The Nasty Blowback from America’s Wars (Sachs Defines Wall St. & Both Party's Morals: PATHOLOGICAL and CORRUPT) NeoCon Chaos/Catastrophe Machine - Pentagon Cuts Yields Small Govt - Elites Prepare for Something Big? (Not to Mention Non-ScienceTologists) Fool Fest!

Watch "The Four Horsemen" on Free Speech TV (FSTV) any time you can find it on.

It will enlighten and dismay your sense of what type of country/economic environment you live in today.

And get you moving to work for real change.


BREAKING

Lawmakers Reach Deal to Give Obama TPP Fast-Track Authority

Grayson on Money & Politics: "If We Do Nothing (About TPP Fast Tracking), We Can Kiss This Country Goodbye. Well, Pucker Up"...

Saudi Arabia Has Done a Stellar Job at Maintaining the Fiction That Even While It Is Everything That America Is Not, the Kingdom is Worthy of Unconditional Support

Bernanke to Take Hedge Fund Job in Latest Sign of Revolving Door

A Brief Recapitulation of Kissinger’s Record Is In Order

Former IMF Chief Rodrigo Rato Probed for Money Laundering

A Climate Hero Languishes in Prison. Let's Fight to Get Him Out.

If you assumed Richard Engel must be a liar from the first mention of his self-reported (as a part of NBC News) "kidnapping by 'thug' Shiites (reportedly an incredibly bad translation for an adept Arabic student)," surely you've been up in arms about the lies emanating from all major news sources about what has happened in Kiev.

The New York Times “Basically Rewrites Whatever the Kiev Authorities Say”:  Stephen F. Cohen on the U.S./Russia/Ukraine History the Media Won’t Tell You

You may have noticed the long essay running down the left side of this blog, where I have discussed at length this exact failing of our newspapers of record (if the "Washington Post" ever qualified).
_ _ _ _ _ _ _

We're just your fools?*

I don't know who the following are, but I have a guess.

A right-wing extremist group is believed to have leaked the home addresses of dozens of former and current employees of the CIA, FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), CBS is reporting.

The list, which was uploaded to QuickLeak, a website designed for content to be leaked anonymously, also included the addresses of political figures such as former DHS head Janet Napolitano, Arizona Gov. Douglas Ducey and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The group, which has not yet been identified, also published addresses it claims the CIA uses for field operations in the United States.

Those southerners.

Or is it just the Rethuglicans?

North Carolina’s Governor Says Offshore Drilling Should Be Closer To Beaches

Wednesday’s hearing on the proposed offshore drilling program comes less than a week before the five year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, which occurred 50 miles off of Louisiana’s coast. That spill required clean-up activities on more than 410 miles of oil-marred Gulf coastline, and resulted in more than $40 billion in economic losses in the region.

Earlier this week, the Obama administration also announced new regulations aimed at improving the safety of offshore drilling. However, environmentalists have said those regulations are similar to the best practices already adopted by the oil and gas industry, and that new technologies cannot always account for the human error and lapses of judgment that have been the underlying causes of major spills like the Exxon Valdez in Alaska and the Deepwater Horizon.

Because he thinks clean water is not really a state-plus?

And speaking of non-southerners who just can't shut up about their dirty secrets:

Israel and Zionism are the central hubs that tie in the highest level conspirators of the 9/11 massacre to a coherent agenda.  It’s impossible to ignore that all others accused of a role in the attack have no overarching umbrella organization they are all connected to.

Outside of individual gains no other entity or ideology benefits from 9/11 besides Israel and Zionism. Indeed, Netanyahu wrote his book on “Islamic” Terrorism in 1987 before “Islamic” Terrorism ever even existed. And it was he who said 9/11 was “very good” for Israel when first asked on that day. But Netanyahu wasn’t the only one delighted. Ehud Sprinzak, an Israeli “counter-terrorism expert” candidly remarked to UK’s “Telegraph”, “From the perspective of the Jews, it is the most important public relations act ever committed in our favour.

Aluf Benn, editor-in-chief of Haaretz, stated plainly that the Israeli “political-security establishment” saw 9/11 as a “Hannakuh miracle” of good fortune for Israel and it was celebrated with delight in those tight circles.

This is all of course totally taboo. The mere suggestion of this avalanche of powerful evidence is “anti-semitic.” Thus, even movies catering to an already fringe audience purporting to expose an “inside job” of 9/11 either shy away from the explosive and unavoidable Israeli role or willfully obscure it.

. . . You don’t have to take our word for it. With 9/11, all roads lead to the same place. Hamid Gul, former ISI director was one of the first to accuse the Mossad of orchestrating the attacks. Francesco Cossiga, the former Italian president, said, regarding 9/11, “[the intelligencia] know well that the disastrous attack was planned and realized by the American CIA and Mossad with the help of the Zionist world to put under accusation the Arabic Countries and to persuade the Western powers to intervene in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Cossiga is not alone, the former director of the Army War College, Dr. Alan Sabrosky also promotes the Israeli manufactured false flag thesis on 9/11. This credentialed veteran has defended his views in numerous discussions and interviews and is highly respected among his former colleagues. Many other notable individuals exist and many more are joining the fold every day as the last taboo of 9/11, the open dissection of Israeli involvement, loudly comes crashing down as the ADL scrambles feverishly to silence it.

Unfortunately 9/11 wasn’t the first and it won’t be the last. Since 9/11 many other false flags have occurred in our world. There were the 3/11 (911 days after 9/11) train bombings in Spain. 7/7 in London. 11/9 in Amman.

There were many attacks in India, including the Mossad/RAW-orchestrated 11/26 bombings in Mumbai. More recently, to demonize Iran, attacks erupted in New Delhi, Baku, Tbilisi, and Bangkok. Unfortunately those attacks didn’t do the job and something far more vast and destructive will be needed to provoke a war with Iran.

There are many sinister signs indicating the diabolical architects of 9/11 have several more tricks up their sleeve.  As most of the top officials in our military industrial complex have repeatedly reiterated, the inevitability of “another 9/11” is a foregone conclusion.  Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have said that it’s not a matter of “if” but a matter of “when.”

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The Neocon Chaos And Catastrophe Machine

Former Washington insider and four-star General Wesley Clark spilled the beans several years ago on how Paul Wolfowitz and his neoconservative co-conspirators implemented their sweeping plan to destabilize key Middle Eastern countries once it became clear that post-Soviet Russia “won’t stop us.”

As I recently reviewed a YouTube eight-minute clip of General Clark’s October 2007 speech, what leaped out at me was that the neocons had been enabled by their assessment that – after the collapse of the Soviet Union – Russia had become neutralized and posed no deterrent to U.S. military action in the Middle East.

While Clark’s public exposé largely escaped attention in the neocon-friendly “mainstream media” (surprise, surprise!), he recounted being told by a senior general at the Pentagon shortly after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 about the Donald Rumsfeld/Paul Wolfowitz-led plan for “regime change” in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.

This was startling enough, I grant you, since officially the United States presents itself as a nation that respects international law, frowns upon other powerful nations overthrowing the governments of weaker states, and – in the aftermath of World War II – condemned past aggressions by Nazi Germany and decried Soviet “subversion” of pro-U.S. nations.

But what caught my eye this time was the significance of Clark’s depiction of Wolfowitz in 1992 gloating over what he judged to be a major lesson learned from the Desert Storm attack on Iraq in 1991; namely, “the Soviets won’t stop us.”

That remark directly addresses a question that has troubled me since March 2003 when George W. Bush attacked Iraq. Would the neocons – widely known as “the crazies” at least among the remaining sane people of Washington – have been crazy enough to opt for war to re-arrange the Middle East if the Soviet Union had not fallen apart in 1991?

The question is not an idle one. Despite the debacle in Iraq and elsewhere, the neocon “crazies” still exercise huge influence in Establishment Washington. Thus, the question now becomes whether, with Russia far more stable and much stronger, the “crazies” are prepared to risk military escalation with Russia over Ukraine, what retired U.S. diplomat William R. Polk deemed a potentially dangerous nuclear confrontation, a “Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse.”

Putin’s Comment

The geopolitical vacuum that enabled the neocons to try out their “regime change” scheme in the Middle East may have been what Russian President Vladimir Putin was referring to in his state-of-the-nation address on April 25, 2005, when he called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [past] century.” Putin’s comment has been a favorite meme of those who seek to demonize Putin by portraying him as lusting to re-establish a powerful USSR through aggression in Europe.

But, commenting two years after the Iraq invasion, Putin seemed correct at least in how the neocons exploited the absence of the Russian counterweight to over-extend American power in ways that were harmful to the world, devastating to the people at the receiving end of the neocon interventions, and even detrimental to the United States.

If one takes a step back and attempts an unbiased look at the spread of violence in the Middle East over the past quarter-century, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Putin’s comment was on the mark. With Russia a much-weakened military power in the 1990s and early 2000s, there was nothing to deter U.S. policymakers from the kind of adventurism at Russia’s soft underbelly that, in earlier years, would have carried considerable risk of armed U.S.-USSR confrontation.

I lived in the USSR during the 1970s and would not wish that kind of restrictive regime on anyone. Until it fell apart, though, it was militarily strong enough to deter Wolfowitz-style adventurism. And I will say that – for the millions of people now dead, injured or displaced by U.S. military action in the Middle East over the past dozen years – the collapse of the Soviet Union as a deterrent to U.S. war-making was not only a “geopolitical catastrophe” but an unmitigated disaster.

Visiting Wolfowitz

In his 2007 speech, General Clark related how in early 1991 he dropped in on Paul Wolfowitz, then Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (and later, from 2001 to 2005, Deputy Secretary of Defense). It was just after a major Shia uprising in Iraq in March 1991. President George H.W. Bush’s administration had provoked it, but then did nothing to rescue the Shia from brutal retaliation by Saddam Hussein, who had just survived his Persian Gulf defeat.

According to Clark, Wolfowitz said: “We should have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein. The truth is, one thing we did learn is that we can use our military in the Middle East and the Soviets won’t stop us. We’ve got about five or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet client regimes – Syria, Iran (sic), Iraq – before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us.”

It’s now been more than 10 years, of course. But do not be deceived into thinking Wolfowitz and his neocon colleagues believe they have failed in any major way. The unrest they initiated keeps mounting – in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Lebanon – not to mention fresh violence now in full swing in Yemen and the crisis in Ukraine. Yet, the Teflon coating painted on the neocons continues to cover and protect them in the “mainstream media.”

True, one neocon disappointment is Iran. It is more stable and less isolated than before; it is playing a sophisticated role in Iraq; and it is on the verge of concluding a major nuclear agreement with the West – barring the throwing of a neocon/Israeli monkey wrench into the works to thwart it, as has been done in the past.

An earlier setback for the neocons came at the end of August 2013 when President Barack Obama decided not to let himself be mouse-trapped by the neocons into ordering U.S. forces to attack Syria. Wolfowitz et al. were on the threshold of having the U.S. formally join the war against Bashar al-Assad’s government of Syria when there was the proverbial slip between cup and lip. With the aid of the neocons’ new devil-incarnate Vladimir Putin, Obama faced them down and avoided war.

A week after it became clear that the neocons were not going to get their war in Syria, I found myself at the main CNN studio in Washington together with Paul Wolfowitz and former Sen. Joe Lieberman, another important neocon. As I reported in “How War on Syria Lost Its Way,” the scene was surreal – funereal, even, with both Wolfowitz and Lieberman very much down-in-the-mouth, behaving as though they had just watched their favorite team lose the Super Bowl.

Israeli/Neocon Preferences

But the neocons are nothing if not resilient. Despite their grotesque disasters, like the Iraq War, and their disappointments, like not getting their war on Syria, they neither learn lessons nor change goals. They just readjust their aim, shooting now at Putin over Ukraine as a way to clear the path again for “regime change” in Syria and Iran. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Why Neocons Seek to Destabilize Russia.”]

The neocons also can take some solace from their “success” at enflaming the Middle East with Shia and Sunni now at each other’s throats — a bad thing for many people of the world and certainly for the many innocent victims in the region, but not so bad for the neocons. After all, it is the view of Israeli leaders and their neocon bedfellows (and women) that the internecine wars among Muslims provide at least some short-term advantages for Israel as it consolidates control over the Palestinian West Bank.

In a Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity memorandum for President Obama on Sept. 6, 2013, we called attention to an uncommonly candid report about Israeli/neocon motivation, written by none other than the Israel-friendly New York Times Bureau Chief in Jerusalem Jodi Rudoren on Sept. 2, 2013, just two days after Obama took advantage of Putin’s success in persuading the Syrians to allow their chemical weapons to be destroyed and called off the planned attack on Syria, causing consternation among neocons in Washington.

Rudoren can perhaps be excused for her naïve lack of “political correctness.” She had been barely a year on the job, had very little prior experience with reporting on the Middle East, and – in the excitement about the almost-attack on Syria – she apparently forgot the strictures normally imposed on the Times’ reporting from Jerusalem. In any case, Israel’s priorities became crystal clear in what Rudoren wrote.

In her article, entitled “Israel Backs Limited Strike Against Syria,” Rudoren noted that the Israelis were arguing, quietly, that the best outcome for Syria’s (then) 2 ½-year-old civil war, at least for the moment, was no outcome:

“For Jerusalem, the status quo, horrific as it may be from a humanitarian perspective, seems preferable to either a victory by Mr. Assad’s government and his Iranian backers or a strengthening of rebel groups, increasingly dominated by Sunni jihadis.

“‘This is a playoff situation in which you need both teams to lose, but at least you don’t want one to win — we’ll settle for a tie,’ said Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general in New York. ‘Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death: that’s the strategic thinking here. As long as this lingers, there’s no real threat from Syria.’”

Clear enough? If this is the way Israel’s leaders continue to regard the situation in Syria, then they look on deeper U.S. involvement – overt or covert – as likely to ensure that there is no early resolution of the conflict there. The longer Sunni and Shia are killing each other, not only in Syria but also across the region as a whole, the safer Tel Aviv’s leaders calculate Israel is.

Favoring Jihadis

But Israeli leaders have also made clear that if one side must win, they would prefer the Sunni side, despite its bloody extremists from Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. In September 2013, shortly after Rudoren’s article, Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, then a close adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told the Jerusalem Post that Israel favored the Sunni extremists over Assad.

“The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc,” Oren said in an interview. “We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.” He said this was the case even if the “bad guys” were affiliated with Al-Qaeda.

In June 2014, Oren – then speaking as a former ambassador – said Israel would even prefer a victory by the Islamic State, which was massacring captured Iraqi soldiers and beheading Westerners, than the continuation of the Iranian-backed Assad in Syria. “From Israel’s perspective, if there’s got to be an evil that’s got to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail,” Oren said.

Netanyahu sounded a similar theme in his March 3, 2015 speech to the U.S. Congress in which he trivialized the threat from the Islamic State with its “butcher knives, captured weapons and YouTube” when compared to Iran, which he accused of “gobbling up the nations” of the Middle East.

That Syria’s main ally is Iran with which it has a mutual defense treaty plays a role in Israeli calculations. Accordingly, while some Western leaders would like to achieve a realistic if imperfect settlement of the Syrian civil war, others who enjoy considerable influence in Washington would just as soon see the Assad government and the entire region bleed out.

As cynical and cruel as this strategy is, it isn’t all that hard to understand. Yet, it seems to be one of those complicated, politically charged situations well above the pay-grade of the sophomores advising President Obama – who, sad to say, are no match for the neocons in the Washington Establishment. Not to mention the Netanyahu-mesmerized Congress.

Corker Uncorked

Speaking of Congress, a year after Rudoren’s report, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tennessee, who now chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, divulged some details about the military attack that had been planned against Syria, while lamenting that it was canceled.

In doing so, Corker called Obama’s abrupt change on Aug. 31, 2013, in opting for negotiations over open war on Syria, “the worst moment in U.S. foreign policy since I’ve been here.” Following the neocon script, Corker blasted the deal (since fully implemented) with Putin and the Syrians to rid Syria of its chemical weapons.

Corker complained, “In essence – I’m sorry to be slightly rhetorical – we jumped into Putin’s lap.” A big No-No, of course – especially in Congress – to “jump into Putin’s lap” even though Obama was able to achieve the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons without the United States jumping into another Middle East war.

It would have been nice, of course, if General Clark had thought to share his inside-Pentagon information earlier with the rest of us. In no way should he be seen as a whistleblower.

At the time of his September 2007 speech, he was deep into his quixotic attempt to win the Democratic nomination for president in 2008. In other words, Clark broke the omerta code of silence observed by virtually all U.S. generals, even post-retirement, merely to put some distance between himself and the debacle in Iraq – and win some favor among anti-war Democrats. It didn’t work, so he endorsed Hillary Clinton; that didn’t work, so he endorsed Barack Obama.

Wolfowitz, typically, has landed on his feet. He is now presidential hopeful Jeb Bush’s foreign policy/defense adviser, no doubt outlining his preferred approach to the Middle East chessboard to his new boss. Does anyone know the plural of “bedlam?”

(Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served for a total of 30 years as an Army infantry/intelligence officer and CIA analyst and is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).)

Signs That 'The Elites' Are Feverishly Preparing For Something Big

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/16/2015

Conspiracy Theorists, Bloggers Compared To ISIS During Congressional Hearing

Bloggers, conspiracy theorists and people who challenge establishment narratives on the Internet were all likened to ISIS terrorists during a chilling Congressional hearing which took place yesterday. As linguist Noam Chomsky said, “The idea that there should be a network reaching people, which does not repeat the US propaganda system, is intolerable” to the US establishment.

Small Government Starts On The Pentagon Side Of The Potomac

Why, when government expansion has been proved again and again to be detrimental to society, has its growth continued and even escalated?

Indeed, I asked this question in the first sentence of my 1991 book, Reclaiming the American Right:  The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement

[second edition 2008]:  “After a decade in power,” I wrote, as the Reagan era ended, “why has the conservative movement failed to make a dent in the growth of big government?” The revered Reagan, whose sacred memory is ritually invoked by Republicans – even by libertarians such as Sen. Rand Paul – actually increased the size and scope of the federal government, and expenditures went through the roof. There was little consolation to be found in the fact that the rate of increase merely slowed.

David Stockman, Reagan’s budget director, who tried to make some inroads on the Leviathan State, fingered the cause of Reagan’s failure in the cold war ideology that was one of the central props of the Reaganite coalition. In his brilliant book, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, Stockman identified the fly in the conservative ointment:

“Within days of Reagan’s taking office, the White House made a historically devastating mistake by signing over to the Pentagon a blank check known as the ‘7 percent real growth top line.’ This massive injection of fiscal firepower nearly tripled the defense budget from $140 billion to $370 billion within just six years. More importantly, it fueled powerful expansionist impulses throughout the military-industrial complex at exactly the wrong time in history.”

. . . In modern times, the “right” side of the political spectrum has stood for smaller government, at least in theory:

in practice, however, it is quite a different story. The expansion of government power under Reagan was preceded and made possible by a crucial concession made by conservatives: that the prosecution of the cold war made necessary the indefinite postponement of their small government agenda.

As William F. Buckley, Jr., put it in a 1952 article for Commonweal, just as the cold war was dawning:  “[W]e have to accept Big Government for the duration – for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged . . . except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores.” What this meant was that ostensible conservatives were bound to support “the extensive and productive tax laws that are needed to support a vigorous anti-Communist foreign policy,” as well as “large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards and the attendant centralization of power in Washington – even with Truman at the reins of it all.”

With the collapse of Communism, and the end of the cold war, the Buckley Doctrine remained in full force. The conservatives’original conception of limited government had, by this time, been thrown overboard and largely forgotten – or, if remembered, was invoked only when it was deemed necessary to cut back on the “social safety net,” so that interest groups more powerful than unwed mothers could retain their government subsidies.
From David Stockman's blog and "Zero Hedge" we learn the latest scheme to generate fees and rip off poor people even more by paying them to buy houses from their own savings? There's some fine figuring involved here, methinks.

Back in January we asked the following:  “who will be the first to offer a negative rate mortgage?” Soon thereafter we discovered that in fact, this NIRP-inspired aberration already existed in Denmark where Nordea Credit was offering to pay borrowers to purchase a house prompting us to make the following assessment:

And just like that, first in Denmark, and soon everywhere else in Europe, a situation has now emerged where savers who pay the bank to hold their cash courtesy of negative deposit rates, are directly funding the negative interest rate paid to those who wish to take out debt. In fact, the more debt the greater the saver-subsidized windfall.

That would turn out to prove rather prescient because as WSJ reports, this bizarre characteristic of the new paranormal is spreading throughout Europe on the back of Mario Draghi’s trillion-euro adventure in debt monetization land.

Comments:

GRDguy Thu, 04/16/2015 - 20:15 | 6001052

Just glance at the Introduction of the 1889 book The Great Red Dragon:  Foreign Money Power In The United States. http://GreatRedDragon.com You'll see its author stated that the "goal of the Money Kings is to own the earth in fee-simple." The ECB (and the Feds) are creating money from nothing to BUY corporate bonds, which are backed by something. Just another step. They already own your mortgages. Sometimes The Dragon Wins. There's also another old book The Cost of Something For Nothing. It applies here, too.

Midnight Rider Thu, 04/16/2015 - 20:39 | 6001159

So, who exactly ends up owning these bonds that at some point some day will completely and utterly implode? There will ultimately be no way out of this. It's a temporary road to hell.

GRDguy Fri, 04/17/2015 - 01:00 | 6001877

Good question. It's not the bonds per se, but title to the underlying collateral. Groups like Blackstone will "purchase" these bonds at only-god-knows how cheap, and thus ownership passes into private hands. What a scam.  Example: Remember all those homes Blackstone took over from the manipulated real-estate rise & collapse? Then rented them out, but still retains ownership.  Big deal in Phoenix area.

Weaponized Innocense Thu, 04/16/2015 - 21:10 | 6001284

Yea negative rates really perked me up to gold.

One has to be calm when they're riding an avalanche.

And calm the folks with the classic .... Always be afraid unless u should be propaganda

Thank you Goldman Sachs (or at least Goldman's what a Draghi).
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WTF Are These Odd People Who Have Overrun the Government?

ICTS is owned by two Israelis, Ezra Harel and Menachem Atzmon, who was convicted in Israel of fraud with partner and mayor of Jerusalem, Ehud Olmert.  Olmert later became prime minister of Israel.

Olmert incidentally also made a secret trip to meet with then mayor of NYC, Rudy Guiliani on the eve of 9/11, ostensibly to oversee their plot.  He and other Israeli officials were allowed to leave the US aboard an El Al plane when all other planes were grounded on 9/11. ICTS was implicated in the 7/7 bombings in London as well.

Hellerstein and Mukasey just so happen to attend the exact same Orthodox, Zionist, Kehilath Jeshrun synagogue in Manhattan.  The synagogue openly states that it is “deeply committed to the State of Israel and its citizens.” 

How would Americans feel if Pakistani Jihadists at the behest of Pakistan were implicated in 9/11 and two Pakistani Jihadist Judges, who attended the same “radical” mosque, were blocking trials for the victims’ families to pursue legal discovery and preventing any presentation of evidence in a wrongful death suit against an airline security intimately connected to one of the aforementioned judges?

Hellerstein recently effectively blocked the last victim’s family, the Bavises, from ever having a day of trial against the government and airport security, forcing them to settle out of court after a decade of his dedicated gatekeeping. His callous quote to the 96 families of victims of 9/11 will live in infamy:  “We have to get past 9/11. Let it go. Life is beautiful. Life is short. Live out your years. Take the award.” Both father and son Hellerstein also worked for Stroock, Stroock, and Lavan, a Rothschild-funded law firm which, incidentally, represented Larry Silverstein in his bid to lease the towers.  How many conflicts of interests can you count?

. . . Michael Mukasey along with Michael Chertoff, both key suspects in the 9/11 cover-up, also worked hand and glove in the first false flag bombing of the WTC in 1993. Chertoff was the lead prosecutor and Mukasey was the judge presiding over the fraudulent trial of the “Blind Sheikh”, Omar Abdel Rahman in the aftermath of the false flag bombing at WTC in 1993.

The “Blind Sheikh” at the beginning of the trial asked Mukasey to remove himself from the trial given his severe bias towards the state of Israel. Mukasey, who had not permitted the “blind sheikh” the services of his choice of attorney and who also prevented the “blind sheikh” from his due process, denying him the right to have an expert witness explain Islam to the ignorant jury, curtly refused this motion from the defendant.

After his sentencing, the “Blind Sheikh”, among other anomalies and inconsistencies of the prosecution’s case, patiently explained that it was impossible for him to form a terrorist group while being incarcerated thousands of miles away during its creation. He was repeatedly and rudely interrupted by an irate and indignant Mukasey as the sheikh painstakingly debunked the fraudulent proceedings of the trial.

In the 9/11 attacks Mukasey’s role was multifaceted.  He oversaw the detained witnesses and suspects including the 5 dancing Israeli Mossad agents at the behest of then Assistant Attorney General at the Department of Justice, Michael Chertoff, the son of a founding member of the Mossad.  Mukasey’s greatest contribution to 9/11, however, might be his judgment in the case of Larry Silverstein, owner of the lease of the WTC complex against his insurance company.  He judged that the two towers were separate instances of terrorism and as such awarded double the insurance settlement to the tune of $4.6 billion.  More on Silverstein later.

Israeli Michael Chertoff whose mother was a founding Mossad agent was directly responsible for the non-investigation and prosecution of the 9/11 massacre. Chertoff was also the dominant author of the Patriot Act, which severely curtailed civil liberties and was written well before 9/11 took place.

The Patriot Act was edited hours before it was presented for a vote to ensure ICTS and other Israeli-connected firms would be immune from prosecution for the events of 9/11. To create a smokescreen, Chertoff rounded up innocent arabs and muslims to solidify the “Islamic terrorist” theatrics and let the mossad agent suspects and Israeli art student spies go back to Israel without investigation.

In addition, Chertoff’s company, “The Chertoff Group” is making hundreds of millions of dollars off the electronic body scanners in airports which were constructed well in advance of the Christmas Day Underwear Bombing false flag fiasco.  The Israeli ICTS also ran the security at the Schiphol Amsterdam airport where the flight on that Christmas Day originated. Problem. Reaction. Solution.

Michael Chertoff’s cousin, Benjamin Chertoff ‘coincidentally’ penned the "Popular Mechanics" hit piece against the 9/11 “truth movement” called “Debunking 9/11 Lies.”

Another more pernicious attempt at a cover-up was advocated by a celebrated Zionist jew, high in Obama’s administration, Cass Sunstein, of University of Chicago and Harvard University, who wrote a paper, “Conspiracies:  Causes and Cures.” In the paper Sunstein advocates the “cognitive infiltration” of 9/11 activist groups and the dissemination of propaganda to derail their efforts.  He makes it very clear that these “conspiracy theories” are dangerous, especially the “anti-semitic” ones.

Read the whole essay here. Try not to gasp.

I don't think there's any conspiracy theory that sufficiently explains these eye-opening coincidences.

We must be dreaming if we even think we can make a conspiracy theory embracing all of these facts.

And I'm always grateful when they don't leave out the arms dealing/drug connections!

The Nasty Blowback from America’s Wars

There are historical warnings to countries that inflict violence abroad, that the imperial impulse will blow back on the domestic society with suppression of public debate and repression of common citizens, that the war will come home — as is happening in the United States . . . .

By Ray McGovern

April 13, 2015

Brutality thrives in American police treatment of common citizens reflecting an ethos of violence that has flourished over the past dozen years with almost no one in authority held accountable. Much of this behavior can be traced back to U.S. wars of choice – and it is not as though we were not warned of the inevitable blowback.

On Feb. 26, 2003, three weeks before the U.S./UK attack on Iraq, Coleen Rowley, then division counsel and special agent at the FBI office in Minneapolis, had the prescience and the guts to send a letter to then FBI Director Robert Mueller. "The New York Times" published it a week later.

Rowley warned Mueller that launching unjustified war would prove counterproductive in various ways. One blowback she highlighted was that the rationale being applied to allow preemptive strikes abroad could migrate back home, “fostering a more permissive attitude toward shootings by law enforcement officers in this country.” Tragically, the recent spate of murders by police has proved Rowley right.

And not only killing. Police brutality toward the citizenry, some of it by former soldiers who themselves were brutalized by war, has soared. Yet, the dark side of what was done by U.S. troops abroad as well as the damage that was done to their psyches and sense of morality is rarely shown in the U.S. mainstream media, which prefers to veer between romanticizing the adventure of war and lamenting the physical harm done to America’s maimed warriors.

One has to go to foreign media for real-life examples of the brutalization of, as well as by, the young soldiers we send off to battle. (See, for example, this segment from Germany’s “60 Minutes”-type TV program, "Panorama.")

The glib, implicit approval of violence (embedded, for instance, in the customary “Thank you for your service”) simply adds to the widespread acceptance of brutality as somehow okay.

Gratuitous Beatings

Cases of police beating citizens who are detained or taken into custody have multiplied, with police offenders frequently held to the same unconscionable let’s-not-look-back “accountability” that has let George W. Bush and Dick Cheney walk free – so far – for launching the “war of aggression” on Iraq.

The post-World War II Nuremberg Tribunal carefully defined such a war as “the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes only in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Accumulated evil?

Having just emerged from the nightmare of world conflagration, the jurists on the Tribunal understood that it was the unleashing of the dogs of war – launching an aggressive war – that also loosed all the other atrocities and barbarities associated with warfare.

Looking back on the last decade, think of crimes like kidnapping, black prisons and torture as well as the slaughter of so many civilians as the Bush/Cheney war of choice has spread violence and death – now in the form of the brutal Islamic State and America’s endless “drone wars” – across almost the entire Middle East.

But part of that accumulated evil is also playing out at home – on the streets of American cities and in even in our deserts. On April 9, San Bernardino’s “sheriff’s deputies” were caught on video viciously brutalizing a man who had already prostrated himself on the desert floor with his hands behind his back.

Warning:  Watching this video may make you ill – or cry. If so, take heart. For this would merely show that, because you still have a conscience, you are sickened by what you see, and that you can still “cry our beloved country.”

Conscience is a good thing, for it often brings the courage to speak out and confront the banality of evil that always flows and inevitably blows back from wars of aggression. Indifference to human suffering is another one of those accumulated evils of the whole.

We need to summon the kind of courage Coleen Rowley showed three weeks before the United States launched the “supreme international crime.” We need to monitor closely what happens after the unconscionable abuse by police of the helpless man in San Bernardino, after the recent police shootings of unarmed black men, and after the excessive brutality that America’s over-militarized police now regularly inflict on citizens during routine arrests.

“If you see something, say something” – we are constantly told. If we see this video coverage, watch this sort of brutality, and do nothing, I fear for what will become of our country.

(Ray McGovern works with "Tell the the Word," a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served as an infantry/intelligence officer, and then as a CIA analyst for a total of 30 years.)

Jeffrey Sachs calls Wall Street out on its criminality and pathological greed.

And how!

Jeffrey Sachs:  Well, thank you very much for saying it and practicing it. I do believe – by the way, I’m just going to end here because I’ve been told I have to run to the U.N. in fact right now – I believe we have a crisis of values that is extremely deep, because the regulations and the legal structures need reform.

But I meet a lot of these people on Wall Street on a regular basis right now. I’m going to put it very bluntly. I regard the moral environment as pathological. And I’m talking about the human interactions that I have. I’ve not seen anything like this, not felt it so palpably.

These people are out to make billions of dollars and nothing should stop them from that. They have no responsibility to pay taxes. They have no responsibility to their clients. They have no responsibility to people, counterparties in transactions. They are tough, greedy, aggressive, and feel absolutely out of control, you know, in a quite literal sense.

And they have gamed the system to a remarkable extent, and they have a docile president, a docile White House, and a docile regulatory system that absolutely can’t find its voice. It’s terrified of these companies.

If you look at the campaign contributions, which I happened to do yesterday for another purpose, the financial markets are the number one campaign contributors in the U.S. system now. We have a corrupt politics to the core, I’m afraid to say, and no party is – I mean there’s – if not both parties are up to their necks in this. This has nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans. It really doesn’t have anything to do with right wing or left wing, by the way. The corruption is, as far as I can see, everywhere. But what it’s led to is this sense of impunity that is really stunning, and you feel it on the individual level right now, and it’s very, very unhealthy.

I have waited for four years, five years now, to see one figure on Wall Street speak in a moral language, and I’ve not seen it once. And that is shocking to me. And if they won’t, I’ve waited for a judge, for our president, for somebody, and it hasn’t happened. And by the way it’s not going to happen anytime soon it seems.

[Moderator]:  Professor Sachs, thank you so much.

Clearly, Sachs is not taken by Lloyd Blankfein’s “doing God’s work” claims, nor by the hectoring of overstretched consumers to make their debt payments after banks got overt and back door bailouts, and continue to be subsidized by savers via ZIRP.

We can only hope that Sachs’ direct talk emboldens others at his level to speak up.

Speaking of being emboldened . . . those Scientologists coming out of the woodwork are positively livid. It turns out it is only a form of social control (and easy money for and from fools).

My goal wasn’t to write an exposé, it was simply to understand Scientology.”

So says Lawrence Wright at the beginning of HBO’s blockbuster documentary “Going Clear.”

The film, which Wright adapted from his bestselling book of the same name, describes Scientology as a criminal cult that harasses former members who become critical of the church; physically and emotionally tortures some current ones; and once strong-armed the IRS into granting it tax-exempt status as a recognized religion. Beneath the sensational and harrowing stories, however, “Going Clear” amounts to a study of belief more broadly — of “why people believe one idea rather than another,” as Wright puts it.

One by one, former church members recount their involvement in the Church with a mix of shame, puzzlement and resignation. “I was really stupid,” says Academy Award-winner Paul Haggis, one of Scientology’s most famous apostates. “I was part of this for 30 years before I spoke out. […] Why didn’t I do it earlier?”

Others are even more self-critical: “Maybe my entire life has been a lie,” says Spanky Taylor, an ex-Scientologist who alleged that, as a pregnant mother, she was held in a “prison camp” and punished with grueling physical labor for objecting to the way the church “denied medical treatment to her boss.”

Their embarrassment about their pasts becomes even easier to understand when Wright describes the church’s creation myth:  A galactic overlord Xenu expelled hordes of people to a prison planet (Earth) 75 million years ago, dropped them into volcanoes, then dispersed their spirits (or “thetans”) with nuclear bombs. These spirits still possess humans to this day, and Scientologists expend a great deal of energy and money trying to exorcise them.

But “Going Clear” avoids the trap of incredulity. Those interviewed for the film, while eccentric, are accomplished, well spoken and, most of all, sincere. Parallel to their stories of abuse and warped belief are understandable explanations of their choices:  Haggis explains that as a young man, worried about his relationships and anxious to get his start as a documentary filmmaker, he was partially seduced by Scientology’s reputation for advancing careers, and was comforted by their undogmatic facade.

Indeed, the Church’s website still boasts that “[u]nlike religions with Judeo-Christian origins […] Scientology does not ask individuals to accept anything on faith alone.” As a curious and hopeful 21-year-old, he contributed a modest $50 to begin his training. Like many of those interviewed for “Going Clear,” he says that Scientology more resembled a self-help organization at first glance.

But, while there seems to be an unbridgeable gap between self-help and alien exorcisms, Scientology’s rigid, diagrammatic structure provides a clue to how one idea can lead to the other.

According to the documentary, after signing up, a Scientologist embarks on something called “The Bridge,” a step-by-step course of spiritual advancement, through which one could eventually achieve a “Clear” state of mind. (“Every step to ‘Clear’ had a price tag,” notes the film’s narrator.)

Along “The Bridge,” Scientologists attend compulsory and successive “auditing” sessions, which Wright describes resembling a sci-fi version of Freudian therapy. Scientologists discuss the most intimate details of their lives during auditing, details which the church records diligently — and can later allegedly use for blackmail.

It’s only after years of training, after they have told the church every private fact about themselves, that Scientologists hear about Xenu and humankind’s alien origins. Unsurprisingly, even after many years, Haggis and others still found the creation myth hard to stomach. Haggis even wondered if it was an “insanity test.”

Curiously, none of those interviewed in the film exited Scientology at that junction. As Haggis put it, “you have already paid for the next [session],” your social life centered around the church, and, besides, you weren’t required to believe it.

. . . In the language of the Mafia, says Gourevitch, “a person who has become invested in the logic and practices of the gang is said to be owned by it.”

. . . Once a person has acted on a belief, they don’t need to be continually pressured. Ex-Scientologists who alleged that they were placed in “The Hole,” a holding facility in California where upper-level church members were held and beaten, found themselves actually fighting to stay there. If the FBI came to rescue them from what some described as a “prison camp,” says one of the captives, Tom De Vocht, they would have responded:  “We’re doing this voluntarily. We like living in these conditions.”

Sound familiar?

We are a mafia civilization now.

But . . . where is our Eliot Ness?

Scientology’s persuasiveness is not in the logic of its beliefs but in its ability to control behavior.

People believe in Xenu and thetans because it becomes exceedingly difficult not to in light of all they have committed to the church. At the close of “Going Clear,” Haggis reflects on his time within Scientology:  “We lock up a portion of our own mind. We willingly put cuffs on. We willingly avoid things that could cause us pain if we just looked.”

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this:  If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle, We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken.

Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."
  - Carl Sagan

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
  - Voltaire

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