Unfortunately for the Obama regime, this report says, and the reason for another “tragic event” needing to happen, is that the “official story” about the Sandy Hook Massacre, like nearly all such events before it, is beginning to break down in the light of critical scrutiny and analysis.
According to some observers, several well-known manufactures of guns have died recently, and in one case, police declare the death a homicide.
“John Noveske is one of the most celebrated battle rifle manufacturers in America. His rifles, found at www.NoveskeRifleworks.com are widely recognized as some of the finest pieces of American-made hardware ever created. (I own one of his rifles, and it's a masterpiece of a machine that just keeps on running.) Sadly, John Noveske was killed in a mysterious car crash just a few days ago, on January 4, 2013.
“John Noveske wasn't the first prominent gun rights supporter to be killed in the last few days. Keith Ratliff, the creator of a super-popular YouTube channel featuring videos of exotic weapons, was also recently found dead. The Daily Mail reports that Ratliff was “discovered on a rural road in Carnesville, Georgia. Ratliff had a single gunshot wound the head and police are treating his death as a homicide.” Someone murdered Ratliff, in other words, and it had to be someone with the ability to get close enough to Ratliff to take him out without warning.”
“…the widely-discredited CNN journalist Piers Morgan, wanted for questioning in Britain's Daily Mirror phone hacking scandal, invited guests onto his show who threatened Alex Jones' children and laughed about the idea of Piers Morgan shooting Alex Jones with an AR-15.”
Cambridge, Mass. — IN the last week, the American public has been reminded of the Central Intelligence Agency’s contradictory attitude toward secrecy. In a critique of “Zero Dark Thirty,” published last Thursday in The Washington Post, a former deputy director of the C.I.A., Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., defended the use of waterboarding and said that operatives used small plastic bottles, not buckets as depicted in the film, to carry out this interrogation method on three notable terrorists. On Sunday, The New York Times reported on the Justice Department’s case against a former C.I.A. officer, John C. Kiriakou, a critic of waterboarding who faces 30 months in prison for sharing the name of a covert operative with a reporter, who never used the name in print.
The contrast points to the real threat to secrecy, which comes not from the likes of Mr. Kiriakou but from the agency itself. The C.I.A. invokes secrecy to serve its interests but abandons it to burnish its image and discredit critics.
Over the years, I have interviewed many active and retired C.I.A. personnel who were not authorized to speak with me; they included heads of the agency’s clandestine service, analysts and well over 100 case officers, including station chiefs. Five former directors of central intelligence have spoken to me, mostly “on background.” Not one of these interviewees, to my knowledge, was taken to the woodshed, though our discussions invariably touched on classified territory.
Somewhere along the way, the agency that clung to “neither confirm nor deny” had morphed into one that selectively enforces its edicts on secrecy, using different standards depending on rank, message, internal politics and whim.
I am no fan of excessive secrecy, or of prosecuting whistle-blowers or leakers whose actions cannot be shown to have damaged American security. The C.I.A. needs secrecy, as do those who place their lives in the agency’s hands, but the agency cannot have it both ways.
IF YOU'VE ever suspected politics is increasingly being run in the interests of big business, I have news: Jeffrey Sachs, a highly respected economist from Columbia University, agrees with you – at least in respect of the United States.
In his book, The Price of Civilisation, he says the US economy is caught in a feedback loop. ”Corporate wealth translates into political power through campaign financing, corporate lobbying and the revolving door of jobs between government and industry; and political power translates into further wealth through tax cuts, deregulation and sweetheart contracts between government and industry. Wealth begets power, and power begets wealth,” he says.
Sachs says four key sectors of US business exemplify this feedback loop and the takeover of political power in America by the ”corporatocracy”.
First is the well-known military-industrial complex. ”As [President] Eisenhower famously warned in his farewell address in January 1961, the linkage of the military and private industry created a political power so pervasive that America has been condemned to militarisation, useless wars and fiscal waste on a scale of many tens of trillions of dollars since then,” he says.
Second is the Wall Street-Washington complex, which has steered the financial system towards control by a few politically powerful Wall Street firms, notably Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and a handful of other financial firms.
Defense officials have begun “serious planning” for automatic spending cuts that could force the Pentagon to lay off hundreds of thousands of civilian workers as it reduces its budget by $500 billion over the next 10 years.
“We are doing some serious planning for sequestration,” Pentagon press secretary George Little told reporters Tuesday. “We need to be ready, and we’re working through those numbers right now.”
Known as sequestration, the across-the-board, automatic reductions are set to begin March 1, unless Congress reaches a deal on taxes and spending. Under sequestration, about $1 trillion is to be trimmed from the federal budget, with the Pentagon accounting for about half of that amount.
As many as 800,000 civilian employees in the Pentagon eventually could be laid off, defense officials say.
CNN: Peter wrote what I think is (one of the) most … interesting and compelling articles about the Hagel nomination, explaining it perhaps better than anyone I've seen, including the president.
The first paragraph of the piece, you write, it may prove the most consequential foreign policy appointment of his presidency because the struggle over Hagel is a struggle over whether Obama can change the terms of the foreign policy debate. Explain that for me.
Peter Beinart: I think so far, the debate about military action in Iran has been conducted by and large in Washington, as if Iraq and Afghanistan didn't happen.
As if we haven't learned anything from the disaster (of) these two wars over the last 10 years. I think the real struggle between Hagel and his foes is he wants to bring some of the lessons in to the Iran debate that we learned about (Iraq) and Afghanistan.
He talks very compellingly about the fact wars once launched can't be fully controlled. He is very cognizant of the enormous financial cost that these wars have imposed on the United States, and I think the heart of the hostility is the fear that his recognition about what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq will make taking us to war in Iran harder.
By J.K. Trotter | The Atlantic Wire – Fri, Dec 28, 2012
“The CIA is a lot different than Hollywood portrays it to be,” reads an official explainer issued today by the Central Intelligence Agency — a thinly veiled attempt to continue debunking Zero Dark Thirty, the controversial Oscar favorite that its director admittedly hates. Referring to James Bond, the fictional MI6 agent, depictions of “shootouts and high speed chases,” and scenes of “CIA officers chasing terrorists through the American heartland,” the memo goes on to try and dispel an array of “myths” pertaining to the agency's operations, from its impact on foreign policy to its ability to spy on Americans. The effort follows a December 21 letter addressed to CIA employees from the agency's acting director, Michael Morrell, concerning the “artistic license” of Zero Dark Thirty. Today's release touches on the same themes: whether the CIA of our popular imagination corresponds to the CIA of reality, and how movies like Zero Dark Thirty (which isn't name-checked directly) blur the distinction between fact and fantasy. Should you believe the CIA's interpretation of Hollywood? We break down each agency claim with actual details from the movies — and Homeland, obviously.
