Trusted Computing Must Repudiate The NSA – Forbes
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Crimes Against Humanity: Why Is Henry Kissinger Walking Around Free?
Andy Piascik
Two months ago, hundreds of thousands of Chileans somberly marked the 40th anniversary of their nation’s September 11th terrorist event. It was on that date in 1973 that the Chilean military, armed with a generous supply of funds and weapons from the United States, and assisted by the CIA and other operatives, overthrew the democratically-elected government of the moderate socialist Salvador Allende.
Sixteen years of repression, torture and death followed under the fascist Augusto Pinochet, while the flow of hefty profits to US multinationals – IT&T, Anaconda Copper and the like – resumed. Profits, along with concern that people in other nations might get ideas about independence, were the very reason for the coup and even the partial moves toward nationalization instituted by Allende could not be tolerated by the US business class.
Henry Kissinger was national security advisor and one of the principle architects – perhaps the principle architect – of the coup in Chile. US-instigated coups were nothing new in 1973, certainly not in Latin America, and Kissinger and his boss Richard Nixon were carrying on a violent tradition that spanned the breadth of the 20th century and continues in the 21st – see, for example, Venezuela in 2002 (failed) and Honduras in 2009 (successful).
Where possible, such as in Guatemala in 1954 and Brazil in 1964, coups were the preferred method for dealing with popular insurgencies. In other instances, direct invasion by US forces such as happened on numerous occasions in Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and many other places, was the fallback option.
The coup in Santiago occurred as US aggression in Indochina was finally winding down after more than a decade. From 1969 through 1973, it was Kissinger again, along with Nixon, who oversaw the slaughter in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
It is impossible to know with precision how many were killed during those four years; all the victims were considered enemies, including the vast majority who were non-combatants, and the US has never been much interested in calculating the deaths of enemies.
Estimates of Indochinese killed by the US for the war as a whole start at four million and are likely more, perhaps far more. It can thus be reasonably extrapolated that probably more than a million, and certainly hundreds of thousands, were killed while Kissinger and Nixon were in power.
In addition, countless thousands of Indochinese have died in the years since from the affects of the massive doses of Agent Orange and other Chemical Weapons of Mass Destruction unleashed by the US. Many of us here know (or, sadly, knew) soldiers who suffered from exposure to such chemicals; multiply their numbers by 1,000 or 10,000 or 50,000 – again, it’s impossible to know with accuracy – and we can begin to understand the impact on those who live in and on the land that was so thoroughly poisoned as a matter of US policy.
Studies by a variety of organizations including the United Nations also indicate that at least 25,000 people have died in Indochina since war’s end from unexploded US bombs that pocket the countryside, with an equivalent number maimed. As with Agent Orange, deaths and ruined lives from such explosions continue to this day. So 40 years on, the war quite literally goes on for the people of Indochina, and it is likely it will go on for decades more.
Near the end of his time in office, Kissinger and his new boss Gerald Ford pre-approved the Indonesian dictator Suharto’s invasion of East Timor in 1975, an illegal act of aggression again carried out with weapons made in and furnished by the US.
Social Media and News: Amazing Graphic
“News Use across Social Media Platforms” confirms what I have suspected for a while. The mobile generation has some interesting behavior patterns with regard to news. Among the factoids that the Pew outfit has boiled down to numbers are:
ITEM: YouTube viewers are not using the service to get news. Maybe that explains why experiments with Thomson Reuters proved to be somewhat disappointing.
ITEM: Google Plus is less popular than Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook as a source of news. The push back about Google Plus as a prerequisite for YouTube comments may have more importance than some realize.
ITEM: Facebook is an important source of news. As the demographics of Facebook shift, the importance of news may suggest that Facebook has morphed into a more mature service.
The most interesting “fact” in the report is the apparent importance of Reddit, a service which points to public posts on a range of issues. The Reddit service offers a search function, but I find consistently disappointing. In fact, most of the unusual collections of links and comments are essentially unfindable.
Jesse Ventura on JFK Assassination
The Unexplained (Podcast) Edition 132
Discusses Richard Nixon saying Warren Commission was biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people, and death-bed confession of E. Howard Hunt including entire CIA chain of command in support of the assassination. Discusses CIA use of fast-moving cancer to attempt to kill Castro, to kill Ruby, others. Points out many obvious flaws in the official story that the media and academia studiously ignored.
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How the Sunni-Shia schism is dividing the world
The unprecedented Saudi refusal to take up its Security Council seat is not just about Syria but a response to the Iranian threat
Robert Fisk
The Independent, 23 October 2013
The Muslim world’s historic – and deeply tragic – chasm between Sunni and Shia Islam is having worldwide repercussions. Syria’s civil war, America’s craven alliance with the Sunni Gulf autocracies, and Sunni (as well as Israeli) suspicions of Shia Iran are affecting even the work of the United Nations.
Saudi Arabia’s petulant refusal last week to take its place among non-voting members of the Security Council, an unprecedented step by any UN member, was intended to express the dictatorial monarchy’s displeasure with Washington’s refusal to bomb Syria after the use of chemical weapons in Damascus – but it also represented Saudi fears that Barack Obama might respond to Iranian overtures for better relations with the West.
The Saudi head of intelligence, Prince Bandar bin Sultan – a true buddy of President George W Bush during his 22 years as ambassador in Washington – has now rattled his tin drum to warn the Americans that Saudi Arabia will make a “major shift” in its relations with the US, not just because of its failure to attack Syria but for its inability to produce a fair Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.
What this “major shift” might be – save for the usual Saudi hot air about its independence from US foreign policy – was a secret that the prince kept to himself.
Israel, of course, never loses an opportunity to publicise – quite accurately – how closely many of its Middle East policies now coincide with those of the wealthy potentates of the Arab Gulf.
Hatred of the Shia/Alawite Syrian regime, an unquenchable suspicion of Shia Iran’s nuclear plans and a general fear of Shia expansion is turning the unelected Sunni Arab monarchies into proxy allies of the Israeli state they have often sworn to destroy. Hardly, one imagines, the kind of notion that Prince Bandar wishes to publicise.
Quitting Over Syria: Forcing Both Brennan And Clapper To Back Down From Attacking
A number of [intelligence] analysts threatened to resign as a group if their strong dissent was not noted in any report released to the public, forcing both Brennan and Clapper to back down.
The release of the White House “Government Assessment” on August 30, providing the purported evidence to support a bombing attack on Syria, defused a conflict with the intelligence community that had threatened to become public through the mass resignation of a significant number of analysts.
The intelligence community’s consensus view on the status of the Syrian chemical-weapons program was derived from a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) completed late last year and hurriedly updated this past summer to reflect the suspected use of chemical weapons against rebels and civilians.
The report maintained that there were some indications that the regime was using chemicals, while conceding that there was no conclusive proof. There was considerable dissent from even that equivocation, including by many analysts who felt that the evidence for a Syrian government role was subject to interpretation and possibly even fabricated.
These Ogre Companies are Anti-Their-Customers
“Some of America’s largest technology and telecoms companies, including Facebook, Microsoft and AT&T, are backing a network of self-styled “free-market thinktanks” promoting a radical rightwing agenda in states across the nation, according to a new report by a lobbying watchdog. The Center for Media and Democracy asserts that the State Policy Network (SPN), an umbrella group of 64 thinktanks based in each of the 50 states, is acting as a largely beneath-the-radar lobbying machine for major corporations and rightwing donors. Its policies include cutting taxes, opposing climate change regulations, advocating reductions in labour protections and the minimum wage, privatising education, restricting voter rights and lobbying for the tobacco industry. The network’s $83.2m annual warchest comes from major donors. These include the Koch brothers, the energy tycoons who are a mainstay of Tea Party groups and climate change skeptics; the tobacco company Philip Morris and its parent company Altria Group; the food giant Kraft; and the multinational drugs company GlaxoSmithKline. More surprisingly, backers also include Facebook and Microsoft, as well as the telecoms giants AT&T, Time Warner Cable and Verizon… Gordon Lafer, a professor at the University of Oregon, said that SPN groups were actively targeting the rights of often non-unionised employees. His research had uncovered attempts to expand the use of child labour, cut the minimum wage, reduce unemployment benefit, make it harder to sue employers for sex or race discrimination, or even to police wage theft where companies refused to pay workers over-time or any wages at all. “These are a very dramatic package of proposals at a time of economic hardship, and they are being rolled out in a cookie-cutter fashion from state to state, and affecting the lives of working people across the country.” Lafer added: “This looks like scholarship from local organisations, but in fact it is neither – neither scholarship, nor local.”
Henry Ford believed in paying a fair wage to his workers so they could afford to buy his cars. One does not have to be a Ph.d in Economics to see the sense in this. But apparently not Microsoft, not AT&T, not Facebook, and not so many other companies who have so many smart people running them, companies which support think-tanks that actively and aggressively push for policies designed to crush labor with maximum prejudice. Someone should ask Gates or Zuckerberg this question: who is going to be able to afford buying your crap when SPN, which you economically support, completely has their way?
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Facebook and Microsoft help fund rightwing lobby network, report finds