The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Italy's ex-spy chief convicted over 2003 CIA rendition
Italy's former intelligence chief Nicolo Pollari has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for his role in the rendition of a terror suspect.
The court in Milan also sentenced his former deputy Marco Mancini to nine years in jail over the 2003 kidnapping.
Italy's courts have already convicted in absentia 22 CIA agents over the same case. The abducted Egyptian cleric said he was flown to Egypt and tortured.
FEMA camp bill resurfaces in Congress
Published on Feb 12, 2013
In the US, natural disasters have caused the US government to declare national emergencies. Now, an old bill has resurfaced in Congress that allows the government to implement at least six military installations to house US citizens when a national emergency is declared. The National Emergency Centers Act or HR 645 gives the Federal Emergency Management Agency power over the camps and before the bill was shot down due to the broad language and the fears of unchecked government power, but can this bill ever pass? Bob English, civil liberties activist and blogger, sounds off on the issue.
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Phi Beta Iota: Buried in the six minutes is the key point — regardless of intentions, this furthers the idea that centralized solutions funded by money that is borrowed or printed, are the solution. It is a good initiative in theory, but in practice it is distant from localized resilience. Think Katrina or Sandy to understand how inept FEMA is with what it already has. The bill leaves open the use of the military as internment overseers — with the National Guard now known to be recruiting internment staff for each of the ten FEMA districts.
Source: Body found in rubble of burned cabin
BIG BEAR, Calif. (AP) — The extraordinary manhunt for the former Los Angeles police officer suspected of three murders converged Tuesday on a mountain cabin where he was believed to have barricaded himself inside, engaged in a shootout that killed a deputy and then never emerged as the home went up in flames.
A single gunshot was heard from within, and a charred body was found inside.
No matter the outcome, big money and voter suppression crippled the election. This is no way to run the world’s oldest democracy.
Bob Moser
American Prospert, January 28, 2013
Last November 7, a syndicated cartoon made the rounds in progressive circles. Drawn by Signe Wilkinson, it showed a battered, bruised, patched-up Uncle Sam defiantly flexing his biceps and flashing the dazed grin of a fighter who’d survived a vicious knockdown and prevailed in 15 rounds. The caption, “Democracy Wins,” became a popular meme amid the liberal euphoria that broke out on election night. President Barack Obama had been re-elected, Karl Rove had been embarrassed on national television, and the Sheldon Adelsons and National Rifle Associations of the world had thrown hundreds of millions of dollars down the toilet. Voter suppression had not kept blacks and Latinos from the polls. Citizens United had not done its worst. Democracy had been tried and tested, and emerged banged up but miraculously intact.
Liberals had earned their moment of giddiness. But the assumption that “democracy won” because Obama won and Democrats carried the U.S. Senate is flat wrong. Dangerously wrong. Democracy, already in a weakened state, suffered serious defeats in 2012. The battle to win it back will be long, fierce, and uphill.
Continue reading “John Steiner: What Democracy Lost in 2012”
Dark, the Force is, in Washington DC.
Bill Moyers: Why U.S. Internet Access is Slow, Costly and Unfair
>Americans are getting bilked for second class internet access.
BILL MOYERS: You’ve heard me before quote one of my mentors who told his students that “news is what people want to keep hidden; everything else is publicity.” That’s why two books are rattling the cages of powerful people who would rather you not read them. Here’s the first one. Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age by Susan Crawford. Read it and you’ll understand why we Americans are paying much more for internet access than people in many other countries and getting much less in return. That, despite the fact that our very own academics and engineers, working with our very own Defense Department, invented the internet in the first place.
EXTRACT (Susan CVrawford)
What's happened is that these enormous telecommunications companies, Comcast and Time Warner on the wired side, Verizon and AT&T on the wireless side, have divided up markets, put themselves in the position where they're subject to no competition and no oversight from any regulatory authority. And they're charging us a lot for internet access and giving us second class access. This is a lot like the electrification story from the beginning of the 20th century.
. . . . . . . .
BILL MOYERS: In here you call it the digital divide. Describe that to me.
SUSAN CRAWFORD: Well, here's the problem. For 19 million Americans, many in rural areas, you can't get access to a high speed connection at any price, it's just not there. For a third of Americans, they don't subscribe often because it's too expensive. So the rich are getting gouged, the poor are very often left out. And this means that we're creating yet again two Americas and deepening inequality through this communications inequality.
MILNET passing this around.
Brennan-led secret raids may have led to Benghazi retaliation, book claims
EXTRACT
“Brennan waged his own unilateral operations in North Africa outside of the traditional command structure,” the book says, calling it an “off the books” operation not coordinated with Petraeus and the CIA. The authors then claim that these raids were a “contributing factor” in the militant strike on the U.S. Consulate and CIA annex on Sept. 11. The raids, they said, “kicked the hornets' nest and pissed off the militia.” Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was killed in the attack, “was kept in the dark and ultimately killed in a retaliation that he never could have seen coming,” they wrote. “Likewise, the CIA never knew what hit them.”
. . . . . . .
“The reality of the situation is that high-ranking CIA officers had already discovered the affair by consulting with Petraeus' PSD and then found a way to initiate an FBI investigation in order to create a string of evidence and an investigative trail that led to the information they already had — in other words, an official investigation that could be used to force Petraeus to resign.”
See Also:
Reference: John Brennan’s Opening Statement — Extreme Fluff + CIA Meta-RECAP
Lt Chris Dorner, USNR (Honorable Discharge) is acquiring a fan club.
The 2nd half of this article below is about a a 1972 incident in New Orleans about another black, a vet, who loses it from constant injustice, and ends up killing a lot of cops and civilians before they get him. What amazes me is he has virtually no gun training, since he's Navy, yet he's an amazing shot, who himself avoids the bullets most of the time:
Blacks in the street cheered this guy as he's shooting at cops, and the author of this piece concludes, “Does anyone cheer Dorner”
Well, yes. Scroll down to last reply (I bolded most interesting text) – here's cut/paste:
