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One of these survivors is April Gallop. April Gallop would testify under oath in a two-hour-long, video-taped interview with Barbara Honegger who has conducted an in-depth investigation into the events at the Pentagon on September 11. April Gallop would state that a violent explosion near her desk in Wedge Two on Corridor Five, more than 100 ft north from the official narratives’ alleged plane impact point stopped her watch at 9:30.

The Russian Government’s Tass ‘news’ agency is alleging that “The US private military company Academi (formerly known as Blackwater) … has confirmed to the Kiev authorities its readiness to start training an experimental battalion of 550 men as of January at the request of Ukraine’s General Staff,” according to an unnamed source, which source is probably one of the few remaining anti-nazi bureaucrats still remaining in the Ukrainian Government. The reported price of this Blackwater (a.k.a. “Xe,” a.k.a. “Academi”) training contract is $3.5 million. Furthermore, “‘Ukraine has said it is ready to pay the money on the condition of assistance from the Ukrainian association Patriot, providing technical and financial support for the project,’ the source said.” That organization is Patriot of Ukraine. If this report in Tass is true, then the Ukrainian Government, which now is being funded almost entirely by U.S. taxpayers (inasmuch as it no longer meets the financial requirements of the IMF and EU, both of which receive funding from both U.S. and European taxpayers), and for which the U.S. Congress just passed and the U.S. President just signed into law in December authorization of a $450 million donation, is now co-funding this military training, along with — as wikipedia describes “Patriot of Ukraine” (but with wikipedia’s footnotes removed) —

a Ukrainian nationalist organization with racist and neo-Nazi political beliefs. It constitutes a paramilitary wing of the Social-National Assembly of Ukraine (S.N.A.), an assemblage of neo-Nazi organizations and groups founded in 2008 that share the social-national ideology and agree upon building a social-national state in Ukraine. Both the “Patriot of Ukraine” and the S.N.A. engage in political violence against minorities and their political opponents. The leader of the “Patriot of Ukraine” and of the Social-National Assembly is Andriy Biletsky. The S.N.A. derived from “the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine,” whose name was derived from the National Socialist Party of Germany — the original Nazis. America’s CIA hides its longstanding support of nazis after World War II (see this and this), but the Bushes and Obama have continued it even decades after the Soviet Union and its communism ended. Consequently, in 2004, the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine was advised by the CIA to, and it did, change its name to the “Freedom Party,” or “Svoboda,” because that sounds better to Americans.

End Torture, Shut Down the CIA! Written by Ron Paul Sunday July 27, 2014

Remember back in April, 2007, when then-CIA director George Tenet appeared on 60 Minutes, angrily telling the program host, “we don’t torture people”? Remember a few months later, in October, President George W. Bush saying, “this government does not torture people”? We knew then it was not true because we had already seen the photos of Iraqis tortured at Abu Ghraib prison four years earlier.   Still the US administration denied that torture was torture, preferring to call it “enhanced interrogation” and claiming that it had disrupted so many terrorist plots. Of course, we later found out that the CIA had not only lied about the torture of large numbers of people after 9/11, but it had vastly exaggerated any valuable information that came from such practices. However secret rendition of prisoners to other places was ongoing.

The US not only tortured people in its own custody, however. Last week the European Court of Human Rights found that the US government transferred individuals to secret detention centers in Poland (and likely elsewhere) where they were tortured away from public scrutiny. The government of Poland was ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages to two victims for doing nothing to stop their torture on Polish soil.

link By Malia Zimmerman Published May 16, 2017 Fox News Facebook Twitter Comments Email Print Now Playing Rod Wheeler on his investigation into DNC staffer's murder The family of the Democratic National Committee staffer who was gunned down on July 10 on a Washington, D.C., blasted reports that he was a source of emails leaked to WikiLeaks. Rod Wheeler, a retired Washington homicide detective and Fox News contributor investigating the case on behalf of the Rich family, made the WikiLeaks claim, which was corroborated by a federal investigator who spoke to Fox News.

Wheeler made his comments on the possible Rich-Wikileaks connection in a story first reported Monday night by Fox 5 DC.  In an appearance on Fox News' "Hannity" Tuesday night, Wheeler said a "federal investigator that was involved on the inside of the case" saw Rich's computer and the case file. Wheeler told host Sean Hannity the investigator "came across [as] very credible. When you look at that, with the totality of everything else that I found in this case, it’s very consistent for a person with my experience to begin to think, 'Well, perhaps there were some email communication between Seth and Wikileaks.'"

But a spokesman for Rich's family on Tuesday said Wheeler was not authorized to speak for the family and called assertions Seth Rich sent emails to WikiLeaks "unsubstantiated." Brad Bauman said even if purported emails were to surface, it would not necessarily mean Rich had helped WikiLeaks.

A man with a kid in arm runs towards the camera. The kid's face is heavily colored, but it looks otherwise fine. On the lower left we see the back of a man with a "White Helmets" logo on his vest. Dust in the background. Always dust or smoke. A bunch of men looking very busy but are they actually doing anything? That would be a lucky by-chance photo shot for any normal photographer. Even in country where rubble from a fresh bombing may be around some near corner. But this is a typical "White Helmets rescue kid" propaganda picture. The photo above is, except for maybe the old rubble, likely completely staged. There the 43 similar pictures below the fold to demonstrate that. Just ask yourself: Could all these very similar by-chance pics, taken within about a year, be real? Really?

The pictures above all look astonishingly similar: rubble, dust or rather haze from a smoke grenade in the background, dusted/greasepaint bloody kids who have no visible trauma, the rescuer with the kid moving towards the camera. Dramatic, high quality scenes which do get distributed by news agencies and published again and again by major "western" media. Isn't it an amazing fortune that so many kids get rescued alive by the "White Helmets", without any serious wounds visible, just moments after bomb impacts? This week after week? With all the same attributes in each picture? No photo editor at any of the big media ever wondered about that? These staged photos are part of the war propaganda against the Syrian people and their government. The "White Helmets" take and distribute these photos. They also distribute lots of "kids rescued from rubble" videos. We wrote about those a month ago: Other typical features of these movies, see this one, are smoke (grenades) in the streets, dramatic but small open fires nearby, dust or some red color on the children's face or arms. The camera is often used in a hectic, intentionally amateurish first person view, a style extensively developed in the 1999 horror clip Blair Witch Project. Sometimes sounds of additional "bomb impact" bangs or screaming/wailing women are added. The "White Helmets" are part of the (anti-)Syria Campaign. "Kid rescued from rubble" is their standard shtick. They are financed with some $60+ million from your taxes by the U.S., the UK and other governments. Such money will buy a lot of good cameras and props and will pay for many actors and extras.

The Syria Campaign was created by Purpose Campaigns LLC. The company fabricates and runs for you any world-wide "grass root" movement you would like. With Purpose LLC or other such companies involved, big dollars will buy you big effects. How about an automated Twitter campaign to spread anti-Shia sectarianism? Someone paid for it and here it is. The "White Helmets" campaign demonstrates the amazing manipulation potential such companies and their high paying customers have.

Phil Zimmermann, the creator of the email encryption software PGP, has warned that anyone who uses consumer email services needs to be aware of the threats of exposing their metadata to eavesdroppers.

That risk also led Zimmermann to develop a new feature for his Silent Phone app, encrypting conversations earlier in the call process. Dubbed "tunnelling", the feature hides the knowledge of who is talking to who from any eavesdroppers. Zimmermann had the idea for the feature “quite a few months before the Edward Snowden revelations”, but its upcoming release will be timely. Where PGP flaws are becoming clearer with time, Zimmermann argues that the core technology holds up just as well. “The first thing I did [after the Guardian published Snowden’s leaks] was review my own designs. "I haven't seen anything in the Snowden revelations that suggests that PGP or the stuff we do now is weak in any way.”

Some time on Tuesday afternoon, about 50,000 Comcast Internet customers in Houston will become part of a massive public Wi-Fi hotspot network, a number that will swell to 150,000 by the end of June. Comcast will begin activating a feature in its Arris Touchstone Telephony Wireless Gateway Modems that sets up a public Wi-Fi hotspot alongside a residential Internet customer’s private home network. Other Comcast customers will be able to log in to the hotspots for free using a computer, smartphone or other mobile device. And once they log into one, they’ll be automatically logged in to others when their devices “see” them. Comcast says the hotspot – which appears as “xfinitywifi” to those searching for a Wi-Fi connection – is completely separate from the home network. Someone accessing the Net through the hotspot can’t get to the computers, printers, mobile devices, streaming boxes and more sitting on the host network. Comcast officials also say that people using the Internet via the hotspot won’t slow down Internet access on the home network. Additional capacity is allotted to handle the bandwidth. You can read more about Comcast’s reason for doing this in my report on HoustonChronicle.com.

What’s interesting about this move is that, by default, the feature is being turned on without its subscribers’ prior consent. It’s an opt-out system – you have to take action to not participate. Comcast spokesman Michael Bybee said on Monday that notices about the hotspot feature were mailed to customers a few weeks ago, and email notifications will go out after it’s turned on. But it’s a good bet that this will take many Comcast customers by surprise. If you have one of these routers and don’t want to host a public Wi-Fi hotspot, here’s how to turn it off.

The additional capacity for public hotspot users is provided through a separate channel on the modem called a “service flow,” according to Comcast. But the speed of the connection reflects the tier of the subscriber hosting the hotspot. For example, if you connect to a hotspot hosted by a home user with a 25-Mbps connection, it will be slower than if you connect to a host system on the 50-Mbps tier.

In a Chicago court, several Facebook users filed a class-action lawsuit against the social media giant for allegedly violating its users’ privacy rights to acquire the largest privately held stash of biometric face-recognition data in the world. The court documents reveal claims that “Facebook began violating the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (IBIPA) of 2008 in 2010, in a purported attempt to make the process of tagging friends easier.”

This would be a violation of the IBIPA which states it is “unlawful to collect biometric data without written notice to the subject stating the purpose and length of the data collection, and without obtaining the subject’s written release.” Because all users are automatically part of the “faceprint’ facial recognition program, this is an illegal act in the state of Illinois, according to the complaint. Jay Edelson, attorney for the plaintiffs, asserts the opt-out ability to prevent other Facebook users from tagging them in photos is “insufficient”.

This was accomplished through the “tag suggestions” feature provided by Facebook which “scans all pictures uploaded by users and identifies any Facebook friends they may want to tag.” The Facebook users maintain that this feature is a “form of data mining [that] violates user’s privacy”. One plaintiff said this is a “brazen disregard for its users’ privacy rights,” through which Facebook has “secretly amassed the world’s largest privately held database of consumer biometrics data.” Because “Facebook actively conceals” their protocol using “faceprint databases” to identify Facebook users in photos, and “doesn’t disclose its wholesale biometrics data collection practices in its privacy policies, nor does it even ask users to acknowledge them.”

Seven out of the top ten countries afflicted by terrorist attacks are predominately Muslim, according to the Australia-headquartered Institute for Economics and Peace’s Global Terrorism Index for 2014, which is based on the University of Maryland’s meta-analytic Global Terrorism Database. Using a maximum value of ten and a minimum value of zero, the entire international community is systematically ranked. Although the definition of terrorist incidents in the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database can definitely be debated over, important inferences can be made from its data sets and the Institute for Economics and Peace’s Global Terrorism Index. Several key features can be noticed, if readers look at the nature and identities of the perpetrators of what is classified as acts of terrorism among the top thirty countries in the Global Terrorism Index for 2014. The first feature is that the violence generated from the ascribed terrorist groups falls within the framework of insurrections and civil wars that are generally equated as acts of terrorism. For example, this is the case for countries like Somalia, the Philippines, Thailand, Colombia, Turkey, Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nepal, which are respectively ranked seventh, ninth, tenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, twenty-second, and twenty-fourth place. Under closer examination several of these insurgencies can be tied to international rivalries and power plays by the US and its allies. This becomes obvious when more observations are made.

The second feature is that the majority of the cases of terrorism in the indexed countries, especially the higher ranked they are on the list, are connected to Washington’s direct or indirect interference in their affair. For example, this is the case for Iraq, NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Russia, Lebanon, Libya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, South Sudan, China, and Iran, which are respectively ranked first, second, third, fifth, seventh, eighth, eleventh, fourteenth, fifteenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, twenty-fifth, and twenty-eighth. US-led wars, Pentagon interventions, US-backed coups, or US government support for so-called «opposition» groups or proxy regimes have all been a basis for the affliction of terrorism in these countries. Out of the above countries, according to the Global Terrorism Index, 82% of global deaths that are assigned to acts of terrorism happen in NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Nigeria. The ties to US foreign policy should be clear.

It has been claimed that if all terrorists are not Arabs or Muslims, that most terrorists are Arabs or Muslims. Is this true or another myth? An empirical look at data compiled in the US and Europe will help answer this question. In the US, which is ranked thirtieth in the Global Terrorism Index for 2014, the majority of terrorists are not Muslims and are non-Muslims according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Inside the US, 6% of terrorist cases from 1980 to 2005 were committed by Muslim terrorists. [1] The other 94% of terrorism cases and terrorists — in other words, the vast majority — were not related to Arabs, Muslims, or Islam. [2] While the FBI’s methodology on what is a terrorist attack and what is not a terrorist attack is questionable, it will be accepted herein for arguments sake. According to the same FBI report, there were actually more terrorist attacks launched by Jews from 1980 to 2005 on US soil. The same FBI data was compiled by the Princeton University-linked webpage loonwatch.com in a chart that describes the breakdown of cases of terrorist attacks on US soil from 1980 to 2005 as follows: 42% Hispanic terrorism; 24% extreme left-wing group terrorism; 16% other types of terrorists that do not fit into the other main categories; 7% Jewish terrorists; 6% Muslim terrorists; and 5% communist terrorists. [3] While Muslim terrorists comprised 6% of the attacks on US soil from 1980 to 2005, Jewish terrorists and Hispanic terrorists respectively comprised 7% and 42% of the terrorist attacks in the US during the same period. There, however, is no fear mongering about Jews or Hispanic people. The same media and government focus is not given to them as is given to ethnic Arabs and Muslims.

GLOBAL RESEARCH ONLINE INTERACTIVE READER SERIES GR I-BOOK No.  7  THE 9/11 READER The September 11, 2001 Terror Attacks 9/11 Truth: Revealing the Lies,  Commemorating the 9/11 Tragedy

August 2012 The 911/ Reader is part of Global Research’s Online Interactive I-Book Reader, which brings together, in the form of chapters, a collection of Global Research feature articles, including debate and analysis, on a broad theme or subject matter.  To consult our Online Interactive I-Book Reader Series, click here.

Table of Contents of the 9/11 Reader In Part I, the 911 Reader provides a review of what happened on the morning of 9/11, at the White House, on Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, at Strategic Command Headquarters (USSTRATCOM), What was the response of the US Air Force in the immediate wake of the attacks?  Part II focusses on “What Happened on the Planes” as described in the 9/11 Commission Report. Part III sheds light on what caused the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings. It also challenges the official narrative with regard to the attack on the Pentagon. Part IV reviews and refutes the findings of the 9/11 Commission Report. Part V focusses on the issue of foreknowledge by Western intelligence agencies. Part VI examines the issue of how foreknowledge of the attacks was used as an instrument of insider trading on airline stocks in the days preceding September 11, 2001. The bonanza financial gains resulting from insurance claims to the leaseholders of the WTC buildings is also examined.

Sunday morning news television is where Washington sets its media agenda for the week and, more importantly, defines its narrow range of conventional, acceptable viewpoints. It’s where the Serious People go to spout their orthodoxies and, through the illusion of “tough questioning,” disseminate DC-approved bipartisan narratives. Other than the New York Times front page, Sunday morning TV was the favorite tool of choice for Bush officials and neocon media stars to propagandize the public about Iraq; Dick Cheney’s media aide, Catherine Martin, noted in a memo that the Tim Russert-hosted Meet the Press lets Cheney “control message,” and she testified at the Lewis Libby trial that, as a result, “I suggested we put the vice president on Meet the Press, which was a tactic we often used. It’s our best format.” Over the last couple months, the Sunday morning TV shows — NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’s Face The Nation, ABC’s This Week, Fox’s News Sunday, and CNN’s State of the Union — have focused on a deal with Iran as one of their principal topics. In doing so, they have repeatedly given a platform to fanatical anti-Iran voices, including Israeli officials such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They have sycophantically interviewed officials from the U.S.-supported, anti-Iranian Gulf tyrannies such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan; two weeks ago, Chuck Todd interviewed Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. Adel Al-Jubeir and didn’t utter a word about extreme Saudi repression,

In the last three weeks alone, Meet the Press has interviewed the Israeli prime minister, the Saudi ambassador, and the Israeli ambassador to the U.S.

Meanwhile, their “expert media panels” almost always feature the most extremist “pro-Israel,” anti-Iran American pundits such as Jeffrey Goldberg, who played a leading role in spreading false claims about Iraq under the guise of “reporting” (and only became more beloved and credible in DC for it), was dubbed Netanyahu’s “faithful stenographer” by New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, and even joined the Israeli military in his young adulthood. In 2014, Face the Nation interviewed Netanyahu five times and featured his “faithful stenographer,” Goldberg, three times; in 2015, the CBS show just last week interviewed Netanyahu and has already hosted Goldberg four times. ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos actually features supreme neocon propagandist Bill Kristol as a regular “ABC News Contributor” and has also interviewed Netanyahu. And that’s to say nothing of the “hawkish,” AIPAC-loyal and/or evangelical members of the U.S. Congress who are fanatically devoted to Israel and appear literally almost every week on these programs. But as these shows “cover” the Iran deal, one thing is glaringly missing: Iranian voices. There has not been a single Iranian official recently interviewed by any of these Sunday morning shows. When I raised this issue on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, a Meet the Press senior editor, Shawna Thomas, said the show had “put in a request” with Iran for an interview, while MSNBC’s Chris Hayes also suggested that it can be difficult to secure interviews with Iranian government officials.

NSA Director Finally Admits Encryption Is Needed to Protect Public’s Privacy The new stance denotes a growing awareness within the government that Americans are not comfortable with the State’s grip on their data. By Carey Wedler | AntiMedia | January 22, 2016 Share this article! https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&to&su=NSA%20Director%20Finally%20Admits%20Encryption%20Is%20Needed%20to%20Protect%20Public%E2%80%99s%20Privacy&body=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mintpress

Rogers cited the recent Office of Personnel Management hack of over 20 million users as a reason to increase encryption rather than scale it back. “What you saw at OPM, you’re going to see a whole lot more of,” he said, referring to the massive hack that compromised the personal data about 20 million people who obtained background checks. Rogers’ comments, while forward-thinking, signify an about face in his stance on encryption. In February 2015, he said he “shares [FBI] Director [James] Comey’s concern” about cell phone companies’ decision to add encryption features to their products. Comey has been one loudest critics of encryption. However, Rogers’ comments on Thursday now directly conflict with Comey’s stated position. The FBI director has publicly chastised encryption, as well as the companies that provide it. In 2014, he claimed Apple’s then-new encryption feature could lead the world to “a very dark place.” At a Department of Justice hearing in November, Comey testified that “Increasingly, the shadow that is ‘going dark’ is falling across more and more of our work.” Though he claimed, “We support encryption,” he insisted “we have a problem that encryption is crashing into public safety and we have to figure out, as people who care about both, to resolve it. So, I think the conversation’s in a healthier place.”

At the same hearing, Comey and Attorney General Loretta Lynch declined to comment on whether they had proof the Paris attackers used encryption. Even so, Comey recently lobbied for tech companies to do away with end-to-end encryption. However, his crusade has fallen on unsympathetic ears, both from the private companies he seeks to control — and from the NSA. Prior to Rogers’ statements in support of encryption Thursday, former NSA chief Michael Hayden said, “I disagree with Jim Comey. I actually think end-to-end encryption is good for America.” Still another former NSA chair has criticized calls for backdoor access to information. In October, Mike McConnell told a panel at an encryption summit that the United States is “better served by stronger encryption, rather than baking in weaker encryption.” Former Department of Homeland Security chief, Michael Chertoff, has also spoken out against government being able to bypass encryption.