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Gary Edwards

Clinton Articles of Impeachment - Senate Votes - 1 views

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    "Article One: In his conduct while President of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has willfully corrupted and manipulated the judicial process of the United States for his personal gain and exoneration, impeding the administra tion of justice, in that: On August 17, 1998, William Jefferson Clinton swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth before a Federal grand jury of the United States. Contrary to that oath, William Jefferson Clinton willfully provided perjurious, false and misleading testimony to the grand jury concerning one or more of the following: (1) the nature and details of his relationship with a subordinate Government employee; (2) prior perjurious, false and misleading testimony he gave in a Federal civil rights action brought against him; (3) prior false and misleading statements he allowed his attorney to make to a Federal judge in that civil rights action; and (4) his corrupt efforts to influence the testimony of witnesses and to impede the discovery of evidence in that civil rights action. In doing this, William Jefferson Clinton has undermined the integrity of his office, has brought disrepute on the Presidency, has betrayed his trust as President, and has acted in a manner subversive of the rule of law and justice, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, William Jefferson Clinton, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States. Article Two: Obstruction of Justice .. In his conduct while President of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton, in viola
Gary Edwards

Walter E. Williams: States should nullify Obamacare [AUDIO] | The Daily Caller - 0 views

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    Interesting discussion by Walter Williams as guest host for Rush Limbaugh.  Walter points to the 1798 Jefferson-Madison "Kentucky Resolution" and, the Marbury v Madison ruling as the legal rational for States to oppose and nullify the Supreme Court Obamacare Tax. Many Conservatives erroneously blame the Kentucky Resolution for being the pretext of the Southern States defending their sovereignty by succeeding from the Union following the election of Lincoln in 1860.  My read is that Jefferson and Madison both saw the States as having the final say on the Constitutionality of any Federal action - be it Congress, Justice or Executive branch.  Marbury v. Madison seems to fully justify the Jefferson-Madison view of the Constitution and State Sovereignty.   Note that Jefferson and Madison were responding to the reprehensible Federalist "Alien and Sedition Act". excerpt: On Rush Limbaugh's Thursday program, George Mason University professor Walter E. Williams outlined the case that states can nullify Obamacare, citing Thomas Jefferson's 1789 Kentucky Resolution, which was a claim that the U. S. Constitution is a compact among the several states, and any power not delegated to the U.S. government is void. "I think the American citizens ought to press their state governors and legislatures just to nullify the law - just to plain nullify it and say, 'The citizens of such-and-such-a state don't have to obey Obamacare because it's unconstitutional, regardless of what the Supreme Court says,'" Williams said. Williams cited Marbury v. Madison, which said "all laws which are repugnant to the Constitution are null and void" to further the case for nullification from the states. Nullification is a doctrine introduced in the infancy of the United States and was what some have suggested led to the Civil War. As far as the legal precedent of nullification and how it led to the Civil War, Williams said he doubted the repercussions would as serious as the
Gary Edwards

'Clinton death list': 33 spine-tingling cases - 0 views

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    "(Editor's note: This list was originally published in August 2016 and has gone viral on the web. WND is running it again as American voters cast their ballots for the nation's next president on Election Day.) How many people do you personally know who have died mysteriously? How about in plane crashes or car wrecks? Bizarre suicides? People beaten to death or murdered in a hail of bullets? And what about violent freak accidents - like separate mountain biking and skiing collisions in Aspen, Colorado? Or barbells crushing a person's throat? Bill and Hillary Clinton attend a funeral Apparently, if you're Bill or Hillary Clinton, the answer to that question is at least 33 - and possibly many more. Talk-radio star Rush Limbaugh addressed the issue of the "Clinton body count" during an August show. "I swear, I could swear I saw these stories back in 1992, back in 1993, 1994," Limbaugh said. He cited a report from Rachel Alexander at Townhall.com titled, "Clinton body count or left-wing conspiracy? Three with ties to DNC mysteriously die." Limbaugh said he recalled Ted Koppel, then-anchor of ABC News' "Nightline," routinely having discussions on the issue following the July 20, 1993, death of White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster. In fact, Limbaugh said, he appeared on Koppel's show. "One of the things I said was, 'Who knows what happened here? But let me ask you a question.' I said, 'Ted, how many people do you know in your life who've been murdered? Ted, how many people do you know in your life that have died under suspicious circumstances?' "Of course, the answer is zilch, zero, nada, none, very few," Limbaugh chuckled. "Ask the Clintons that question. And it's a significant number. It's a lot of people that they know who have died, who've been murdered. "And the same question here from Rachel Alexander. It's amazing the cycle that exists with the Clintons. [Citing Townhall]: 'What it
Joe La Fleur

Liberals, Progressives and Socialists - Walter E. Williams - Page 1 - 1 views

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    The Williams article does no more than to sing to the choir and certainly is no scholarly work. First he stuffs the Nazis into his own "socialist" bag, ignoring the fact that the "socialist" label in the party name was only window dressing for what was in reality a mix of fascism and capitalism, not socialism. Then he declares that "communists" in the Soviet Union were responsible for mass murders, blinking past the fact that the Soviet Union was communist in name only. It was a fascist state during the entire period when the mass murders there took place and wound up an oligarchy before it died. "Communist China" likewise was never a communist state. It began as a socialist state ruled by an oligarchy, became near-fascist under Chairman Mao, and returned to being an oligarchy after his death, but this time sprouting capitalist wings. (Nixon removing the U.S. trade barriers with China had a lot to do with this.) Having stuffed everything in sight into his "socialist" bag, deserving or not, and labeling *all* socialists as government mass murders, Williams takes the insurmountable mental leap to paint groups like the "NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, Green for All, the Sierra Club and the Children's Defense Fund" as mass murderers, apparently should their views ever become dominant in the U.S. (Williams provides no connective tissue for his illogic there.) Then to top it all off, the web site's editor slaps a title on the essay lumping liberals and progressives in with the socialists, so apparently liberals and progressives are potential mass murderers too, which is unmistakably his innuendo. Williams seems to have a problem with organizations working *through our legal system* to expand civil liberties and to raise ethnic minorities out of poverty. Love 'em or hate 'em, those are not groups of mass murderers. Williams has the right to dislike those organizations. He also has the right to make absurd arguments, which he has fully exercised. But he wa
Gary Edwards

There Are No Coincidences - 3 views

This commentary is currently making the rounds of the Bay Area Patriots circles: ITS ALL TRUE :: Any one of these 'coincidences' when taken singularly appear to not mean much, but when taken as a ...

Obama-coincidences Marxism Marxist-Muslim

started by Gary Edwards on 02 Jul 13 no follow-up yet
Gary Edwards

Democrats and Republicans Against Agenda 21 - [ coast to coast am ] - YouTube - 0 views

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    "Democrats and Republicans Against Agenda 21  .. MP3 Coast to Coast interview with William Jasper and Rosa Koire.  Excellent explanation of Agenda 21 ........................................................ Date: 09-29-12 Host: John B. Wells Guests: William Jasper, Rosa Koire Agenda 21 is a non-binding, voluntarily implemented action plan of the United Nations with regards to sustainable development. Some view the plan as a way to inventory and control all land, water, plants, animals, and human beings in the world. William Jasper (1st half) from the John Birch Society and Rosa Koire from Democrats Against Agenda 21 (2nd half) weighed in with their views, from both the right and left, on why Agenda 21 is bad news for the world."
Gary Edwards

Sworn Declaration of Whistleblower William Binney on NSA Domestic Surveillance Capabili... - 0 views

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    "Sworn Declaration of Whistleblower William Binney on NSA Domestic Surveillance Capabilities July 16, 2012 in National Security Agency The following sworn declaration of William Binney, a former employee of the NSA and specialist in traffic analysis, was filed July 2, 2012 in support of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's case against the National Security Agency (Jewel v. NSA) regarding their illegal domestic surveillance programs which, according to Binney "are consistent, as a mathematical matter, with seizing both the routing information and the contents of all electronic communications" inside the U.S.  Thanks to Jacob Appelbaum for originally drawing attention to the declaration." DECLARATION OF WILLIAM E. BINNEY IN SUPPORT OF PLAINTIFFS' MOTION FOR PARTIAL SUMMARY JUDGMENT REJECTING THE GOVERNMENT DEFENDANTS' STATE SECRET DEFENSE
Gary Edwards

NSA Whistleblower William Binney Explains NSA Surveillance - Business Insider - 0 views

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    Wow.  I watched this short film and listened carefully to what William Binney had to say.  This is incredible stuff and his explanation of how it cam to be is easy enough to follow.  I hope Americans will pay attention and in the ground swell to take back our country will forcefully oppose the requthorization of NSA in December 2012.  Just a month after elections. excerpt: "National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney explains how the secretive agency run its pervasive domestic spying apparatus in a new piece by Laura Poitras in The New York TImes. Binney-one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history-worked for the Defense Department's foreign signals intelligence agency for 32 years before resigning in late 2001 because he "could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution." In a short video called "The Program," Binney explains how the agency took part of one of the programs he built and started using it to spy on virtually every U.S. citizen without warrants under the code-name Stellar Wind. Binney details how the top-secret surveillance program, the scope of which has never been made public, can track electronic activities-phone calls, emails, banking and travel records, social media-and map them to collect "all the attributes that any individual has" in every type of activity and build a profile based on that data."
Gary Edwards

Whistleblowers & NSA - Shows - Coast to Coast AM - 0 views

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    Interview Date: 07-27-13 :: 3 hours on mp3 Host: John B. Wells Guests: William E. Binney This amazing interview covers 3 hours with William Edward Binney; the former highly placed intelligence official with the United States National Security Agency (NSA) turned whistleblower who resigned on October 31, 2001, after more than 30 years with the agency. He joined John B. Wells to discuss living his life as a whistleblower, the NSA scandal and related topics. "The NSA was chartered to do foreign intelligence only, not domestic intelligence," he said. Prior to the Bush Administration, if the NSA happened to randomly intercept a U.S. citizen's communications, the database was purged of the collection and records erased, Binney revealed. After 9/11 and per a "secret interpretation" of the Patriot Act, the NSA decided it could build a register of every phone in the country, he explained, noting that they now keep records on who every U.S. Citizen calls, how often and for how long. A person has the right to free association with others only as long as the NSA knows about it, he admonished. According to Binney, there is substantial danger that data collected from phone and internet communications as well as financial records will be used to target particular Americans, a scenario recently played out when the IRS was caught harassing tea party members, he pointed out. Because the threat is real and the spy organization's reach well beyond its original charter, Binney said he has signed an affidavit for the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit challenging the NSA's constitutional authority to collect this kind of information. Another peril to U.S. citizens are FISA Courts (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) which can order the transfer of domestic intelligence data but have no way of validating the intelligence being given to them, he continued. Binney called for the defunding of FISA Courts since they, like the NSA, are in violation of their original charter. He
Paul Merrell

Obama confidant's spine-chilling proposal - Salon.com - 0 views

  • Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama’s closest confidants.  Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama’s head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs.”  In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-”independent” advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups — which advocate views that Sunstein deems “false conspiracy theories” about the Government.  This would be designed to increase citizens’ faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists.  The paper’s abstract can be read, and the full paper downloaded, here. Sunstein advocates that the Government’s stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups.”  He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called “independent” credible voices to bolster the Government’s messaging (on the ground that those who don’t believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government).   This program would target those advocating false “conspiracy theories,” which they define to mean: “an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role.”  Sunstein’s 2008 paper was flagged by this blogger, and then amplified in an excellent report by Raw Story‘s Daniel Tencer.
  • There’s no evidence that the Obama administration has actually implemented a program exactly of the type advocated by Sunstein, though in light of this paper and the fact that Sunstein’s position would include exactly such policies, that question certainly ought to be asked.  Regardless, Sunstein’s closeness to the President, as well as the highly influential position he occupies, merits an examination of the mentality behind what he wrote.  This isn’t an instance where some government official wrote a bizarre paper in college 30 years ago about matters unrelated to his official powers; this was written 18 months ago, at a time when the ascendancy of Sunstein’s close friend to the Presidency looked likely, in exactly the area he now oversees.  Additionally, the government-controlled messaging that Sunstein desires has been a prominent feature of U.S. Government actions over the last decade, including in some recently revealed practices of the current administration, and the mindset in which it is grounded explains a great deal about our political class.  All of that makes Sunstein’s paper worth examining in greater detail.
  • Initially, note how similar Sunstein’s proposal is to multiple, controversial stealth efforts by the Bush administration to secretly influence and shape our political debates.  The Bush Pentagon employed teams of former Generals to pose as “independent analysts” in the media while secretly coordinating their talking points and messaging about wars and detention policies with the Pentagon.  Bush officials secretly paid supposedly “independent” voices, such as Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher, to advocate pro-Bush policies while failing to disclose their contracts.  In Iraq, the Bush Pentagon hired a company, Lincoln Park, which paid newspapers to plant pro-U.S. articles while pretending it came from Iraqi citizens.  In response to all of this, Democrats typically accused the Bush administration of engaging in government-sponsored propaganda — and when it was done domestically, suggested this was illegal propaganda.  Indeed, there is a very strong case to make that what Sunstein is advocating is itself illegal under long-standing statutes prohibiting government ”propaganda” within the U.S., aimed at American citizens: As explained in a March 21, 2005 report by the Congressional Research Service, “publicity or propaganda” is defined by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to mean either (1) self-aggrandizement by public officials, (2) purely partisan activity, or (3) “covert propaganda.”  By covert propaganda, GAO means information which originates from the government but is unattributed and made to appear as though it came from a third party.
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  • Covert government propaganda is exactly what Sunstein craves.  His mentality is indistinguishable from the Bush mindset that led to these abuses, and he hardly tries to claim otherwise.  Indeed, he favorably cites both the covert Lincoln Park program as well as Paul Bremer’s closing of Iraqi newspapers which published stories the U.S. Government disliked, and justifies them as arguably necessary to combat “false conspiracy theories” in Iraq — the same goal Sunstein has for the U.S.Sunstein’s response to these criticisms is easy to find in what he writes, and is as telling as the proposal itself.  He acknowledges that some “conspiracy theories” previously dismissed as insane and fringe have turned out to be entirely true (his examples:  the CIA really did secretly administer LSD in “mind control” experiments; the DOD really did plot the commission of terrorist acts inside the U.S. with the intent to blame Castro; the Nixon White House really did bug the DNC headquarters).  Given that history, how could it possibly be justified for the U.S. Government to institute covert programs designed to undermine anti-government “conspiracy theories,” discredit government critics, and increase faith and trust in government pronouncements?  Because, says Sunstein, such powers are warranted only when wielded by truly well-intentioned government officials who want to spread The Truth and Do Good — i.e., when used by people like Cass Sunstein and Barack Obama
  • Throughout, we assume a well-motivated government that aims to eliminate conspiracy theories, or draw their poison, if and only if social welfare is improved by doing so. But it’s precisely because the Government is so often not “well-motivated” that such powers are so dangerous.  Advocating them on the ground that “we will use them well” is every authoritarian’s claim.  More than anything else, this is the toxic mentality that consumes our political culture:  when our side does X, X is Good, because we’re Good and are working for Good outcomes.  That was what led hordes of Bush followers to endorse the same large-government surveillance programs they long claimed to oppose, and what leads so many Obama supporters now to justify actions that they spent the last eight years opposing.
  • Consider the recent revelation that the Obama administration has been making very large, undisclosed payments to MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber to provide consultation on the President’s health care plan.  With this lucrative arrangement in place, Gruber spent the entire year offering public justifications for Obama’s health care plan, typically without disclosing these payments, and far worse, was repeatedly held out by the White House — falsely — as an “independent” or “objective” authority.  Obama allies in the media constantly cited Gruber’s analysis to support their defenses of the President’s plan, and the White House, in turn, then cited those media reports as proof that their plan would succeed.  This created an infinite “feedback loop” in favor of Obama’s health care plan which — unbeknownst to the public — was all being generated by someone who was receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in secret from the administration (read this to see exactly how it worked).In other words, this arrangement was quite similar to the Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher scandals which Democrats, in virtual lockstep, condemned.  Paul Krugman, for instance, in 2005 angrily lambasted right-wing pundits and policy analysts who received secret, undisclosed payments, and said they lack “intellectual integrity”; he specifically cited the Armstrong Williams case.  Yet the very same Paul Krugman last week attacked Marcy Wheeler for helping to uncover the Gruber payments by accusing her of being “just like the right-wingers with their endless supply of fake scandals.”  What is one key difference?  Unlike Williams and Gallagher, Jonathan Gruber is a Good, Well-Intentioned Person with Good Views — he favors health care — and so massive, undisclosed payments from the same administration he’s defending are dismissed as a “fake scandal.”
  • Sunstein himself — as part of his 2008 paper — explicitly advocates that the Government should pay what he calls “credible independent experts” to advocate on the Government’s behalf, a policy he says would be more effective because people don’t trust the Government itself and would only listen to people they believe are “independent.”  In so arguing, Sunstein cites the Armstrong Williams scandal not as something that is wrong in itself, but as a potential risk of this tactic (i.e., that it might leak out), and thus suggests that “government can supply these independent experts with information and perhaps prod them into action from behind the scenes,” but warns that “too close a connection will be self-defeating if it is exposed.”  In other words, Sunstein wants the Government to replicate the Armstrong Williams arrangement as a means of more credibly disseminating propaganda — i.e., pretending that someone is an “independent” expert when they’re actually being “prodded” and even paid “behind the scenes” by the Government — but he wants to be more careful about how the arrangement is described (don’t make the control explicit) so that embarrassment can be avoided if it ends up being exposed.  
  • In this 2008 paper, then, Sunstein advocated, in essence, exactly what the Obama administration has been doing all year with Gruber:  covertly paying people who can be falsely held up as “independent” analysts in order to more credibly promote the Government line.  Most Democrats agreed this was a deceitful and dangerous act when Bush did it, but with Obama and some of his supporters, undisclosed arrangements of this sort seem to be different.  Why?  Because, as Sunstein puts it:  we have “a well-motivated government” doing this so that “social welfare is improved.”  Thus, just like state secrets, indefinite detention, military commissions and covert, unauthorized wars, what was once deemed so pernicious during the Bush years — coordinated government/media propaganda — is instantaneously transformed into something Good.* * * * *What is most odious and revealing about Sunstein’s worldview is his condescending, self-loving belief that “false conspiracy theories” are largely the province of fringe, ignorant Internet masses and the Muslim world.  That, he claims, is where these conspiracy theories thrive most vibrantly, and he focuses on various 9/11 theories — both domestically and in Muslim countries — as his prime example.
  • It’s certainly true that one can easily find irrational conspiracy theories in those venues, but some of the most destructive “false conspiracy theories” have emanated from the very entity Sunstein wants to endow with covert propaganda power:  namely, the U.S. Government itself, along with its elite media defenders. Moreover, “crazy conspiracy theorist” has long been the favorite epithet of those same parties to discredit people trying to expose elite wrongdoing and corruption. Who is it who relentlessly spread “false conspiracy theories” of Saddam-engineered anthrax attacks and Iraq-created mushroom clouds and a Ba’athist/Al-Qaeda alliance — the most destructive conspiracy theories of the last generation?  And who is it who demonized as “conspiracy-mongers” people who warned that the U.S. Government was illegally spying on its citizens, systematically torturing people, attempting to establish permanent bases in the Middle East, or engineering massive bailout plans to transfer extreme wealth to the industries which own the Government?  The most chronic and dangerous purveyors of “conspiracy theory” games are the very people Sunstein thinks should be empowered to control our political debates through deceit and government resources:  namely, the Government itself and the Enlightened Elite like him.
  • It is this history of government deceit and wrongdoing that renders Sunstein’s desire to use covert propaganda to “undermine” anti-government speech so repugnant.  The reason conspiracy theories resonate so much is precisely that people have learned — rationally — to distrust government actions and statements.  Sunstein’s proposed covert propaganda scheme is a perfect illustration of why that is.  In other words, people don’t trust the Government and “conspiracy theories” are so pervasive precisely because government is typically filled with people like Cass Sunstein, who think that systematic deceit and government-sponsored manipulation are justified by their own Goodness and Superior Wisdom.
  • The point is that there are severe dangers to the Government covertly using its resources to “infiltrate” discussions and to shape political debates using undisclosed and manipulative means.  It’s called “covert propaganda” and it should be opposed regardless of who is in control of it or what its policy aims are. UPDATE II:  Ironically, this is the same administration that recently announced a new regulation dictating that “bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers, as occurs frequently.”  Without such disclosure, the administration reasoned, the public may not be aware of important hidden incentives (h/t pasquin).  Yet the same administration pays an MIT analyst hundreds of thousands of dollars to advocate their most controversial proposed program while they hold him out as “objective,” and selects as their Chief Regulator someone who wants government agents to covertly mold political discussions “anonymously or even with false identities.”
  • UPDATE III:  Just to get a sense for what an extremist Cass Sunstein is (which itself is ironic, given that his paper calls for ”cognitive infiltration of extremist groups,” as the Abstract puts it), marvel at this paragraph:
  • So Sunstein isn’t calling right now for proposals (1) and (2) — having Government ”ban conspiracy theorizing” or “impose some kind of tax on those who” do it — but he says “each will have a place under imaginable conditions.”  I’d love to know the “conditions” under which the government-enforced banning of conspiracy theories or the imposition of taxes on those who advocate them will “have a place.”  That would require, at a bare minumum, a repeal of the First Amendment.  Anyone who believes this should, for that reason alone, be barred from any meaningful government position.
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    This is a January 2010 article by Glenn Greenwald. The Sunstein paper referred to was published in 2008 and is at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585  Sunstein left the Obama Administration in 2012 and now teaches law at Harvard. He is the husband of U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice,a notorious neocon.  His paper is scholarly only in format. His major premises have no citations and in at least two cases are straw man logical fallacies that misportray the position of the groups he criticizes. This is "academic" work that a first-year-law student heading for a 1.0 grade point average could make mincemeat of. This paper alone would seem to disqualify him from a Supreme Court nomination and from teaching law. Has he never heard of the First Amendment and why didn't he bother to check whether it is legal to inflict propaganda on the American public? But strange things happen when you're a buddy of an American president. Most noteworthy, however, is that the paper unquestionably puts an advocate of waging psychological warfare against the foreign populations *and* the American public as the head of the White House White House OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2008 through 2012 and on Obama's short list for the Supreme Court. Given the long history of U.S. destabilization of foreign nations via propaganda, of foreign wars waged under false pretenses, of the ongoing barrage of false information disseminated by our federal government, can there be any reasonable doubt that the American public is not being manipulated by false propaganda disseminated by their own government?  An inquiring mind wants to know ...   
Gary Edwards

Tomgram: William Astore, Groundhog Day in the War on Terror | TomDispatch - 0 views

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    "It was August 2, 1990, and Saddam Hussein, formerly Washington's man in Baghdad and its ally against fundamentalist Iran, had just sent his troops across the border into oil-rich Kuwait.  It would prove a turning point in American Middle East policy. Six days later, a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division was dispatched to Saudi Arabia as the vanguard of what the U.S. Army termed "the largest deployment of American troops since Vietnam." The rest of the division would soon follow as part of Operation Desert Storm, which was supposed to drive Saddam's troops from Kuwait and fell the Iraqi autocrat.  The division's battle cry: "The road home... is through Baghdad!" In fact, while paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne penetrated deep into Iraq in the 100-day campaign that followed, no American soldier would make it to the Iraqi capital -- not that time around, anyway.  After the quick triumph of the Gulf War, the Airborne's paratroops instead returned to Ft. Bragg, North Carolina.  And that, it seemed, was the end of the matter, victory parades and all.  Naturally, the soldiers using that battle cry did not have the advantage of history.  They had no way of knowing that it would have been more accurate to chant something like: "The road home always leads back to Baghdad!"  After all, when the First Gulf War ended in the crushing defeat of Saddam's forces and he nonetheless remained in power, the stage was set for the invasion that began Iraq War 2.0 a dozen years later.  Perhaps you still remember that particular "mission accomplished" moment. In the course of that invasion, the 82nd Airborne would conduct "sustained combat operations throughout Iraq."  Once the occupation of the country began, paratroopers from the division would return to Iraq in August 2003 to, as an Army website puts it, "continue command and control over combat operations in and around Baghdad."  In other words, they were tasked with repressing the insurgen
Paul Merrell

FBI Releases Redacted Clinton Foundation Files One Week Before US Election - 0 views

  • With only one week left before the US election, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has released heavily redacted files related to a 2001 investigation into the William J. Clinton Foundation.The investigation concerned former President Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich during his last days in office. "In accordance with the policy regarding Public Corruption investigations, the authority of the SAC is requested to open a Preliminary Investigation," one portion of the documents reads.
  • Both Rich and his partner, Pincus Green, were indicted on a number of charges, including mail fraud, wire fraud, tax evasion, and racketeering, and lived in exile in Switzerland before being pardoned.
  • "[Redacted] has been a major political donor to the Democratic Party, and these donations may have been intended to influence the fugitive’s pardon," the documents state, adding that "public records also indicate that [redacted] contributed approximately [redacted] to the William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation, a foundation to support the Clinton library. "Pursuant to testimony provided at the aforementioned hearings, it appears that the required pardon standards and procedures were not followed."
Gary Edwards

History's Path To Tyranny - Google Docs - 0 views

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    Nice article written by Ron Kilmartin and published to the Bay Area Patriots Group listmail.  Republished here for the purposes of Diigo bookmarking. Ron compares the Obama tyranny methods to those used by Hitler to subjugate the German people and take over the German Republic.  His observations are based on the historical work of William L. Shirer, "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich". excerpt: Over the past year I have been reading a few pages a day of William L. Shirer's history of Nazism, "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" - Nearly 1200 pages and I have finally finished. It is a masterpiece of journalism history based on Shirer's own observations beginning in the 1920s. It is centered of course on Adolf Hitler, his cronies, and his generals. As I read this I began mentally comparing it with our current leader and our current administration's edicts  from the EPA and other agencies. I found that there are many similarities between Hitler's rise to power and Obama's, as well as the tyranny of the Nazi administration. So I decided to write up my comparative observations, as given below. It is not that Obama is following a path to Nazism, but that he seems to be following a path to a tyranny that is all his own: racist, anti-rich,  pro-socialist, anti-industry, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, , anti-Israel,  pro-Islam, anti-Constitution, anti-First Amendment anti-Second Amendment, anti-Fourth Amendment, anti-Tenth Amendment and anti-America, to name a few of the tyrannical tenants of Obamunism. There are many other historical examples of tyrannical leaders besides Hitler, but for now he will do just fine as a model tyrant, and Shirir's tomb provides a ready means of comparison. ...........
Gary Edwards

Who owns the Bank of England? |Dark Politricks - 0 views

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    "Who owns the Bank of England? A brief history of World Banksters By Dark Politricks First a few historical comments by people who helped create two of the worlds most famous central banks, the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve. "I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men." - Woodrow Wilson, after signing the Federal Reserve into existence The Bank of England was created in 1694 by a Scotsman William Paterson who famously said: The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing. - William Paterson The history of the Bank of England and how it was taken over by one powerful family hundreds of years ago. Up until 1946 when it was nationalised the Bank of England was a private run bank that lent money it created out of nothing to the English government and was paid back with interest. A very famous story relates to the Bank of England and the infamous Rothschilds, that all powerful banking family. This story was re-told recently in a BBC documentary about the creation of money and the Bank of England. It revolves around the Battle of Waterloo in which Nathan Rothschild used his inside knowledge of the outcome and his faster horses and couriers to play the market by getting the result of the battle before anyone else knew the outcome. He quickly sold his English bonds and gave all the traders who looked to him for guidance the impression that the French had won at Waterloo. The other traders all rus
Paul Merrell

How William Hague Deceived the House of Commons on Ukraine | David Morrison - 0 views

  • In a statement on 4 March 2014, Foreign Minister William Hague deceived the House of Commons about the legitimacy of the new regime in Ukraine. He led the House to believe that the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, had removed President Yanukovich from power on 22 February in accordance with the Ukrainian constitution. "It is wrong to question the legitimacy of the new authorities", he said. It is simply untrue that the Rada followed the procedure laid down in the Ukrainian constitution to impeach and remove a president from power. Article 108 of the constitution specifies four circumstances in which a president may cease to exercise power before the end of his term. Those are: resignation; inability to exercise his or her powers for reasons of health; removal from office by the procedure of impeachment; death.
  • The procedure for removal from office by impeachment is laid down in Article 111. It is not unlike that required for the impeachment and removal from power of a US president, which could take months. Thus, Article 111 obliges the Rada to establish a special investigatory commission to formulate charges against the president, seek evidence to justify the charges and come to conclusions about the president's guilt for the Rada to consider. To find the president guilty, at least two-thirds of Rada members must assent. Prior to a final vote to remove the president from power, the procedure requires the Constitutional Court of Ukraine to review the case and certify that the constitutional procedure of investigation and consideration has been followed, and the Supreme Court of Ukraine to certify that the acts of which the President is accused are worthy of impeachment. To remove the president from power, at least three-quarters of Rada members must assent. The Rada didn't follow this procedure at all. No investigatory commission was established and the Courts were not involved. On 22 February, the Rada simply passed a bill removing President Yanukovych from office.
  • Furthermore, the bill wasn't even supported by three-quarters of Rada members as required by Article 111 - it was supported by 328 members, when it required 338 (since the Rada has 450 members). Nevertheless, justifying UK support for the new regime in Kiev in the House of Commons on 4 March, William Hague said: "Former President Yanukovych left his post and then left the country, and the decisions on replacing him with an acting President were made by the Rada, the Ukrainian Parliament, by the very large majorities required under the constitution, including with the support of members of former President Yanukovych's party, the Party of Regions, so it is wrong to question the legitimacy of the new authorities." That gives the impression that the procedure prescribed in the Ukrainian constitution for the removal of a president from office had been followed, when in fact it hadn't and therefore the new authorities in Kiev are illegitimate. President Putin questioned the legitimacy of the authorities in Kiev at his press conference on 4 March, just before William Hague spoke in the House of Commons:
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  • "Are the current authorities legitimate? The Parliament is partially, but all the others are not. The current Acting President is definitely not legitimate. There is only one legitimate President, from a legal standpoint. Clearly, he has no power. However, as I have already said, and will repeat: Yanukovych is the only undoubtedly legitimate President. "There are three ways of removing a President under Ukrainian law: one is his death, the other is when he personally steps down, and the third is impeachment. The latter is a well-deliberated constitutional norm. It has to involve the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court and the Rada. This is a complicated and lengthy procedure. It was not carried out. Therefore, from a legal perspective this is an undisputed fact." There is a fourth way - ill health - but, aside from that, Putin is undoubtedly correct.
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    Although directed at comments made by the UK Foreign Minister, similar statements were issued by the Obama Administration. What happened in the Ukraine was a coup, not a legitimate impeachment of its President.  Notice that the article's link to the Ukraine Constitution is now dead. Among the coup leader's other unlawful actions, post-coup the Ukraine Rada repealed the former constitution by simple majority and reinstated the Constitution of 2004. But the enacting legislation was never signed by Ukraine's President, who had fled into exile. Moreover, the 2004 constitution had already been declared void by Ukraine's Constitutional Court because of procedural violations, repeated in its re-enactment. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Ukraine#2004_and_2010_amendments_and_alleged_2014_return_to_2004_amendments  It definitely was a coup, not a legitimate transfer of power.   
Gary Edwards

How the Money Vanished - The Bear Stearns "House of Cards" story by William Cohan - 0 views

  • At 2:00 a.m. on Friday -- Mr. Cohan tells us -- Mr. Geithner called Donald Kohn, the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, and told him that he "wasn't confident that the fallout from the bankruptcy of Bear Stearns could be contained." Taxpayers reading this fascinating tale may wonder whether the fallout from the government's intervention can be contained and, if so, at what cost.
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    Meeting the characters in "House of Cards," it's not easy to conceive of people less deserving of federal assistance. In 1997, Bear Stearns helped pioneer the subprime mortgage-backed security by serving as co-underwriter on a $385 million offering. By the mid-2000s, Bear was the leading issuer of such securities and a leader in collateralized debt obligations, which offered even less transparency to investors. Bear was a vertically integrated manufacturer of mortgage chaos, making individual loans to home buyers, servicing the loans, bundling them into pools for investors, marketing the securities and also borrowing huge sums to finance internal hedge funds that held onto these dodgy assets. House of Cards By William D. Cohan (Doubleday, 468 pages, $27.95) Mr. Cohan describes the succession of government policies that encouraged Bear and others to invest so heavily in mortgage finance, from the Fed's easy money to Clinton-era changes to the Community Reinvestment Act requiring more loans to low-income borrowers. But the firm itself deserves the lion's share of the blame for its own collapse. Suggestions to sell some of its risky mortgage assets, or to raise capital, or to consider merger partners were brushed aside in the years and months leading up to the debacle. Paul Friedman, chief operating officer of Bear's fixed-income division, tells Mr. Cohan that "we did this to ourselves. . . . It's our fault for allowing it to get this far, and for not taking any steps to do anything about it."
Paul Merrell

Virtual Economy's Phantom Job Gains Are Based on Statistical Fraud. And More Fraud Is i... - 0 views

  • Washington can’t stop lying.  Don’t be convinced by last Thursday’s job report that it is your fault if you don’t have a job. Those 288,000 jobs and 6.1% unemployment rate are more fiction than reality.  In his analysis of the June Labor Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, John Williams (www.ShadowStats.com) wrote that the 288,000 June jobs and 6.1% unemployment rate  are “far removed from common experience and underlying reality.” Payrolls were overstated by “massive, hidden shifts in seasonal adjustments,” and the Birth-Death model added the usual phantom jobs.  Williams reports that “the seasonal factors are changed each and every month as part of the concurrent seasonal-adjustment process, which is tantamount to a fraud,” as the changes in the seasonal factors can inflate the jobs number.  While the headline numbers always are on a new basis, the prior reporting is not revised so as to be consistent.
  • The monthly unemployment rates are not comparable, so one doesn’t know whether the official U.3 rate (the headline rate that the financial press reports) went up or down. Moreover, the rate does not count discouraged workers who, unable to find a job, cease looking. To be counted among the U.3 unemployed, the person must have actively looked for work during the four weeks prior to the survey. The U.3 rate automatically declines as people who have been unable to find jobs cease trying to find one and thereby cease to be counted as unemployed. There is a second official measure of unemployment that includes people who have been discouraged for less than one year. That rate, known as U.6, is seldom reported and is double the 6.1% rate. Since 1994 there has been no official measure than includes discouraged people who have not looked for a job for more than a year. Including all discouraged workers produces an unemployment rate that currently stands at 23.1%, almost four times the rate that the financial press reports.
  • What you can take away from this is the opposite of what the presstitute media would have you believe.  The measured rate of unemployment can decline simply because large numbers of the unemployed become discouraged workers, cease looking for work, and cease to be counted in the U.3 and U.6 measures of the unemployment rate.   The decline in the employment-population ratio from 63% prior to the 2008 downturn to 59% today reflects the growth in discouraged workers.  Indeed, the ratio has not recovered its previous level during the alleged recovery, an indication that the recovery is an illusion created by the understated measure of inflation that is used to deflate nominal GDP growth.
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  • Insurance (most likely the paperwork of Obamacare) contributed 8,500 jobs. As so few can purchase homes, “real estate rental and leasing” contributed 8,500 jobs. Professional and business services contributed 67,000 jobs, but 57% of these jobs were in employment services, temporary help services, and services to buildings and dwellings.   That old standby, education and health services, accounted for 33,700 jobs consisting mainly of ambulatory health care services jobs and social assistance jobs of which three-quarters are in child day care services.   The other old standby, waitresses and bartenders, gave us 32,800 jobs, and amusements, gambling, and recreation gave us 3,500 jobs.
  • In other words, the economy did not gain 288,000 new jobs last month.   But let’s assume the economy did gain 288,000 jobs and exam where the claimed jobs are reported to be. Of the alleged 288,000 new jobs, 16,000, or 5.5 percent are in manufacturing, which is not very promising for engineers and blue collar workers.  Growth in goods producing jobs has almost disappeared from the US economy.  As explained below, to alter this problem the government is going to change definitions in order to artificially inflate manufacturing jobs. In June private services account for 82 percent of the supposed new jobs.  The jobs are found mainly in non-tradable domestic services that pay little and cannot be exported to help to close the large US trade deficit. Wholesale and retail trade account for 55,300 jobs.  Do you believe sales are this strong  when retailers are closing stores and when shopping malls are closing?
  • Another indication that there has been no recovery is that Sentier Research’s index of real median household income continued to decline for two years after the alleged recovery began in June 2009.   There has been a slight upturn in real median household income since June 2011, but income remains far below the pre-recession level.   The Birth-Death model adds an average of 62,000 jobs to the reported payroll jobs numbers each month. This arbitrary boost to the payroll jobs numbers is in addition to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ underlying assumption that unreported jobs lost to business failures are matched by unreported new jobs from new business startups, an assumption that does not well fit an economy that fell into recession and is unable to recover.   John Williams concludes that in current BLS reporting, “the aggregate average overstatement of employment change easily exceeds 200,000 jobs per month.”
  • Local government, principally education, gave us 22,000 jobs.   So, where are the jobs for university graduates?  They are practically non-existent. Think of all the MBAs, but June had only 2,300 jobs for management of companies and enterprises. Think of the struggle to get into law and medical schools.  There’s no job payoff. June had jobs for 1,200 in legal services, which includes receptionists and para-legals.  Where are all the law school graduates finding jobs? Offices of physicians (mainly people who fill out the mandated paperwork and comply with all the regulations, which have multiplied under ObamaCare) hired 4,000 people.  Outpatient care centers hired 700 people.  Nursing care facilities hired 2,400 people.  So where are the jobs for the medical school graduates? Aside from all the exaggerations in the jobs numbers of which ShadowStats.com has informed us, just taking the jobs as reported, what kind of economy do these jobs indicate:  a superpower whose pretensions are to exercise hegemony over the world or an economy in which opportunities are disappearing and incomes are falling?
  • Do you think that this jobs picture would be the same if the government in Washington cared about you instead of the mega-rich? Some interesting numbers can be calculated from table A.9 in the BLS press release.  John Williams advises that the BLS is inconsistent in the methods it uses to tabulate the data in table A.9 and that the data is also afflicted by seasonal adjustment problems.  However, as the unemployment rate and payroll jobs are reported regardless of their problems, we can also report the BLS finding that in June 523,000 full-time jobs disappeared and 800,000 part time jobs appeared. Here, perhaps, we have yet another downside of the misnamed Obama “Affordable Care Act.”  Employers are terminating full-time employment and replacing the jobs with part-time employment in order to come in under the 50-person full time employment that makes employers responsible for fringe benefits such as health care. Americans are already experiencing difficulties making ends meet, despite the alleged “recovery.”  If yet another half million Americans have been forced onto part-time pay with consequent loss of health care and other benefits, consumer demand is further compressed, with the consequence, unless hidden by statistical trickery, of a 2nd quarter negative GDP and thus officially the reappearance of recession.
  • What will the government do if a recession cannot be hidden?  If years of unprecedented money printing and Keynesian fiscal deficits have not brought recovery, what will bring recovery?  How far down will US living standards fall for the 99% in order that the 1% can become ever more mega-rich while Washington wastes our diminishing substance exercising hegemony over the world? Just as Washington lied to you about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Assad’s use of chemical weapons, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Waco, and any number of false flag or nonexistent attacks such as Tonkin Gulf, Washington lies to you about jobs and economic recovery.  Don’t believe the spin that you are unemployed because you are shiftless and prefer government handouts to work.  The government does not want you to know that you are unemployed because the corporations offshored American jobs to foreigners and because economic policy only serves the oversized banks and the one percent. Just as the jobs and inflation numbers are rigged and the financial markets are rigged, the corrupt Obama regime is now planning to rig US manufacturing and trade statistics in order to bury all evidence of offshoring’s adverse impact on our economy.
  • The federal governments Economic Classification Policy Committee has come up with a proposal to redefine fact as fantasy in order to hide offshoring’s contribution to the US trade deficit, artificially inflate the number of US manufacturing jobs, and redefine foreign-made manufactured products as US manufactured products.  For example, Apple iPhones made in China and sold in Europe would be reported as a US export of manufactured goods. Read Ben Beachy’s important report on this blatant statistical fraud in CounterPunch’s July 4th weekend edition: http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/07/04/we-didnt-offshore-manufacturing/ China will not agree that the Apple brand name means that the phones are not Chinese production. If the Obama regime succeeds with this fraud, the iPhones would be counted twice, once by China and once by the US, and the double-counting would exaggerate world GDP. For years I have exposed the absurd claim that offshoring is merely the operation of free trade, and I have exposed the incompetent studies by such as Michael Porter at Harvard and Matthew Slaughter at Dartmouth that claimed to prove that the US was benefitting from offshoring its manufacturing.  My book published in 2012 in Germany and in 2013 in the US, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, proves that offshoring has dismantled the ladders of upward mobility that made the US an opportunity society and is responsible for the decline in US economic growth. The lost jobs and decline in the middle class has contributed to the rise in income inequality, the destruction of tax base for cities and states, and loss of population in America’s once great manufacturing centers.
  • For the most part economists have turned a blind eye. Economists serve the globalists.  It pays them well. The corruption in present-day America is total. Psychologists and anthropologists serve war and torture. Economists serve globalism and US financial hegemony. Physicists and chemists serve the war industries. Physicists and computer geeks serve NSA. The media serves the government and the corporations. The political parties serve the six powerful private interest groups that rule the country. No one serves truth and liberty. I predict that within ten years truth and liberty will be forbidden words uttered only by “domestic extremists” who are a threat that must be exterminated without due process of law. America has left us.  We now have the tyranny of the Orwellian state that rules, not by the ballot box and Constitution, but by force and propaganda.
Paul Merrell

Jim Crow returns | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

  • Election officials in 27 states, most of them Republicans, have launched a program that threatens a massive purge of voters from the rolls. Millions, especially black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters, are at risk. Already, tens of thousands have been removed in at least one battleground state, and the numbers are expected to climb, according to a six-month-long, nationwide investigation by Al Jazeera America. At the heart of this voter-roll scrub is the Interstate Crosscheck program, which has generated a master list of nearly 7 million names. Officials say that these names represent legions of fraudsters who are not only registered but have actually voted in two or more states in the same election — a felony punishable by 2 to 10 years in prison. Until now, state elections officials have refused to turn over their Crosscheck lists, some on grounds that these voters are subject to criminal investigation. Now, for the first time, three states — Georgia, Virginia and Washington — have released their lists to Al Jazeera America, providing a total of just over 2 million names.
  • The Crosscheck list of suspected double voters has been compiled by matching names from roughly 110 million voter records from participating states. Interstate Crosscheck is the pet project of Kansas’ controversial Republican secretary of state, Kris Kobach, known for his crusade against voter fraud. The three states’ lists are heavily weighted with names such as Jackson, Garcia, Patel and Kim — ones common among minorities, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, fully 1 in 7 African-Americans in those 27 states, plus the state of Washington (which enrolled in Crosscheck but has decided not to utilize the results), are listed as under suspicion of having voted twice. This also applies to 1 in 8 Asian-Americans and 1 in 8 Hispanic voters. White voters too — 1 in 11 — are at risk of having their names scrubbed from the voter rolls, though not as vulnerable as minorities.If even a fraction of those names are blocked from voting or purged from voter rolls, it could alter the outcome of next week’s electoral battle for control of the U.S. Senate — and perhaps prove decisive in the 2016 presidential vote count.
  • Based on the Crosscheck lists, officials have begun the process of removing names from the rolls — beginning with 41,637 in Virginia alone. Yet the criteria used for matching these double voters are disturbingly inadequate.
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  • In practice, all it takes to become a suspect is sharing a first and last name with a voter in another state. Typical “matches” identifying those who may have voted in both Georgia and Virginia include:Kevin Antonio Hayes of Durham, North Carolina, is a match for a man who voted in Alexandria, Virginia, as Kevin Thomas Hayes.John Paul Williams of Alexandria is supposedly the same man as John R. Williams of Atlanta, Georgia.Robert Dewey Cox of Marietta, Georgia is matched with Robert Glen Cox of Springfield, Virginia.
  • That was the sales pitch. But the actual lists show that not only are middle names commonly mismatched and suffix discrepancies ignored, even birthdates don’t seem to have been taken into account. Moreover, Crosscheck deliberately ignores Social Security mismatches, in the few instances when the numbers are even collected. The Crosscheck instructions for county election officers state, “Social Security numbers are included for verification; the numbers might or might not match.”
  • There are 6,951,484 names on the target list of the 28 states in the Crosscheck group; each of them represents a suspected double voter whose registration has now become subject to challenge and removal. According to a 2013 presentation by Kobach to the National Association of State Election Directors, the program is a highly sophisticated voter-fraud-detection system. The sample matches he showed his audience included the following criteria: first, last and middle name or initial; date of birth; suffixes; and Social Security number, or at least its last four digits.
  • Al Jazeera America visited these and several other potential double voters. John Paul Williams of Alexandria insists he has never used the alias “John R. Williams.” “I’ve never lived in Georgia,” he says.Jo Cox, wife of suspected double voter Robert Glen Cox of Virginia, says she has a solid alibi for him. Cox “is 85 years old and handicapped. He wasn’t in Georgia. Never voted there,” she says. He has also never used the middle name “Dewey.” Twenty-three percent of the names — nearly 1.6 million of them — lack matching middle names. “Jr.” and “Sr.” are ignored, potentially disenfranchising two generations in the same family. And, notably, of those who may have voted twice in the 2012 presidential election, 27 percent were listed as “inactive” voters, meaning that almost 1.9 million may not even have voted once in that race, according to Crosscheck’s own records.
  • Mark Swedlund is a specialist in list analytics whose clients have included eBay, AT&T and Nike. At Al Jazeera America’s request, he conducted a statistical review of Crosscheck’s three lists of suspected double voters. According to Swedlund, “It appears that Crosscheck does have inherent bias to over-selecting for potential scrutiny and purging voters from Asian, Hispanic and Black ethnic groups. In fact, the matching methodology, which presumes people in other states with the same name are matches, will always over-select from groups of people with common surnames.” Swedlund sums up the method for finding two-state voters — simply matching first and last name — as “ludicrous, just crazy.”
  • elen Butler is the executive director of Georgia’s Coalition for the Peoples’ Agenda, which conducts voter drives in minority communities. Any purge list that relies on name matches will contain a built-in racial bias against African-Americans, she says, because “We [African-Americans] took our slave owners’ names.” The search website PeopleSmart notes that 86,020 people in the United States have the name John Jackson. And according to the 2000 U.S. Census, which is the most recent data set, 53 percent of Jacksons are African-American.
  • In North Carolina, state officials have hired former FBI agent Charles W. “Chuck” Stuber, who played a major role in the campaign finance fraud case brought against former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, to, in the words of their press release, “investigate cases of possible voter fraud identified by an interstate cross-check comparing election records from 28 states.”
  • But despite knowing the names and addresses of 192,207 supposed double voters in the state, Stuber has not nabbed a single one in his five months on the job. Josh Lawson, a spokesman for the board of elections, says, “This agency has made no determination as to which portion of these [lists] represent data error or voter fraud.” In fact, to date, Lawson admits that Stuber has found only errors and not one verified fraudulent voter.
Gary Edwards

We Call a Top NSA Whistleblower … And Get the REAL SCOOP on Spying | Washingt... - 0 views

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    "NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake corroborated Klein's assertions, testifying that while the NSA is using Israeli-made NARUS hardware to "seize and save all personal electronic communications." ..................... I then asked the NSA veteran Binney if the government's claim that it is only spying on metadata - and not content - was correct. We have extensively documented that the government is likely recording content as well. (And the government has previously admitted to "accidentally" collecting more information on Americans than was legal, and then gagged the judges so they couldn't disclose the nature or extent of the violations.) Binney said that was not true; the government is gathering everything, including content. Binney explained - as he has many times before - that the government is storing everything, and creating a searchable database … to be used whenever it wants, for any purpose it wants (even just going after someone it doesn't like). ..................... Binney said that former FBI counter-terrorism agent Tim Clemente is correct when he says that no digital data is safe (Clemente says that all digital communications are being recorded). Both Verint and Narus were founded in Israel in the 1990s. *** Binney next confirmed the statement of the author of the Patriot Act - Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner - that the NSA spying programs violate the Patriot Act. After all, the Patriot Act is focused on spying on external threats … not on Americans. Binney asked rhetorically: "How can an American court [FISA or otherwise] tell telecoms to cough up all domestic data?!" Update: Binney sent the following clarifying email about content collection: It's clear to me that they are collecting most e-mail in full plus other text type data on the web. As for phone calls, I don't think they would record/transcribe the approximately 3 billion US-to-US calls every day. It's more likely that they are reco
Gary Edwards

The Impact of NSA Domestic Spying - Business Insider - 0 views

  • NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks.
  • Thanks to AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein and NSA whistleblowers William Binney and Thomas Drake, we know that the NSA has been perpetually amassing not only phone records but virtually all electronic records and communications.
  • As an AT&T engineer, Klein discovered that a special NSA network actively "vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T," emphasizing that "much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic."
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  • Binney — one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history — worked for the Defense Department's foreign signals intelligence agency for 32 years before resigning in late 2001 because he "could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution."
  • He's detailed how, ever since 9/11, the NSA has run a top-secret surveillance program that amasses electronic data — phone calls, emails, banking and travel records, social media, entire government databases — and analyzes the information "to be able to monitor what people are doing" and who they are doing it with.
  • Thanks to AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein and NSA whistleblowers William Binney and Thomas Drake, we know that the NSA has been perpetually amassing not only phone records but virtually all electronic records and communications.
  • Binney would know — he built the original software (i.e. ThinThread) that identified, in real time, networks of connections between individuals based on their electronic communications.
  • "I can pull your entire life together from all those domains and map it out and show your entire life over time," Binney told documentarian Laura Poitras while she was investigating the NSA's $2 billion data storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah. "This is something the KGB, the Stasi or the Gestapo would have loved to have had."
  • Binney — one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history — worked for the Defense Department's foreign signals intelligence agency for 32 years before resigning in late 2001 because he "could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution." He's detailed how, ever since 9/11, the NSA has run a top-secret surveillance program that amasses electronic data — phone calls, GPS information, emails, social media, banking and travel records, entire government databases — and analyzes the information "to be able to monitor what people are doing" and who they are doing it with.
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    Excellent coverage.  Follow the links, they are extraordinary. " Glenn Greenwald revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) is using the so-called "business records" provision of the Patriot Act to secretly collect telephone records of millions of Americans. Although the revelation doesn't surprise privacy advocates, the fact that Greenwald obtained a top secret court order compelling Verizon to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems is the first concrete piece of evidence exposing dragnet domestic surveillance. "
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