed, 11 dead, including several small children. The police, the mayor’s office, and the FBI were all involved in this effort to evict an organization called MOVE from the house they lived in.

The victims were all black of course. So let’s rephrase our question. Can it be imagined that American officials would bomb a house in Beverly Hills or the upper east side of Manhattan? Stay tuned.

And what else can we imagine about a society that’s been super militarized, that’s at war with much of the world, and is convinced that it’s on the side of the angels and history? Well, the Boston transit system, MBTA, recently announced that in conjunction with Homeland Security they plan to release dead bacteria at three stations during off-hours this summer in order to test sensors that detect biological agents, which terrorists could release into subway systems. The bacterium, bacillus subtilis, is not infectious even in its live form, according to the government.³

However, this too has a precedent. During five days in June, 1966 the Army conducted a test called “A Study of the Vulnerability of Subway Passengers in New York City to Covert Attack with Biological Agents”. Trillions ofbacillus subtilis variant niger were released into the subway system during rush hours, producing aerosol clouds. The report on the test noted that “When the cloud engulfed people, they brushed their clothing, looked up at the grate [at street level] and walked on.”⁴ The wind of passing trains spread the bacteria along the tracks; in the time it took for two trains to pass, the bacteria were spread from 15th Street to 58th Street.⁵ It is not known how many people later became ill from being unsuspecting guinea pigs because the United States Army, as far as is known, exhibited no interest in this question.

For the planned Boston test the public has not been informed of the exact days; nor is it known how long the bacteria might linger in the stations or what the possible danger might be to riders whose immune system has been weakened for any reason.

It should be noted that the New York subway experiment was only one of many such experiments. The Army has acknowledged that between 1949 and 1969, 239 populated areas from coast to coast as well as US overseas territories were blanketed with various organisms during tests designed to measure patterns of dissemination in the air, weather effects, dosages, optimum placement of the source, and other factors. Such testing was supposedly suspended after 1969.⁶

Government officials have consistently denied that the biological agents used could be harmful despite an abundance of expert and objective scientific evidence that exposure to heavy concentrations of even apparently innocuous organisms can cause illness, at a minimum to the most vulnerable segments of the population — the elderly, children, and those suffering from a variety of ailments. “There is no such thing as a microorganism that cannot cause trouble,” George Connell, assistant to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, testified before the Senate in 1977. “If you get the right concentration at the right place, at the right time, and in the right person, something is going to happen.”⁷

The United States has used biological weapons abroad as well, repeatedly, not for testing purposes but for hostile purposes.⁸ So what will the land which has the highest (double) standards say when such weapons are used against it? Or when foreign drones hit American cities? Or when American hi-tech equipment is sabotaged by a cyber attack as the US has now admitted doing to Iran? A year ago the Pentagon declared that “computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war. … If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks,” said a US military official.⁹

“The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.” – André Gide, French Author, 1869-1951

Barack Obama, his mother, and the CIA

In his autobiography, Dreams From My Fathers, Barack Obama writes of taking a job at some point after graduating from Columbia University in 1983. He describes his employer as “a consulting house to multinational corporations” in New York City, and his functions as a “research assistant” and “financial writer”.

Oddly, Obama doesn’t mention the name of his employer. However, a New York Times story of October 30, 2007 identifies the company as Business International Corporation. Equally odd is that the Times did not remind its readers that the newspaper itself had disclosed in 1977 that Business International had provided cover for four CIA employees in various countries between 1955 and 1960.¹⁰

The British journal, Lobster — which, despite its incongruous name, is a venerable international publication on intelligence matters — has reported that Business International was active in the 1980s promoting the candidacy of Washington-favored candidates in Australia and Fiji.¹¹ In 1987, the CIA overthrew the Fiji government after but one month in office because of its policy of maintaining the island as a nuclear-free zone, meaning that American nuclear-powered or nuclear-weapons-carrying ships could not make port calls.¹² After the Fiji coup, the candidate supported by Business International, who was much more amenable to Washington’s nuclear desires, was reinstated to power — R.S.K. Mara was Prime Minister or President of Fiji from 1970 to 2000, except for the one-month break in 1987.

In his book, not only doesn’t Obama mention his employer’s name; he fails to say exactly when he worked there, or why he left the job. There may well be no significance to these omissions, but inasmuch as Business International has a long association with the world of intelligence, covert actions, and attempts to penetrate the radical left — including Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)¹³ — it’s reasonable to wonder if the inscrutable Mr. Obama is concealing something about his own association with this world.

Adding to the wonder is the fact that his mother, Ann Dunham, had been associated during the 1970s and 80s — as employee, consultant, grantee, or student — with at least five organizations with intimate CIA connections during the Cold War: The Ford Foundation, Agency for International Development (AID), the Asia Foundation, Development Alternatives, Inc., and the East-West Center of Hawaii.¹⁴ Much of this time she worked as an anthropologist in Indonesia and Hawaii, being in good position to gather intelligence about local communities.

As one example of the CIA connections of these organizations, consider the disclosure by John Gilligan, Director of AID during the Carter administration (1977-81). “At one time, many AID field offices were infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people. The idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas, government, volunteer, religious, every kind.”¹⁵ And Development Alternatives, Inc. is the organization for whom Alan Gross was working when arrested in Cuba and charged with being part of the ongoing American operation to destabilize the Cuban government.

How the owners of a society play with their property

The Supreme Court of the United States has just upheld the constitutionality of President Obama’s health care law, the Affordable Care Act. Liberals as well as many progressives are very pleased, regarding this as a victory for the left.

Under the new law, people can benefit in one way or another depending on the following factors:

Their age; whether their income is at or below 133 percent of the federal poverty level; whether their parents have a health plan; whether they use tobacco; what state they live in; whether they have a pre-existing medical condition; whether they qualify to buy health insurance through newly-created market places known as “exchanges”; and numerous other criteria … They can obtain medical insurance in a “competitive insurance market” (emphasis on the “competitive”); they can perhaps qualify for various other kinds of credits and tax relief if they meet certain criteria … The authors of the Act state that it will save thousands of dollars in drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries by closing a coverage gap called the “donut hole” … They tell us that “It keeps insurance companies honest by setting clear rules that rein in the worst insurance industry abuses.”

That’s a sample of how health care looks in the United States of America in the 21st century, with a complexity that will keep a small army of lawyers busy for years to come. Ninety miles away, in the Republic of Cuba, it looks a bit different. If you feel sick you go to a doctor. You’re automatically qualified to receive any medical care that’s available and thought to be suitable. The doctor treats you to the best of his or her ability. The insurance companies play no role. There are no insurance companies. You don’t pay anything. You go home.

The Affordable Care Act will undoubtedly serve as a disincentive to the movement for single-payer national health insurance, setting the movement back for years. The Affordable Care Act was undoubtedly designed for that purpose.

Notes

1. Washington Post, January 23, 2000, p.1; “The coup in Ecuador: a grim warning”, World Socialist Web Site, February 2, 2000; Z Magazine (Massachusetts), February 2001, pp.36-7 ^↩
2. Washington Post, June 12, 2012 ^↩
3. Beacon Hill Patch (Boston), “MBTA to Spread Dead Bacteria on Red Line in Bio-Terror Test”, May 18, 2012 ^↩
4. Leonard Cole, Clouds of Secrecy: The Army’s Germ Warfare Tests over Populated Areas (1990), pp.65-9^↩
5. New York Times, September 19, 1975, p.14 ^↩
6. “Biological Testing Involving Human Subjects by the Department of Defense”, 1977, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, US Senate, March 8 and May 23, 1977; see also William Blum, Rogue State, chapter 15 ^↩
7. Senate Hearings, op. cit., p.270 ^↩
8. Rogue State, op. cit., chapter 14 ^↩
9. Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2011 ^↩
10. New York Times, December 27, 1977, p.40 ^↩
11. Lobster magazine, Hull, UK, #14, November 1987 ^↩
12. Rogue State, op. cit., pp.199-200 ^↩
13. Carl Oglesby, Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Antiwar Movement (2008), passim^↩
14. Wikipedia entry for Ann Dunham ^↩
15. George Cotter, “Spies, strings and missionaries”, The Christian Century (Chicago), March 25, 1981, p.321

Taking The Temperature of The Department of Consumer Affairs–Diagnosis: DEADLY

Reichel Everhart, the Deputy Director of the California Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA), has declined to respond to questions as to the functioning of the Professional Fiduciaries Bureau, which is housed in the DCA. Nor will she respond to written requests to direct the Bureau to respond to public records act requests in a manner which would be considered legal. The two records requests in question, one made to the PFB in January of 2012 and the other made in April of 2012, produced email responses which were highly problematic.

The proper format to respond to a public records act request is by letter, as emails may not be considered legal tender. In fact, if there were a legal challenge to the content of the responses, the emails might not be admissable in a court of law.

In an email dated January 27, 2012, DCA Press Officer Russ Heimerich replied to a public records act request for the policies and procedures manual in use by the PFB, admitting there were no such written records. Clearly, for a government agency to be operating in a vacuum of written guidelines is unheard of. The terminology used for such an absence of written procedures is “underground guidelines,” which, according to attorney Bruce Ebert, are simply illegal.

The request was made due to the mounting evidence that the PFB has gone rogue. Top of the list of concerns is the fact that the agency is closing complaints with no legal basis to do so. The tiny PFB, staffed by only one analyst, Angela Bigelow, and a part-time bureau chief, Gil DeLuna, serves the critical function of overseeing and licensing professional conservators and fiduciaries. The complaints which have been closed by the Bureau include allegations of theft, embezzlement and profound physical and medical abuse. A number of the complaints have alleged that the abuse of the elderly or disabled person resulted in death. Queries made as to the reason for complaint closure have met with silence.

Guardianship abuse is admittedly a hot button item. The abuses being committed against these vulnerable citizens has reached a critical point and grassroots groups have sprung up across the country in an effort to address this. Activists, such as Bonnie Reiter and Dr. Robert Sarhan, each of whom allege that a conservator caused the untimely death of a parent, have visited D.C., met with Congressmen, written letters to the media, made reports to the FBI, all with no ostensible results.

Another public records request tendered in April asked for interagency memos advising the Bureau that they would be protected for failing to investigate or prosecute claims of conservator crimes. PFB Chief Gil Deluna replied—via email– that there were no such records. DeLuna was repeatedly contacted asking if he would put his reply in the form of a letter and has not replied.

The record of the DCA in prosecuting complaints speaks for itself. The most recent available annual report—for 2010– lists, under the Conviction/Arrest notification category, that there were zero arrests made, zero pending and zero referred for investigation. Zero inspections were conducted and zero citations were issued. There were zero referrals for criminal action made and zero for civil. The report states that, in terms of cost recovery to complainants, zero dollars had been ordered and zero dollars had been collected.

In a conversation several months ago, DCA Deputy Director Reichel Everhart sounded shocked to learn that the PFB had no written guidelines. She promised to speak with PFB Chief DeLuna and get back to this reporter promptly. Since then, Everhart has been unavailable for comment and has not fulfilled her promise.

The Bureau appears to be operating under a cloak of secrecy and provides little transparency as to its functioning. Issues of concern include that agency’s negligence in advising complainants that their complaints were closed. Several complainants, including Joe Quattrochi and Gina Rilke, were surprised to learn that their complaints were closed over a year ago as they were never so informed. Nor will the agency provide the file of the complaint, including any scrap of work product, to the complainant upon request. It’s all hush-hush.

The Professional Fiduciaries Bureau was created by an act of the Legislature in 2006, following an investigative series into conservatorship abuse, published in the Los Angeles Times. The abuses detailed in the series, “Guardians for Profit—When a Family Matter becomes a Business,” produced a public outcry and the Legislature swung into action, passing the Omnibus Conservatorship Reform Act of 2006.The Bureau’s funding was subsequently line item vetoed for two years in a row by Governor Schwarzenegger, and thus only opened its doors for business in late 2008.

The Bureau is tasked with holding public meetings four times a year. Per its own website, there have been no public meetings in eight months, since October of last year. Activists and conservatorship abuse victims became interested in these public meetings and started to attend them last year. The meetings were then apparently discontinued.

Former Assemblyman Dave Jones was a primary author of the legislation which created the Bureau. Jones, now California Insurance Commissioner, has declined to reply to questions as to what has happened to his brainchild. Speaking under conditions of anonymity, Jones’ staffer angrily suggested that such questions were inappropriate.

The White House Secret Kill List

In a recent column, Judge Andrew Napolitano highlighted a recent New York Times investigative report that reveals how President Barack Obama is engaging in secret assassinations worldwide. Judge Napolitano begins, “The leader of the government regularly sits down with his senior generals and spies and advisers and reviews a list of the people they want him to authorize their agents to kill. They do this every Tuesday morning when the leader is in town. The leader once condemned any practice even close to this, but now relishes the killing because he has convinced himself that it is a sane and sterile way to keep his country safe and himself in power. The leader, who is running for re-election, even invited his campaign manager to join the group that decides whom to kill.

“This is not from a work of fiction, and it is not describing a series of events in the Kremlin or Beijing or Pyongyang. It is a fair summary of a 6,000-word investigative report in The New York Times earlier this week about the White House of Barack Obama. Two Times journalists, Jo Becker and Scott Shane, painstakingly and chillingly reported that the former lecturer in constitutional law and liberal senator who railed against torture and Gitmo now weekly reviews a secret kill list, personally decides who should be killed and then dispatches killers all over the world–and some of his killers have killed Americans.

“We have known for some time that President Obama is waging a private war. By that I mean he is using the CIA on his own–and not the military after congressional authorization–to fire drones at thousands of persons in foreign lands, usually while they are riding in a car or a truck. He has done this both with the consent and over the objection of the governments of the countries in which he has killed. He doesn’t want to talk about this, but he doesn’t deny it. How chilling is it that David Axelrod–the president’s campaign manager–has periodically seen the secret kill list? Might this be to keep the killings politically correct?”

The judge concludes, “Since 9/11, the United States government has set up national security systems that function not under the Constitution, not under the Geneva Conventions, not under the rule of law, not under the rules of war, not under federal law, but under a new secret system crafted by the Bush administration and personally directed by Obama, the same Obama who condemned these rules as senator and then extended them as president. In the name of fighting demons in pick-up trucks and wars that Congress has never declared, the government shreds our rights, taps our cellphones, reads our emails, kills innocents abroad, strip searches 87-year-old grandmothers in wheelchairs and 3-year-old babies in their mothers’ arms, and offers secrecy when the law requires accountability.

“Obama has argued that his careful consideration of each person he orders killed and the narrow use of deadly force are an adequate and constitutional substitute for due process. The Constitution provides for no such thing. He has also argued that the use of drones to do his killing is humane since they are ‘surgical’ and only kill their targets. We know that is incorrect. And he has argued that these killings are consistent with our values. What is he talking about? The essence of our values is the rule of law, not the rule of presidents.”

See Judge Napolitano’s column at:

http://lewrockwell.com/napolitano/napolitano56.1.html

Let me begin by offering kudos to Judge Napolitano for his trenchant column, and kudos to New York Times reporters Jo Becker and Scott Shane for their blockbuster report.

Do readers not find it a little curious that hardly anyone in the national press corps–or even in the vast majority of the local media–has not picked up the Times report? After all, the New York Times is the unquestioned flagship newspaper of America. The vast majority of newspapers around the country rely on the NYT for much of their reporting. So, why didn’t we see this report blasted on front pages all across the United States? Do newspaper publishers and editors really think that this report is not Page One worthy? Is not this the kind of story that the freedom of the press was directly designed for? And where were the three major network news shows or even the cable news shows on this report? This is an incredible report, and for all intents and purposes, the story is relegated to media oblivion.

Oh, yes! Maybe we also now know why so many drones are beginning to appear over the skies of America.

One would think that the supposed “anti-Obama” FOX News network would be all over this story. To help enlighten readers, let me quickly point out the sagacious point that Judge Napolitano made in his column, “Since 9/11, the United States government has set up national security systems that function not under the Constitution, not under the Geneva Conventions, not under the rule of law, not under the rules of war, not under federal law, but under a new secret system crafted by the Bush administration.”

Ah! There it is! That’s why FOX News ignores the story. G.W. Bush is just as culpable in this monstrous activity as is Barack Obama. In fact, Bush is the one who created this modern American version of Hitler’s Brown Shirts. When it comes to ignoring the US Constitution and assuming dictatorial Hitlerian policies, Republican and Democrat Presidential administrations of late have been virtual Siamese Twins.

Now, please read this paragraph carefully (taken from HistoryLearningSite.com): “Germany became a nation of snoops. People were employed in each street, in each building complex, etc. with the sole purpose of keeping an eye on others in their ‘area’ and reporting them to the authorities if they believed that something was amiss. [Sounds like America’s Department of Homeland Security, doesn’t it?] The reputation of the Nazi police and the secret police lead by Himmler was such that no-one wished to cause offence. People kept their thoughts to themselves unless they wished to invite trouble. In this sense, Nazi Germany was a nation run on fear of the government. Hitler had created a one party state within months of being appointed chancellor.”

See the report at:

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/Nazi_Germany_dictatorship.htm

And ladies and gentlemen, this is why electing Mitt Romney will change nothing! The same Orwellian, big-government internationalists who are manipulating Barack Obama, and who manipulated G.W. Bush (and Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush) are manipulating Mitt Romney. Ever since President Ronald Reagan, it hasn’t mattered to a tinker’s dam whether a Republican or Democrat has been in the White House. As Sonny and Cher sang, “The Beat Goes On.” For all intents and purposes, America only has one party at the national level. Pat Buchanan was right when he said that the Elephants and Donkeys inside the Beltway were “two wings of the same bird of prey.”

Of course, if the American electorate suddenly got a surge of constitutional electricity and would elect Congressman Ron Paul as President, the story would be much different. Things would change at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue–not to mention in the United States and the entire world–dramatically. However, with the majority of Americans in the hip pockets of the mainstream media, a Romney/Obama showdown in November seems inevitable (although I am still privately cheering for a Ron Paul coup d’etat at the GOP national convention in Tampa).

So, how many people have been or are on this secret kill list–and who are they? With the vast majority of the mainstream media cowering in abject fear of the federal government, and with both major parties in Washington, D.C., walking in lockstep to the drumbeat of an emerging police state, who is left to even sound an alarm of protest? Well, two New York Times reporters did; Judge Andrew Napolitano did; Lew Rockwell did. And now I am, too.

Is this the kind of government that most Democrats want? Is this what they wanted when they elected Barack Obama? Is this the kind of government that most Republicans want? Is this what they wanted when they elected G.W. Bush?

Anyone who cannot see history being repeated is flat not paying attention! I cannot believe my country has turned into this!

Anyway, thank you Judge Napolitano for being a watchman on the wall!

Banks ‘Reaping Billions From Colombian Cocaine Trade

The vast profits made from drug production and trafficking are overwhelmingly reaped in rich “consuming” countries – principally across Europe and in the US – rather than war-torn “producing” nations such as Colombia and Mexico, new research has revealed. And its authors claim that financial regulators in the west are reluctant to go after western banks in pursuit of the massive amount of drug money being laundered through their systems.

The most far-reaching and detailed analysis to date of the drug economy in any country – in this case, Colombia – shows that 2.6% of the total street value of cocaine produced remains within the country, while a staggering 97.4% of profits are reaped by criminal syndicates, and laundered by banks, in first-world consuming countries.

“The story of who makes the money from Colombian cocaine is a metaphor for the disproportionate burden placed in every way on ‘producing’ nations like Colombia as a result of the prohibition of drugs,” said one of the authors of the study, Alejandro Gaviria, launching its English edition last week.

“Colombian society has suffered to almost no economic advantage from the drugs trade, while huge profits are made by criminal distribution networks in consuming countries, and recycled by banks which operate with nothing like the restrictions that Colombia’s own banking system is subject to.”

His co-author, Daniel Mejía, added: “The whole system operated by authorities in the consuming nations is based around going after the small guy, the weakest link in the chain, and never the big business or financial systems where the big money is.”

The work, by the two economists at University of the Andes in Bogotá, is part of an initiative by the Colombian government to overhaul globaldrugs policy and focus on money laundering by the big banks in America and Europe, as well as social prevention of drug taking and consideration of options for de-criminalising some or all drugs.

The economists surveyed an entire range of economic, social and political facets of the drug wars that have ravaged Colombia. The conflict has now shifted, with deadly consequences, to Mexico and it is feared will spread imminently to central America. But the most shocking conclusion relates to what the authors call “the microeconomics of cocaine production” in their country.

Gaviria and Mejía estimate that the lowest possible street value (at $100 per gram, about £65) of “net cocaine, after interdiction” produced in Colombia during the year studied (2008) amounts to $300bn. But of that only $7.8bn remained in the country.

“It is a minuscule proportion of GDP,” said Mejía, “which can impact disastrously on society and political life, but not on the Colombian economy. The economy for Colombian cocaine is outside Colombia.”

Mejía told the Observer: “The way I try to put it is this: prohibition is a transfer of the cost of the drug problem from the consuming to the producing countries.”

“If countries like Colombia benefitted economically from the drug trade, there would be a certain sense in it all,” said Gaviria. “Instead, we have paid the highest price for someone else’s profits – Colombia until recently, and now Mexico.

“I put it to Americans like this – suppose all cocaine consumption in the US disappeared and went to Canada. Would Americans be happy to see the homicide rates in Seattle skyrocket in order to prevent the cocaine and the money going to Canada? That way they start to understand for a moment the cost to Colombia and Mexico.”

The mechanisms of laundering drug money were highlighted in the Observer last year after a rare settlement in Miami between US federal authorities and the Wachovia bank, which admitted to transferring $110m of drug money into the US, but failing to properly monitor a staggering $376bn brought into the bank through small exchange houses in Mexico over four years. (Wachovia has since been taken over by Wells Fargo, which has co-operated with the investigation.)

But no one went to jail, and the bank is now in the clear. “Overall, there’s great reluctance to go after the big money,” said Mejía. “They don’t target those parts of the chain where there’s a large value added. In Europe and America the money is dispersed – once it reaches the consuming country it goes into the system, in every city and state. They’d rather go after the petty economy, the small people and coca crops in Colombia, even though the economy is tiny.”

Colombia’s banks, meanwhile, said Mejía, “are subject to rigorous control, to stop laundering of profits that may return to our country. Just to bank $2,000 involves a huge amount of paperwork – and much of this is overseen by Americans.”

“In Colombia,” said Gaviria, “they ask questions of banks they’d never ask in the US. If they did, it would be against the laws of banking privacy. In the US you have very strong laws on bank secrecy, in Colombia not – though the proportion of laundered money is the other way round. It’s kind of hypocrisy, right?”

 

Dr Mejia said: “It’s an extension of the way they operate at home. Go after the lower classes, the weak link in the chain – the little guy, to show results. Again, transferring the cost of the drug war on to the poorest, but not the financial system and the big business that moves all this along.”

With Britain having overtaken the US and Spain as the world’s biggest consumer of cocaine per capita, the Wachovia investigation showed much of the drug money is also laundered through the City of London, where the principal Wachovia whistleblower, Martin Woods, was based in the bank’s anti-laundering office. He was wrongfully dismissed after sounding the alarm.

Gaviria said: “We know that authorities in the US and UK know far more than they act upon. The authorities realise things about certain people they think are moving money for the drug trade – but the DEA [US Drugs Enforcement Administration] only acts on a fraction of what it knows.”

“It’s taboo to go after the big banks,” added Mejía. “It’s political suicide in this economic climate, because the amounts of money recycled are so high.”

Source: The Guardian

Is Jeffrey Feltman Iran’s Best Friend In Lebanon?

Bullying Hezbollah…

Key Iranian and American officials arrived in Lebanon last week to assess the strength of their local allies in the fast approaching and crucial legislative elections, the escalating spillover effects of the Syrian uprising in North Lebanon and presumably other ways each country can remain key players in this cross-roads/cross-hairs quasi-country.

The Lebanese public and media heard plenty of policy nuances and even similar and seemingly repeated statements by the two well-listened to guests.

But there were plenty of differences. During over-lapping visits one warned and threatened Lebanon, while the second praised Lebanon’s “achievements”. Admittedly, divining these Lebanese ‘achievements” is no mean task.

Making the front page lead paragraph in a number of Beirut and Middle East dailies last Friday were nearly simultaneous summations by the two visitors as they articulated their country’s policy toward Lebanon.

One visitor was Jeffrey Feltman, the long serving US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, who for all intents and purposes in still US Ambassador to Lebanon and elsewhere in the Levant. Mr. Feltman is well known in Lebanon and many here actually view him as a too frequent visitor, Assistant Secretary Feltman repeated his seven year mantra during a meeting with Prime Minister Najib Mikati, of warnings for the Lebanese government and citizens to break with Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran.

On the arguably more positive side, as he had so many times in the past, Assistant Secretary Feltman renewed the United States’ commitment to “a stable, sovereign and independent Lebanon”. And he repeated these words to the President of the Chamber of Deputies Speaker Nabih Berri, Progressive Socialist Party Leader MP Walid Jumblatt, Lebanese Forces Party President Samir Geagea, Maronite Bishop of Beirut Boulous Matar, and March 14 politicians. All of whom presumably hear the words in their sleep by now as all visiting US officials repeat Feltman’s buzz words.

A few hours earlier, another visitor, the Iranian First Vice President, Mohammad Rida Rahimi, having arrived in Lebanon in a bid to implement agreements signed between the two gentlemen used 67 per cent of the same key words but their meanings appear vastly different and that’s why some of us could use some help from a serious student of the subject.

Feltman told his interlocutors that he came to Lebanon to express his country’s “grave concern” on a number of issues including Hezbollah and its links with Iran and Syria. He also gave instructions on next year’s parliamentary elections which his team, the March 14 opposition, has threatened to boycott. If they do, according to some analysts here, their decision will have resulted from Feltman’s instructions.

The Beirut Daily, As-Safir, reported that Feltman’s sole purpose was to lash out at Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah.
And he did.

Feltman repeatedly warned that “if some sides in Lebanon seek to circumvent the sanctions on Iran then the Lebanese government will face “very serious complicated problems with the international community. The “International Community” is increasingly defined as “US allies”. During his meeting at the obsequious and literally genuflecting pro-Saudi MP Boutros Harb’s house, whose front page photograph showed the MP bowing deeply to Feltman, the latter threatened that “the United States is keen not to allow any exploitation of the bank secrecy in Lebanon, in order to bypass the sanctions on Iran, Hezbollah, and Syria. This enters deep into US strategy.”

Feltman’s threats continued as he sought to pressure businessmen in Syria and Lebanon:”Not abiding by the US and International sanctions will have dangerous repercussions on the Lebanese banking sector.” More than once Feltman warned the Lebanese, with reference to the recent unilateral sanctions imposed on the Central Bank of Iran, not to underestimate the American capacity to monitor and trace deposits and transfers. Most Lebanese are generally aware that US Treasury officials have been swarming through Lebanon the past two years in order to intimidate Lebanon’s banking sector and shore up the failing US sanctions against the Islamic Republic.

Assistant Secretary Feltman, as he has done for the past seven years, repeated to his Lebanese hosts that the US would consider providing arms to the Lebanese army. While nearly everyone in Lebanon realizes that the American Congress will veto even shoe laces for the Lebanese army without Israel’s approval, Iran is ready to help. Lebanese Defense Minister Fayez Ghosn announced this week that Iran is ready to ship weapons to the Lebanese army and that the shipments will begin as soon as Prime Ministers Najib Mikati’s government finalizes its own political decision. “The Iranian weapons are ready Ghosn told a Beirut Daily As-Safir. “ Our request is there [in Iran]. What is missing is a political decision from the Cabinet to provide support for the Lebanese Army.” Mr. Feltman is working diligently to assure that the Cabinet does not give its approval.

While Feltman was busy so was Iranian First Vice-President Rahimi. Rahimi signed three memoranda of understanding agreed upon in previous meetings.

During his meetings, the Iranian first Vice President stressed his country’s “total support for Lebanon on the political, economic, and development levels.

According to sources attending the Joint Lebanese-Iranian Higher Committee meeting, Rahimi discussed Iranian support to Lebanon on the oil, electricity, economic, trade, and agricultural levels, in addition to Iran’s interest in constructing water dams.

To give credence to his words, Rahimi presented a $40 million Iranian grant to Lebanon to pay for the construction of a dam in the Batroun region. He further announced that as the agreement’s executive program has been signed in both Tehran and Beirut, Iranian engineers will soon arrive in Lebanon to begin a project that the American government has discussed since the late 1970’s but has always conditioned US help to Lebanon on “better relations” with Israel.

With respect to Lebanon’s continuing electricity crisis, which leaves many in Lebanon with only 4-8 hours of government electricity per day, an Iranian Energy Ministry official said over the weekend that Iran would begin providing Lebanon with electricity next week. Abdolhamid Farzam, the Iranian Energy Ministry’s official in charge of foreign exchanges, was reported as saying that Iran would supply Lebanon with 50 Megawatts during an initial phase, to be boosted to 200 MW in the second phase.

On the subject of Israel, which is said to deeply concern Feltman, one American stringer for a major US daily who was covering the two envoys visit noted that Embassy sources advised that Feltman was in a bad mood during part of his visit for a few reasons. One was because he was not advised of the Iranian Vice-President’s simultaneous visit. Another was because he not told about the May 12th celebrations organized by Hezbollah and Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah speech that were sure to dominate a news cycle. The Hezbollah mass event was to acknowledge the success of its building and construction unit, WAAD (‘promise), in completing after nearly four years of nearly 24/7 rebuilding, 275 high rise apartment buildings housing more than ten thousand citizens in South Beirut. The destruction was caused by American weapons in the hands of Zionist forces and destroyed with carpet bombing Dahiyeh/Haret Hreik neighborhoods during the 33 days of the July 2006 aggression against Lebanon.

Feltman complained that there were American citizens who were tenants in some of the recently completed buildings that cost more than $ 450 to rebuild, despite both Hezbollah and its construction company, Jihad al Binna being put on US terrorism lists at his initiative. He reportedly demanded an investigation.

According to the same sources, Assistant Secretary Feltman was grousing over discouraging reports that another one of his projects, this one to salvage Camp David, was experiencing turbulence. Specifically, he was briefed that the current front runner in the May 23-24 Egyptian Presidential election, Abdel Moneim Abul Fotouh, has branded Israel a “racist state” and repeated to cheering crowds that the 1979 peace treaty with Israel was “a national security threat” that had to be scrapped and added that Israel and its supporters were “enemies of the Egyptian people.”

To make matters and his mood worse, the American Assistant Secretary was informed that another strong Egyptian presidential candidate, Ahmed Shafiq is exciting crowds with his campaign claim that the former air force chief had shot down two Israeli planes during the War of Attrition which Egypt declared between 1969 and 1970. “General Ahmed Shafiq has a great military record and career,” his campaign statement said.

Priding himself on being an adherent of realpolitik, Feltman is observing Israel being rejected by Arabs, Muslims and increasingly by the grounding swelling movement by people of good will including his own countrymen. He reportedly told one interviewer recently that he sees his role as “trying to staunch the coming tsunami of global rejection and delegitimization of Israel, and it’s not going to be easy.”

Meanwhile, Iran’s Vice-President Rahimi’s program included a meeting with Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, and a visit to the, “Iran” Gardens hugely popular with many Lebanese families, in the southern village of Maroun al-Ras located on Lebanon’s borders with occupied Palestine. From this hillside vantage point, on a clear day one can see Akka and other ethnically cleansed areas.

Similar words from Washington and Tehran to Beirut via experienced envoys. But fundamentally different approaches and deeds as has so often has been the case over the past decade.

Washington has, in important strategic respects, handed Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and soon more of the Persian Gulf countries to Iran’s rising presence and influence.
Next is likely Lebanon.

« Previous Page — Next Page »