Friday, November 3, 2017

Record 95.4 Million Americans Are No Longer In The Labor Force As 968,000 Exit In One Month

ORIGINAL LINK

part%20rate%20oct%202017_0.jpg

In what was otherwise a mediocre jobs report, in which the establishment survey reported that a lower than expected 261K jobs were added to the post-Hurricane economy, the biggest surprise was not in the Establishment survey, but the household, where the unemployment rate tumbled once more, sliding to a new cycle low of 4.1%, for all the wrong reasons, because a quick look at the participation rate metrics showed that in October there was a sharp decline, with the labor force part. rate sliding from 63.1% to 62.7%, back to 4 decade lows...



via IFTTT

Trump Administration Issues Report Concluding That Climate Change Is Real And Man-Made

ORIGINAL LINK

"This assessment concludes, based on extensive evidence, that it is extremely likely that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence.:

           - from "Highlights of the Findings of the U.S. Global Change Research Program Climate Science Special Report", Nov. 3 2017

Surprising many "climate watchers", on Friday the Trump Administration allowed the release of a sweeping federal climate report that began under President Barack Obama and concludes that humans are the primary driver of climate change, causing higher temperatures, sea level rise, agriculture problems and more. The report - whose executive summary alone is 34 pages - found the Earth is undergoing its warmest period “in the history of modern civilization,” fueled primarily by rising levels of carbon dioxide. It was released by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which is mandated by Congress to report every four years on the state of climate change.

The massive study - which is the first volume of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, was years in the making and involved contributions from more than a dozen federal agencies - is meant to be an authoritative assessment of the current state of climate change science.

However, what has caught pundits by surprise, is that many of the report’s conclusions directly contradict the Trump administration’s publicly held positions on climate change.

Case in point: Trump officials like EPA chief Scott Pruitt and Energy Secretary Rick Perry have said they can’t be sure whether human-caused greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are the primary cause of climate change. And yet the Climate Assessment plainly states that is the case. “This assessment concludes, based on extensive evidence, that it is extremely likely that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,” it says. “For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence.”

climate%203_0.jpg

"Globally averaged, annually averaged surface air temperature has increased by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1 degree Centigrade, over the last 115 years," David Fahey, an atmospheric scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and one of the leading authors of the report, told reporters. "This period is now the warmest in the history of modern civilization."

While it concedes that greenhouse gas emission growth has slowed in recent years, it concludes it’s not enough to keep temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius, the limit at which scientists expect the worst effects of climate change to be irreversible.

warming%201_0.jpg

The report also cites “thousands of studies conducted by researchers around the world” that show evidence of a warming globe, including “changes in surface, atmospheric, and oceanic temperatures; melting glaciers; diminishing snow cover; shrinking sea ice; rising sea levels; ocean acidification; and increasing atmospheric water vapor.” The study also includes dire warnings about the impact of climate change on human activities.

Heavy rainfall, which causes flooding, is expected to increase over the rest of the century, and heat waves will become more frequent. Severe weather events like forest fires and drought will grow more prevalent, and sea levels will rise “by at least several inches in the next 15 years and by 1–to-4 feet by 2100.”

 

Severe weather events like forest fires and drought will grow more prevalent, and sea levels will rise “by at least several inches in the next 15 years and by 1–to-4 feet by 2100.”

climate%202_0.jpg

The study is the fourth time this century that federal scientists have put together a report on the impacts of climate change around the globe and in the United States.

What has perplexed analysts, is what was contained in the study, or rather what wasn't: this year’s assessment comes amid concerns that the White House would work to undermine the study’s conclusions. As we reported at the time, scientists shared a draft version of the study with The New York Times in August, seeking extra publicity for its findings in the hope of rebuffing any attempt to water it down.

"Of course there are perhaps fears. We’re all citizens and scientists at the same time. But I think whatever fears we had weren’t realized," NOAA scientist Fahey said. "The word ‘interference’ might have been a threat, but it never materialized. This report says what the scientists wanted it to say."

In an attempt to preserve some ambivalence, the White House issued a statement that “the climate has changed and is always changing” and pointed to a line in the report that concluded the future of climate change depends primarily on “remaining uncertainty in the sensitivity of Earth's climate to [greenhouse gas] emissions.”

The report said, with “very high confidence,” that the magnitude of climate change will also depend on the “amount of greenhouse gases emitted globally” over the next few decades.

“The administration supports rigorous scientific analysis and debate and encourages public comment on the draft documents being released today.To address climate change as well as other risks, the U.S. will continue to promote access to the affordable and reliable energy needed to grow economically, and to support technology, innovation and the development of modern and efficient infrastructure that will reduce emissions and enable us to add

The bottom line, and what may spark controversies among Trump supporters, is that the central premise of the report, that climate change is real and that humans are to blame, contradicts previous statements of President Donald Trump and many high-ranking members of his administration, who have questioned the scientific findings regarding climate change. The EPA had no immediate comment.



via IFTTT

Barrett Brown is Trying to Write a Book Critical of the Justice Department. They are Making it Hard by Trying to Prevent Him Being Paid His Advance.

ORIGINAL LINK

Barrett Brown is currently out of prison and on probation after getting an over five year sentence for essentially linking online to hacked documents (and a supposed threat to an FBI agent that resulted during the investigation for the linking).

Brown tweeted today that the Department of Justice (DOJ), who are seeking to collect the nearly $900,000 in restitution he was found to owe Stratfor (the company whose hacked docs Brown linked to) is preventing him from getting any future money for a book he is working on for Farrar Straus & Giroux.

In an email from Brown's literary agency I've seen, publisher Farrar Straus & Giroux is reported to have said that they have been told by the DOJ to disburse no further money from the book to Brown without the government's permission.

The next installment on Brown's advance is due soon, though this demand has not yet technically prevented money from reaching Brown's hands. Brown says his own lawyers have not been able to tell him whether the DOJ has the power to hold such moneys owed him in limbo as long as they want with such a demand.

According to Brown, his restitution order mentions he should pay "not less than 10 percent" of his gross monthly income toward that restitution. It simultaneously says that stating such a limit that apparently satisfies his obligation "shall not affect the ability of the United States to immediately collect payment in full through garnishment" and a list of other legal means.

At this link, an infuriating phone conversation can be heard between Brown and Emily Shutt with the DOJ out of the Dallas U.S. Attorney's office. She upholds the general principle that they can do whatever they want when it comes to trying to squeeze money out of Brown.

That link also contains a copy of an "application for a writ of garnishment" sent to Barrett's literary agency, Writer's House, demanding money from them. That document says, for what it's worth, that the amount Brown has to pay "is limited to the lesser of (i) 25 percent of disposable income for a week; or (ii) the amount by which disposable earnings for a week exceed 30 times the federal minimum hourly wage." (How they calculate how book advance earnings should be measured against "a week" is unclear. Books are written over many months.)

Brown thinks it is not at all coincidental that his book is highly critical of the DOJ's actions in prosecuting him. (I reported back in April on how Brown was temporarily taken back into custody for talking to the press without explicit Bureau of Prisons permissions; that post contains a brief assessment with links of his entire tortured legal saga.)

Brown figures what makes his case perhaps unique to the DOJ is that in most other cases, the agency "isn't...trying to complicate publication of a major book that will provide new information on criminality from its office," said Brown in an email today.

As far as Brown knows, a similar insistence on garnishment or holds on his income has not gone to one of his other sources of income, D Magazine. "If this was really about getting restitution for Stratfor, they would have been put through this same process," Brown suggests. "But D Magazine is run by Wick Allison, the former National Review [publisher] who was the one to pay $10,000 to that NYC firm to get me out when I was arrested in April, so they're probably reluctant to expose themselves to that."

This move of the DOJ's indeed might have a chilling effect on his ability to express his criticism of them, he says.

"The great majority of my income comes from these staggered advances, and any other income I try to make would result in further subpoenas and writes of garnishment for whatever outlet I write for," he says. "Even if I got a job at a burger joint, that money would likewise be denied to me indefinitely via this same process. I'll be out of money in a month. It's difficult to write a book under those circumstances, and it's difficult to get further work when the DOJ can force any employer to spend a great deal of time responding to subpoenas and ignoring further requests for direction."

He's unhappy but not surprised: "But given that they had me arrested without charges for giving an interview to Vice back in April, and only let me out when one of my other publishers hired a major law firm to threaten to take it to a judge and demand cause, these people know that they can get away with these things without prompting the degree of press coverage necessary to force them to stop their harassment campaign. This is the price we pay when we aggressively pursue corruption in law enforcement and intelligence; these people know they're immune to consequences."

Detailed background on Brown's legal travails can be found at the Free Barrett Brown website. The founder of that website is involved in an ongoing lawsuit against a U.S. Attorney for seeking via subpoena private information on everyone donating to his legal defense fund, claiming that demand violated both the First Amendment and Stored Communications Act.



via IFTTT

Trump Was Right: Mainstream Newscasts Entirely Ignored Clinton-DNC Rigging Revelations

ORIGINAL LINK

20171103_HILL_1_0.jpg

President Trump has been actively tweeting this morning as he heads to Asia, but one of his messages particularly caught our eye... That cannot be, right? And considering the source was once a well-sponsored, well-respected contributor to many of these organizations, we were shocked. So we decided to do a little fact-checking.



via IFTTT

It’s Not One Side Or The Other, It’s The Whole Damn Thing

ORIGINAL LINK

become_a_patron_button.png

TheLastAmericanVagabond.com

What America might want to know right now is: how come Hillary Clinton doesn’t have any legal problems? Why aren’t DOJ investigators examining the financial records of the Clinton Foundation? You would think somebody would want to find out how over $120 million of Russian “charitable donations” ended up on its ledgers around the time that Secretary […]

The post It’s Not One Side Or The Other, It’s The Whole Damn Thing appeared first on The Last American Vagabond.



via IFTTT

Thursday, November 2, 2017

12 Shocking Facts About Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller

ORIGINAL LINK

Talking heads act like Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is fair, impartial and unbiased.

But the facts are a wee bit different …

Failure to Aggressively Prosecute the BCCI Scandal

The BBC noted:

[Mueller] is also known for leading the probe into the 1991 collapse of the Luxembourg-registered Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

Williams Safire wrote in the New York Times:

The B.C.C.I. scandal involves the laundering of drug money, the illicit financing of terrorism and of arms to Iraq, the easy purchase of respectability and the corruption of the world banking system.

For more than a decade, the biggest banking swindle in history worked beautifully. Between $5 billion and $15 billion was bilked from governments and individual depositors to be put to the most evil of purposes — while lawmen and regulators slept.

Now the fight among investigators is coming out into the open. Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who gave impetus to long-contained probes, told a Senate subcommittee headed by Senator John Kerry that he is getting no cooperation from the Thornburgh Justice Department.

Justice’s Criminal Division chief, Robert Mueller, tells me he will have a hatchet-burying session with the independent-minded D.A. next week, and vehemently denies having told British intelligence to stop cooperating with the Manhattan grand jury.


Mueller’s handling of the BCCI scandal as the point man for the Justice Department was widely criticized.  As noted by a Senate report written by Senators Kerry and Brown:

Over the past two years, the Justice Department’s handling of BCCI has been criticized in numerous editorials in major newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, reflecting similar criticism on the part of several Congressmen, including the chairman of the Subcommittee, Senator Kerry; the chief Customs undercover officer who handled the BCCI drug-money laundering sting, Robert Mazur; his superior at Customs, Commissioner William von Raab; New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau; former Senate investigator Jack Blum, and, within the Justice Department itself, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Dexter Lehtinen.

Typical editorials criticized Justice’s prosecution of BCCI as “sluggish,” “conspicuously slow,” “inattentive,” and “lethargic.” Several editorials noted that there had been “poor cooperation” by Justice with other agencies. One stated that “the Justice Department seems to have been holding up information that should have been passed on” to regulators and others. Another that “the Justice Department’s secretive conduct in dealing with BCCI requires a better explanation than any so far offered.

***

Under Assistant Attorney General Mueller, the Department assigned nearly three dozen attorneys to the case. During 1992, the Department brought several indictments, which remained narrower, less detailed and, at times, seemingly in response to the efforts of District Attorney Robert Morgenthau of New York, the Federal Reserve, or both

***

Suddenly, on August 22, Dennis Saylor, chief assistant to Assistant Attorney General Mueller, called Lehtinen and, according to the US Attorney, “indicated to me that I was directed not to return the indictment.”

The Senate Report also noted:

While the Justice Department’s handling of BCCI has received substantial criticism, the office of Robert Morgenthau, District Attorney of New York, has generally received credit for breaking open the BCCI investigation.

***

In going after BCCI, Morgenthau’s office quickly found that in addition to fighting off the bank, it would receive resistance from almost every other institution or entity connected to BCCI, including at various times, BCCI’s multitude of prominent and politically well-connected lawyers, BCCI’s accountants, BCCI’s shareholders, the Bank of England, the British Serious Fraud Office, and the U.S. Department of Justice.

Squashing Warning Signs that May Have Stopped 9/11

Larry Klayman writes:

Robert Mueller first hit my radar … just months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center.

***

I came to meet and later represent FBI Special Agents Robert Wright and John Vincent, of the agency’s Chicago Counter-Terrorism Field Office. During our meeting, both Special Agents Wright and Vincent revealed to me that they had been conducting a counterterrorism investigation of Saudi money laundering into and in the United States, and they both believed that a massive terrorist attack was imminent.

In the course of this investigation, both special agents had asked a fellow FBI agent who was undercover, one of Muslim descent, to be wired to turn up further evidence of this terrorist operation. The Muslim agent refused, indignantly telling both Wright and Vincent that Muslims don’t spy and rat on other Muslims. In shock, my soon-to-be clients reported this to their supervisors at the FBI, but no action was taken. To make matters worse, Wright’s and Vincent’s FBI supervisors quashed their investigation. They both believed that the order to kill the investigation came from the highest reaches of the FBI, and, upset it not outraged by this cover-up, Wright then decided to write a book detailing this breach of FBI honor.

The only way I could explain this cover-up was that then-FBI Director Robert Mueller was sensitive to the ties between the family of President George W. Bush and the Saudi royal family.

***

Director Mueller, along with his “yes men” supervisors at the agency, not only quashed my clients’ investigation and ignored the disloyalty of the Muslim undercover agent, but then missed the warning signs leading up to September 11 – the biggest intelligence failure in American history, even surpassing Pearl Harbor.

But shamelessly, despite this historic intelligence failure and the World Trade Center terrorist attacks that ensued, Mueller later led an effort to drum both Special Agents Wright and Vincent out of the FBI, in part by attempting to remove their security clearances, as a “reward” for their candor.

FBI special agent – and a 2002 Time Person of the Year – Colleen Rowley points out:

The FBI and all the other officials claimed that there were no clues, that they had no warning [about 9/11] etc., and that was not the case. There had been all kinds of memos and intelligence coming in.

But overwhelming evidence shows that 9/11 was foreseeable. Indeed, Al Qaeda crashing planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was itself foreseeable. Even the chair of the 9/11 Commission said that the attack was preventable.

Mueller was one of the people who dropped the ball and let 9/11 happen.

Allowing Escape of Saudi Persons Connected to Bin Laden

Right after 9/11, American airspace was closed down. Yet Mueller was one of the people who allowed relatives of Bin Laden and other persons of interest fly back to Saudi Arabia.

Round-Up of Innocent People for P.R. Purposes

Rowley notes:

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Mueller directed the “post 9/11 round-up” of about 1,000 immigrants who mostly happened to be in the wrong place (the New York City area) at the wrong time.  FBI Headquarters encouraged more and more detentions for what seemed to be essentially P.R. purposes. Field offices were required to report daily the number of detentions in order to supply grist for FBI press releases about FBI “progress” in fighting terrorism. Consequently, some of the detainees were brutalized and jailed for up to a year despite the fact that none turned out to be terrorists.

9/11 Cover Up

Rowley says:

TIME Magazine would probably have not called my own disclosures a “bombshell memo” to the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry in May 2002 if it had not been for Mueller’s having so misled everyone after 9/11.

In addition, Rowley says that the FBI sent Soviet-style “minders” to her interviews with the Joint Intelligence Committee investigation of 9/11, to make sure that she didn’t say anything the FBI didn’t like. The chairs of both the 9/11 Commission and the Official Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 confirmed that government “minders” obstructed the investigation into 9/11 by intimidating witnesses (and see this).

Mueller’s FBI also obstructed the 9/11 investigation in many other ways. For example, an FBI informant hosted and rented a room to two hijackers in 2000. Specifically, investigators for the Congressional Joint Inquiry discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and even rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location. See this and this.

Harper’s notes:

Bob Graham, the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me recently that Robert Mueller, then the FBI director (and now the special counsel investigating connections between Russia and the Trump campaign) made “the strongest objections” to Jacobson and his colleagues visiting San Diego.

Graham and his team defied Mueller’s efforts, and Jacobson flew west. There he discovered that his hunch was correct. The FBI files in California were replete with extraordinary and damning details …

***

Nevertheless, Mueller adamantly refused their demands to interview him, even when backed by a congressional subpoena, and removed Shaikh to an undisclosed location ‘for his own safety.’

Graham also wrote that the FBI also “insisted that we could not, even in the most sanitized manner, tell the American people that an FBI informant had a relationship with two of the hijackers.”

And Kristen Breitweiser – one of the four 9/11 widows instrumental in forcing the government to form the 9/11 Commission to investigate the 2001 attacks – points out:

Mueller and other FBI officials had purposely tried to keep any incriminating information specifically surrounding the Saudis out of the Inquiry’s investigative hands. To repeat, there was a concerted effort by the FBI and the Bush Administration to keep incriminating Saudi evidence out of the Inquiry’s investigation. And for the exception of the 29 full pages, they succeeded in their effort.

Anthrax Frame-Up

Mueller also presided over the incredibly flawed anthrax investigation.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office says the FBI’s investigation was “flawed and inaccurate”. The investigation was so bogus that a senator called for an “independent review and assessment of how the FBI handled its investigation in the anthrax case.”

The head of the FBI’s anthrax investigation says the whole thing was a sham. He says that the FBI higher-ups “greatly obstructed and impeded the investigation”, that there were “politically motivated communication embargoes from FBI Headquarters”.

The FBI’s anthrax investigation head said that the FBI framed scientist Bruce Ivins. On July 6, 2006, he filed a whistleblower report of mismanagement to the FBI’s Deputy Director pursuant to Title 5, United States Code, Section 2303, which noted:

(j) the FBI’s fingering of Bruce Ivins as the anthrax mailer; and, (k) the FBI’s subsequent efforts to railroad the prosecution of Ivins in the face of daunting exculpatory evidence.

Following the announcement of its circumstantial case against Ivins, Defendants DOJ and FBI crafted an elaborate perception management campaign to bolster their assertion of Ivins’ guilt. These efforts included press conferences and highly selective evidentiary presentations which were replete with material omissions.

In other words, Mueller presided over the attempt to frame an innocent man (and see this).

Unsure About Assassination of U.S. Citizens Living On U.S. Soil

Rather than saying “of course not!”, Mueller said that he wasn’t sure whether Obama had the right to assassinate Americans living on American soil.

Constitutional expert Jonathan Turley commented at the time:

One would hope that the FBI Director would have a handle on a few details guiding his responsibilities, including whether he can kill citizens without a charge or court order.

***

He appeared unclear whether he had the power under the Obama Kill Doctrine or, in the very least, was unwilling to discuss that power. For civil libertarians, the answer should be easy: “Of course, I do not have that power under the Constitution.”

Spying on Americans

Mueller participated in one of the greatest expansions of mass surveillance in human history.

As we noted in 2013:

NBC News reports:

NBC News has learned that under the post-9/11 Patriot Act, the government has been collecting records on every phone call made in the U.S.

On March 2011, FBI Director Robert Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee:

We put in place technological improvements relating to the capabilities of a database to pull together past emails and future ones as they come in so that it does not require an individualized search.

Remember, the FBI – unlike the CIA – deals with internal matters within the borders of the United States.

On May 1st of this year, former FBI agent Tim Clemente told CNN’s Erin Burnett that all present and past phone calls were recorded:

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone fcompanies to give that up at this point. It’s not a voice mail. It’s just a conversation. There’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

CLEMENTE: “No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the ainvestigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

BURNETT: “So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.

CLEMENTE: “No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.”

The next day, Clemente again appeared on CNN, this time with host Carol Costello, and she asked him about those remarks. He reiterated what he said the night before but added expressly that “all digital communications in the past” are recorded and stored:

NSA whistleblowers say that this means that the NSA collects “word for word” all of our communications.

Colleen Rowley writes:

Mueller’s FBI was also severely criticized by Department of Justice Inspector Generals finding the FBI overstepped the law improperly serving hundreds of thousands of “national security letters” to obtain private (and irrelevant) metadata on citizens, and for infiltrating nonviolent anti-war groups under the guise of investigating “terrorism.”

Torture

Rowley also points out:

Mueller was even okay with the CIA conducting torture programs after his own agents warned against participation. Agents were simply instructed not to document such torture, and any “war crimes files” were made to disappear. Not only did “collect it all” surveillance and torture programs continue, but Mueller’s (and then Comey’s) FBI later worked to prosecute NSA and CIA whistleblowers who revealed these illegalities.

Iraq War

Rowley notes:

When you had the lead-up to the Iraq War … Mueller and, of course, the CIA and all the other directors, saluted smartly and went along with what Bush wanted, which was to gin up the intelligence to make a pretext for the Iraq War. For instance, in the case of the FBI, they actually had a receipt, and other documentary proof, that one of the hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had not been in Prague, as Dick Cheney was alleging. And yet those directors more or less kept quiet. That included … CIA, FBI, Mueller, and it included also the deputy attorney general at the time, James Comey.

Covering Up for Turkish Terrorists

Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator who has been deemed credible by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General, several senators (free subscription required), and a coalition of prominent conservative and liberal groups, who the ACLU described as “The most gagged person in the history of the United States of America”, and who famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg says possesses information “far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers”, says that Mueller covered up a Turkish terror network.

Gagging Whistleblowers

Edmonds also said that Mueller gagged her and other whistleblowers.

Conclusion

Rather than being “above the fray”,  Mueller is an authoritarian and water-carrier for the status quo and the powers-that-be.

As Coleen Rowley puts it:

Mueller was chosen as Special Counsel not because he has integrity but because he will do what the powerful want him to do.

Mueller didn’t speak the truth about a war he knew to be unjustified. He didn’t speak out against torture. He didn’t speak out against unconstitutional surveillance. And he didn’t tell the truth about 9/11. He is just “their man.”

And:

It’s sad that political partisanship is so blinding and that so few people remember the actual sordid history.

12 Shocking Facts About Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller was originally published on Washington's Blog



via IFTTT

Media Roots retweeted: Twitter boasts that it "hid" 48% of tweets with the #DNCLeaks hashtag, despite only 2% coming from "potentially Russian-linked accounts"

ORIGINAL LINK
A7cfxZ4g_normal.jpg Michael Tracey
@mtracey
Media Roots retweeted:
Twitter boasts that it "hid" 48% of tweets with the #DNCLeaks hashtag, despite only 2% coming from "potentially Russian-linked accounts"

DNmeLqzVwAAjFHa.jpg:large



via IFTTT

Video of NYC Terrorist Instantly Released—Still No Video of Vegas Shooter Despite 1000s of Cameras

ORIGINAL LINK
Tuesday afternoon, a suspect, identified as Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, according to two law enforcement sources, rented a pickup truck, drove it onto a busy bicycle path and mowed down innocent people before getting...

via IFTTT

Facebook, Google and Twitter admit large-scale Russian infiltration

ORIGINAL LINK

Facebook, Twitter, and Google Testify

Colin Stretch, general counsel at Facebook, Sean Edgett, acting general counsel at Twitter, and Richard Salgado, director of law enforcement and information security at Google, testify. (Credit: Google/Drew Angerer)

In hearings on Capitol Hill on Tuesday and Wednesday, senators of both parties repeatedly rebuked attorneys for Google, Facebook and Twitter for doing virtually nothing to detect Russian attempts to manipulate American politics in the 2016 election, and for underestimating the size and scope of that interference in their initial reports to the federal government.

“I don’t think you get it. I think the fact that you’re general counsels, you defend your company,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., told the top attorneys for the three social media giants. “What we’re talking about is the beginning of cyber-warfare.”

The fact that none of the three social media giants decided to send their chief executives to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee was also a subject of concern for Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine:

“It’s fine to send general counsel, but I think if you could take a message back from this committee, if we go through this exercise again, we would appreciate seeing the top people who are actually making the decisions,” he said.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the panel’s ranking Democrat, chastised the tech companies for not being responsive to governmental requests for information, even as the attorneys tried to put a contrite spin on their testimonies.

“I hear all your words,” Warner said, “but I have more than a little bit of frustration that many of us on this committee have been raising this issue since the beginning of this year, and our claims were frankly blown off by the leaderships of your companies.”

In a filing submitted this week to Congress, Facebook admitted that it had drastically underreported the influence that Russian internet trolls had wielded within its platform. In October, the company had claimed that 10 million Americans had seen advertisements purchased by people affiliated with various trolling operations run out of Russia. Facebook now says it believes that 126 million Americans had seen Russian-generated political content, which is almost equivalent to the number of voters who cast ballots in last year’s election.

The extent of the Russian meddling is likely to be even greater than that, however. Both Google and Twitter appear to be relying on data shared by Facebook rather than doing their own research, meaning that their conclusions are “derivative,” as Warner noted during the hearing.

Members of both the House and Senate Intelligence committees have not yet agreed to release all the advertisements purchased by social media accounts believed to be operated by people working for the “Internet Research Agency,”a large-scale trolling operation funded by the Russian government. Several of the ads were released in Wednesday hearing, however, and they reveal that the propagandists targeted a wide range of political issues and partisan viewpoints with their messages. Under U.S. law, it is illegal for foreign nationals to purchase political advertising.

Oftentimes, the ads in question were actually paid for in rubles, the Russian currency. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., focused on this in tough questioning to Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch.

“People are buying ads on your platform with rubles,” Franken said. “They’re political ads. You put billions of data points together all the time — that’s what I hear that these platforms do.”

In his response, Stretch said that the currency transactions were “a signal we should have been alert to,” but would not commit Facebook to prohibiting the purchase of political advertising in foreign currencies.

“I can tell you that we’re not going to permit political advertising by foreign actors,” Stretch said. “The reason I’m hesitating on foreign currency is that it’s relatively easy for bad actors to switch currency. It’s a signal, but it’s not enough — we have to sweep more broadly.”

Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., the chairman of the Senate committee, noted one particularly striking contrast where Russian-linked Facebook accounts sought to organize dueling rallies in Texas. One of the pages, called Heart of Texas, purchased an ad to protest “the Islamization of Texas” by directing people to assemble outside the Islamic Center of Houston. Another Russian-controlled page, called United Muslims of America, put together another event in the same location.

In his questioning of the witnesses, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., noted that the three companies only seemed to be banning accounts that misrepresented their owners’ identities, meaning that open attempts on the part of Russia or any other country to spread propaganda to Americans would likely be permissible on most social media services.

“We don’t have state-sponsored manipulation of elections as one of our rules,” Twitter’s chief attorney, Sean Edgett, said. “The other rules, like [a ban on] inflammatory ad content, would take down most of these posts, but we don’t outright ban it.”

Twitter has been more aggressive than Facebook and Google in that it has now banned Sputnik News and RT, websites that are openly owned by the Russian government, from purchasing advertising on its platform. Twitter’s reaction may have been a attempt to get ahead of disclosures of that it offered RT the chance to purchase 15 percent of the advertisements the microblogging service was planning to sell in the general election.

All three corporate attorneys said their employers were trying to figure out how to stop foreign interference in election, but it became clear from their testimony that none of the tech giants is aware of the extent to which their platforms are used for such purposes. Under questioning from Rubio, none of the three could say whether countries beyond Russia had attempted to infiltrate American politics.

None of the senators of either party seemed satisfied with what they were hearing. Feinstein likely spoke for the room when she cautioned the tech companies: “You’ve created these platforms and now they’re being misused, and you have to be the ones to do something about it. Or we will.”



via IFTTT

Wednesday, November 1, 2017

Vaccine industry in panic as scientific study solves the riddle of why flu shots don't work

ORIGINAL LINK
Woman-Science-Test-Vaccine-Vials-Dropper (Natural News) The flu shot is a quack science medical hoax. While some vaccines do confer immunization effectiveness, the flu shot isn’t one of them. Recent studies, for example, have proven that flu shots sharply weaken immunity in subsequent years following immunization. In some years, the flu shot viral strains are completely wrong, offering no...


via IFTTT

Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Court: Student can be expelled for calling gay ‘marriage’ a sin on Facebook

ORIGINAL LINK
A Christian student who was expelled from university after posting on Facebook in support of Biblical teaching on marriage and sexual ethics has lost his case in a judicial review...

via IFTTT

Communism's bloody legacy: 100 years and 100 million deaths

ORIGINAL LINK

This year marks the 100th anniversary of one of the worst mistakes ever made: the Communist revolution in Russia.

Communist regimes went on to kill about 100 million people. Most died in famines after socialist tyrants forced people to practice inefficient collective farming. Millions of others were executed in political purges.

Yet when the Russian Revolution happened, people both inside and outside Russia were excited . Crowds cheered Lenin. No longer would nobles rule; no longer would capitalists exploit workers. Now the people would prosper together.

British journalist Theodore Rothstein wrote, “The undivided sway of the Imperialist nightmare is at an end … (there will be) rule of the labouring classes.”

But you can’t have government plan every aspect of people’s lives and expect things to go well. Instead, you get bureaucratic planning commissions and secret police.

That won’t stop some Americans from celebrating Communism’s anniversary.

A day of anti-Trump protests is scheduled for Nov. 4, and I’m sure some protesters will wave hammer-and-sickle flags. Some will wear Che Guevara shirts.

A few commentators will call the protesters “idealistic” but impractical. They shouldn’t. We should call them supporters of mass murder.

Lenin ordered the hanging of 100 property owners at the very start of the Revolution, saying people needed to see the deaths of “landlords, rich men, bloodsuckers.”

Mass murder and starvation rapidly increased the death toll after that.

It wasn’t exactly what philosopher Karl Marx had in mind – but it shouldn’t have surprised anyone. Marx’s writing is filled with comparisons of capitalists to werewolves and other predators who must be destroyed.

Marx admitted that capitalism is productive but said “capital obtains this ability only by constantly sucking in living labor as its soul, vampire-like.”

John Stossel’s logic is undeniable and refreshing — don’t miss his latest book, “No, They Can’t Why: Government Fails, but Individuals Succeed”

Even as the Russian regime killed millions, some journalists and intellectuals covered up the crimes.

Stalin kept most media out, so few Americans knew that millions were starving, but New York Times writer Walter Duranty saw it first-hand.

Yet he “covered up Stalin’s crimes,” says Tom Palmer of the Atlas Network, a group that promotes free-market ideas around the world.

Because Duranty wanted to support “the cause,” he wrote that “report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.”

Duranty “saw the truckloads of bodies,” says Palmer, yet “he wrote on the front page of the New York Times how wonderful everything was.” He even got a Pulitzer Prize for it.

In some ways, times haven’t changed that much. This year, the Times ran a series of essays commemorating the anniversary of Russian Communism, including one piece arguing that sex was better in the Soviet Union because the Revolution destroyed macho capitalist culture.

At least the New York Times eventually admitted that Duranty’s work was “some of the worst reporting in this newspaper,” but the Pulitzer committee never withdrew its prize.

Communism kills wherever it’s practiced. But people still people believe. Making a video on Communism’s 100th anniversary, I interviewed Lily Tang Williams, who grew up under the regime in China.

“Mao was like a god to me,” she recounts. “In the morning, we were encouraged to chant and to confess to dear Chairman Mao.”

Under Mao, Williams nearly starved. “I was so hungry. My uncle taught me how to trap rats. But the problem is, everybody is trying to catch rats. Rats run out, too.”

Still, she says, she was so brainwashed by Communist propaganda that she “cried my eyes out when Mao died.”

But then, “when I was college student, I met a U.S. exchange student … He showed me a pocket Constitution and Declaration of Independence. A light bulb came on!”

For the first time, she realized, “I have rights … natural rights that cannot be taken away. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

She escaped to the United States. Now she says her mission in life is to teach Americans the importance of liberty.

I think her message is wiser than that of Karl Marx, Lenin and Stalin.

“Big, powerful government, it’s very scary,” she warns. “It will keep growing like cancer, will never stop. If you empower government, not the individuals, we’re going to lose this free country!”

 



via IFTTT

Will Spacey scandal expose 'gay' male obsession with young teens?

ORIGINAL LINK

I’d like to weigh in on the Kevin Spacey (age 26)/Anthony Rapp (age 14) tip-of-the-iceberg pederasty scandal that may rip open Hollywood like the hull of the Titanic.

Speaking as the only person ever charged for “crimes against humanity” (not a joke) in significant part for discussing the pedophile core of “gay” male culture – and one of the first people ever listed as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center (for documenting that culture at the core of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party) – I’d just like to say, in advance, “I told you so.”

Frankly, however, pedophilia is too broad a term for this all-too-common aspect of homosexual orientation and misses the gender-specific nature of the problem. The correct term is pederasty, euphemistically known in historic “gay” society as “man/boy love,” as in the infamous North American Man/Boy Love Association, or NAMBLA – which was a regular participant in the early “gay”-pride parades before the LGBT movement got taken over by the marketing and PR strategists of the Democratic Party.

To be clear, I’m not saying all or even most men who identify as “gay” molest children. Even the word “children” is misleading in this context, since “children” connotes preschool and grammar school ages, while the target of pederasts are young teen and slightly pre-teen boys. And I’m not saying lesbians share this problem to the same extent that it exists in male homosexual culture (though lesbian abuse of girls is a problem, too).

What I am saying is that male homosexuality identity (from the days when the ancient Spartan military routinely drafted pre-teen boys and paired them with adult homosexual men) has always been oriented toward youth, and it is this man/boy sexual culture that not only spawned the modern “gay” movement but remains the largely hidden – in fact, politically protected and shielded – core of “gay” male society today. The American public has only once been allowed a glimpse of the pederast underworld – the Catholic priest scandal – which was exposed only because the left’s smoldering hatred of the Catholic Church briefly overwhelmed its protectiveness of “gay” society – but even they all conspired to falsely characterize the priests’ pederasty as “pedophilia” to obscure the homosexual connection.

Consider just a few salient facts documented in “The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party and on my blog ScottLively.net:

The German “Grandfather of Gay Rights,” Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, was molested at 14 by his riding instructor and went on to form the world’s first “gay rights” organization in the 1860s.

The first characterization of homosexual sodomy as a “human right” was by the German Society for Human Rights in the 1920s, whose most famous member was Hitler’s “gay” second-in-command Ernst Roehm (head of the Brown Shirts). Munich police records identified at least 11 boys recruited from a local high school for sex with Roehm – according to journalist Heinz Hoene’s book, “The Order of the Death’s Head” (called a “monumental achievement” by the New York Times).

The first American homosexual organization was the U.S. chapter of Roehm’s Society for Human Rights, started in Chicago in 1924 by Henry Gerber and two other men, all of whom were arrested shortly thereafter for sex with teen boys.

Related column: “C’mon, Disney! Tell the truth about same-sex attraction in kids,” by Linda Harvey

One of those abused boys, as an adult, molested another teen boy named Harry Hay, who is known today as the “Father of the American Gay Rights Movement.” Until his death, Hay was an outspoken advocate for man/boy sex and wore a sweatshirt reading “NAMBLA Walks with Me” in “gay”-pride parades after the pederast group had been banned by the marketing gurus who took over the “gay” movement.

The Stonewall Riots that are commemorated each year as “Gay Pride Day” were triggered by “gay” male patrons of the Stonewall Bar in New York City, angered at police efforts to arrest a 14-year-old boy transvestite prostitute (Mark Pascal, Varieties of Man Boy Love).

Many early “gay” activists were open pederasts, including NAMBLA founder David Thorstad, who also launched the Gay Activist Alliance in 1969, which spawned – directly or indirectly – innumerable LGBT activist organizations, including today’s political behemoth, the Washington, D.C.-based Human Rights Campaign, or HRC, which named me public enemy No. 1 of the global LGBT agenda in 2014.

HRC’s founder was Terrance “Terry” Bean, an Obama fundraising bundler accused of sex with a teen boy in 2014 but who escaped prosecution when (after a public monetary settlement offer) the boy (who had been in hiding at the time) declined to testify.

Terry Bean is based in Portland, Oregon, a sewer of rampant pederasty and home of the “gay” apologist Gus van Sant, whose films have romanticized male teen prostitution, and of Sam Adams, who was also accused of sex with a teen boy while mayor (one of many big-city mayors in recent years – most recently Ed Murray of Seattle, who resigned in September).

Portland is where I had my eyes opened to the destructive LGBT agenda as spokesman for the No Special Rights Act (1992), and where I faced the first four of five major lawsuits by the “gay” movement trying unsuccessfully to silence my criticism.

It was there I learned about the homosexual/Nazi connection that led to writing “The Pink Swastika” with Jewish researcher Kevin E. Abrams – dangerous knowledge that got me targeted by the ultra-powerful Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC, long before it would begin smearing the pro-family movement as a whole.

Here is the SPLC’s dirty little secret that sort of ties everything together in one little vignette: the man/boy sex angle, the Hollywood angle, the Nazi angle and the protect “gays” from the pederast connection at all costs angle.

You see, SPLC’s most famous anti-Nazi lawsuit was against white supremacist Tom Metzger of Southern California, by linking him to the beating death of Ethiopian graduate student Mulugeta Seraw by Skinhead death-metal musician Ken “Death” Mieske and two others in Portland in 1988. Mieske was Metzger’s protégé and likely “gay” lover. He was also the darling of Hollywood “gay” giant Gus Van Sant, who once made a film about Mieske upon his release from prison for an earlier burglary conviction, titled “Ken Death Gets Out of Jail.” Mieske’s history as a teen sexual target of older men is documented in a book about the Seraw murder by Elinor Langer, titled appropriately “A Hundred Little Hitlers.” There’s more on the topic here.

I began this column stating that the Hollywood pederast Titanic may be about to sink – but then again it may not, because there is no higher priority on the political left than protecting the “gay” movement from the link to pederasty.

If the SPLC could bury the pederast and Van Sant connection in the Metzger “gay” Nazi case, while simultaneously mocking “The Pink Swastika” as ludicrous – without a hint of media coverage exposing its hypocrisy; and if Terry Bean could get off scot-free without anyone on the left admitting that his teen accuser may have been paid off under their very noses; and if Kevin Spacey can escape any real consequences for his assault of Anthony Rapp by turning his apology into a “coming-out” celebration (the most “sacred” of LGBT ceremonies), then there may never be a day of public reckoning for the many chickenhawks of Hollywood – whose scope of control and abuse would make Harvey Weinstein and James Toback seem like altar boys by comparison.

 

 

 

 

 



via IFTTT

Monday, October 30, 2017

The nine principles of ethical policing as written in 1829

ORIGINAL LINK

Policing in America today is a far cry from what policing was like just even a couple of generations ago. While it needs to be said that there are indeed many good-minded police in our society, there is also a startling rise in a new kind of insidious police brutality in America. A new callousness where many cops and police departments appear to be preying on the American public while viewing American citizens as dangerous enemies that must be dominated at all costs.Everyday another terrible video...

via IFTTT

Russian Content May Have Reached 126 Million Facebook Users, There Is Just One Catch

ORIGINAL LINK

One month ago, the media world and political punditry was in a furore after Facebook revealed that some 470 alleged Russian troll accounts had paid Facebook a whopping $100,000 to purchase 3,000 advertisements potentially influencing the outcome of the election (even though many of the ads "showed support for Clinton" and only half ran before the actual election). The furore did not last long: gradually the story fizzled, before becoming a watercooler joke that Russia had managed to buy the outcome of the US presidential election for a whopping 100 grand - which would make Vladimir Putin not only a propaganda genius of the highest order, but the best damn advertising mastermind to ever live, generating the highest ad IRR in history .

So, eager to keep the "Russia interfered in US elections" meme going (not to be confused with what the Washington Post one year ago titled "The long history of the U.S. interfering with elections elsewhere"), tomorrow Facebook's general counsel,  Colin Stretch , together with his peers from Google and Twitter, will will sit before the Senate judiciary subcommittee on crime and terrorism and try to fascinate the public with some far bigger numbers, while hopefully also pitching the vast reach Facebook and other social media have. To do that, Facebook will say that it estimates that a grand total of 126 million people may have seen content posted by Russian-backed accounts over more than two years that, as the WSJ puts it, "sought to disrupt American society", according to a prepared copy of the remarks obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

How is this number different from the far smaller number quoted previously when referring only to the Russian trolls' alleged ad outreach? Because this time, Facebook will count virtually every post created by these alleged Russian troll farms as direct form of propaganda: as the WSJ explains, tomorrow's definition of "reach" will include such content as "free posts and events listings."

In all, Facebook will claim that Russian-linked accounts allegedly churned out 80,000 pieces of content - call them posts, surveys, notes, and pretty much anything else, as well as ads - between January 2015 and August 2017.

Going back to the revised "total reach" number, at first blush it sounds unprecedented: up to a whopping 126 million people, more than a third of the US population - and more than half of Facebook's entire US penetration - may have been brainwashed by those pesky Russians.

A quick tangent: when it comes to Facebook's US penetration, lately it's difficult to separate the truth from the lies, because readers may recall that on month ago, Brian Wieser, an analyst with Pivotal Research, calculated that Facebook claimed that its ad platform can reach millions more young adults in the U.S. than are estimated to actually live in the country. Facebook's Ads Manager claims to have a potential reach of 41 million people in the U.S. between the ages of 18-24, according to Wieser, even as the U.S. Census Bureau estimates there were only 31 million people in that age range last year.

Oops.

Of course, numbers are "fluid" when it comes to the advertising industry - and by fluid we mean grossly fabricated and fraudulent - and the last thing we want to do is get Facebook in even more trouble with its advertisers who one day will get sick of reaching robotic click farms in Bangladesh and ask for their money back.

However, there is one catch. When Facebook says that up 126 million people may have seen the allegedly Russian content, what it really means is that there has been a total of 126 million possible impressions and "click thrus" (we give Facebook the benefit of the doubt on the math here). What it did not say, or actually did as we will show momentarily, is that at the same time as the Russian content was running, everyone else was also desperately seeking to attract the attention - and clicks - of these 126 million potential eyeballs, or rather 256 million eyeballs, with their own content, ads, articles, and what not.

How much more content? Here is the math - the Russians supposedly created 80,000 pieces of content. Now, as WaPo explains, for Facebook, which places roughly 220 posts each day in the news feeds of U.S. users, the amount of content equals a tiny fraction of total content served. How tiny? Americans in total were served over 33 trillion stories in their News Feeds between 2015 and 2017. In this context, those 80,000 Russian posts appear... modest.

Which is precisely what Facebook will say tomorrow in its defense. Quote the WSJ:

In his testimony, Mr. Stretch plans to say that “any amount” of fake or malicious activity is “too much,” while at the same time playing down its importance, according to the prepared remarks. Mr. Stretch plans to argue that these posts were a small fraction of the content consumed by Americans during this period—0.004% of posts, or one out of 23,000 pieces of content.

In other words, yes - up to 126,000,000 Americans may have seen the "socially-damaging" Russian content on Facebook. The problem is that those same 126,000,000 Americans also saw a few trillion other stories in the same time period. And speaking of "socially-damaging", this is what Facebook will claim was the content of the ads and posts:

“Many of the ads and posts we’ve seen so far are deeply disturbing—seemingly intended to amplify societal divisions and pit groups of people against each other,” Mr. Stretch plans to say.

Judging by Donald Trump's twitter feed, at least one person was religiously clicking on the Russian Facebook content.

Which about covers Twitter. What about Google? Here is WaPo:

Google said it had found 18 English-language channels with 1,108 videos uploaded, totaling about 43 hours of content, that originated with Russian operatives.

 

The company also found that two accounts linked to the Russian troll farm spent a total of $4,700 on search and display ads during the 2016 election cycle.

So to summarize: having spent $100,000 on Facebook ads, and unleashed a troll army to wrote Facebook posts - which had a 0.004% change of being read - Putin then went for the kill, and assured himself a Trump presidency by splurging another $4,700 for Google ads and creating an additional 43 hours of video content. The rest is history.



via IFTTT

Sunday, October 29, 2017

Syria: NSA Acknowledges Salman Role in 2013 Ghouta Attacks - Veterans Today

ORIGINAL LINK
The NSA is actually acting like a positive force in releasing this information. I feel it is doubtful that Snowden had anything to do with the document’s release, as it was very difficult to get the story out back then. I knew the reporter covering the Saudi gas canisters on the ground days after the […]

via IFTTT

Hillary's corruption may change U.S. politics forever

ORIGINAL LINK

(FOX NEWS)

By Newt Gingrich

The Left has been desperately working for months to find any shred of evidence that Donald Trump had even the slightest connection to Russia during the presidential campaign. Despite having the full support of their friends in the media, they have consistently failed to find anything substantive.

At first, I assumed the liberal elites were simply driven by their inability to accept that the American people elected Donald Trump as their 45th president. Now, I have another theory: The Trump-Russia story is meant to serve as a pure distraction aimed at masking real corruption by the Clinton political machine.

As The Hill reported on Sunday, while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, a Kremlin-linked bank paid her husband, former President Bill Clinton, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Also during her tenure as top diplomat, earlier reports indicate Canadian and Russian business executives directed many millions more to the Clinton Foundation. In fact, citing recently unsealed Federal Bureau of Investigation reports, The Hill described a thorough Russian campaign aimed at gaining access to the Clintons and capitalizing on their influence, while also spying on them to advance a pro-Russia agenda. In 2010, the FBI arrested 10 so-called “sleeper cell” Russian spies who had reportedly become too close to Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, while serving as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was also overseeing a laundry list of U.S.-Russian initiatives and dealings.

Among other things, she served on the Committee on Foreign Investment, where she voted in favor of President Obama’s approval of the sale of Uranium One, a Canadian business, to a state-owned Russian nuclear energy outfit. At the time, the Canadian company controlled 20 percent of the U.S. uranium reserves.



via IFTTT

In Shocking, Viral Interview, Qatar Confesses Secrets Behind Syrian War

ORIGINAL LINK

A television interview of a top Qatari official confessing the truth behind the origins of the war in Syria is going viral across Arabic social media during the same week a leaked top secret NSA document was published which confirms that the armed opposition in Syria was under the direct command of foreign governments from the early years of the conflict.

And according to a well-known Syria analyst and economic adviser with close contacts in the Syrian government, the explosive interview constitutes a high level "public admission to collusion and coordination between four countries to destabilize an independent state, [including] possible support for Nusra/al-Qaeda." Importantly, "this admission will help build case for what Damascus sees as an attack on its security & sovereignty. It will form basis for compensation claims."

A 2013 London press conference: Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Al Thani with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. A 2014 Hillary Clinton email confirmed Qatar as a state-sponsor of ISIS during that same time period. 

As the war in Syria continues slowly winding down, it seems new source material comes out on an almost a weekly basis in the form of testimonials of top officials involved in destabilizing Syria, and even occasional leaked emails and documents which further detail covert regime change operations against the Assad government. Though much of this content serves to confirm what has already long been known by those who have never accepted the simplistic propaganda which has dominated mainstream media, details continue to fall in place, providing future historians with a clearer picture of the true nature of the war.

This process of clarity has been aided - as predicted - by the continued infighting among Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) former allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with each side accusing the other of funding Islamic State and al-Qaeda terrorists (ironically, both true). Increasingly, the world watches as more dirty laundry is aired and the GCC implodes after years of nearly all the gulf monarchies funding jihadist movements in places like Syria, Iraq, and Libya.

Since 2013 The Intercept (+WaPo?) hid NSA docs showing Saudi ordering 'rebel' attacks on Damascus. Now released. https://t.co/0PZrBKpJCw

— Julian Assange ???? (@JulianAssange) October 24, 2017

The top Qatari official is no less than former Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, who oversaw Syria operations on behalf of Qatar until 2013 (also as foreign minister), and is seen below with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in this Jan. 2010 photo (as a reminder, Qatar's 2022 World Cup Committee donated $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation in 2014).

In an interview with Qatari TV Wednesday, bin Jaber al-Thani revealed that his country, alongside Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United States, began shipping weapons to jihadists from the very moment events "first started" (in 2011).

Al-Thani even likened the covert operation to "hunting prey" - the prey being President Assad and his supporters - "prey" which he admits got away (as Assad is still in power; he used a Gulf Arabic dialect word, "al-sayda", which implies hunting animals or prey for sport). Though Thani denied credible allegations of support for ISIS, the former prime minister's words implied direct Gulf and US support for al-Qaeda in Syria (al-Nusra Front) from the earliest years of the war, and even said Qatar has "full documents" and records proving that the war was planned to effect regime change.

"We argued over the prey and that prey run away".Ladies and Gentleman: To these people #Syria #Assad was nothing but a f....ing hunting game https://t.co/w4oKO5TTK6

— EHSANI2 (@EHSANI22) October 27, 2017

According to Zero Hedge's translation, al-Thani said while acknowledging Gulf nations were arming jihadists in Syria with the approval and support of US and Turkey: "I don't want to go into details but we have full documents about us taking charge [in Syria]." He claimed that both Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah (who reigned until his death in 2015) and the United States placed Qatar in a lead role concerning covert operations to execute the proxy war.

The former prime minister's comments, while very revealing, were intended as a defense and excuse of Qatar's support for terrorism, and as a critique of the US and Saudi Arabia for essentially leaving Qatar "holding the bag" in terms of the war against Assad. Al-Thani explained that Qatar continued its financing of armed insurgents in Syria while other countries eventually wound down large-scale support, which is why he lashed out at the US and the Saudis, who initially "were with us in the same trench."

In a previous US television interview which was vastly underreported, al-Thani told Charlie Rose when asked about allegations of Qatar's support for terrorism that, "in Syria, everybody did mistakes, including your country." And said that when the war began in Syria, "all of use worked through two operation rooms: one in Jordan and one in Turkey."

Below is the key section of Wednesday's interview, translated and subtitled by @Walid970721. Zero Hedge has reviewed and confirmed the translation, however, as the original rush translator has acknowledged, al-Thani doesn't say "lady" but "prey" ["al-sayda"]- as in both Assad and Syrians were being hunted by the outside countries.

#Qatar's ex PM says that Qatari support for jihadists including Nusra in #Syria was in coordination w/ KSA, Turkey & the US via @BBassem7 pic.twitter.com/tu8IMRI7IP

— Walid (@walid970721) October 27, 2017

The partial English transcript is as follows:

"When the events first started in Syria I went to Saudi Arabia and met with King Abdullah. I did that on the instructions of his highness the prince, my father. He [Abdullah] said we are behind you. You go ahead with this plan and we will coordinate but you should be in charge. I won’t get into details but we have full documents and anything that was sent [to Syria] would go to Turkey and was in coordination with the US forces and everything was distributed via the Turks and the US forces. And us and everyone else was involved, the military people. There may have been mistakes and support was given to the wrong faction... Maybe there was a relationship with Nusra, its possible but I myself don’t know about this… we were fighting over the prey ["al-sayda"] and now the prey is gone and we are still fighting... and now Bashar is still there. You [US and Saudi Arabia] were with us in the same trench... I have no objection to one changing if he finds that he was wrong, but at least inform your partner… for example leave Bashar [al-Assad] or do this or that, but the situation that has been created now will never allow any progress in the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council], or any progress on anything if we continue to openly fight."

As is now well-known, the CIA was directly involved in leading regime change efforts in Syria with allied gulf partners, as leaked and declassified US intelligence memos confirm. The US government understood in real time that Gulf and West-supplied advanced weaponry was going to al-Qaeda and ISIS, despite official claims of arming so-called "moderate" rebels. For example, a leaked 2014 intelligence memo sent to Hillary Clinton acknowledged Qatari and Saudi support for ISIS.

The email stated in direct and unambiguous language that: 

"the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region."

Furthermore, one day before Prime Minister Thani's interview, The Intercept released a new top-secret NSA document unearthed from leaked intelligence files provided by Edward Snowden which show in stunning clarity that the armed opposition in Syria was under the direct command of foreign governments from the early years of the war which has now claimed half a million lives.

The newly released NSA document confirms that a 2013 insurgent attack with advanced surface-to-surface rockets upon civilian areas of Damascus, including Damascus International Airport, was directly supplied and commanded by Saudi Arabia with full prior awareness of US intelligence. As the former Qatari prime minister now also confirms, both the Saudis and US government staffed "operations rooms" overseeing such heinous attacks during the time period of the 2013 Damascus airport attack. 

No doubt there remains a massive trove of damning documentary evidence which will continue to trickle out in the coming months and years. At the very least, the continuing Qatari-Saudi diplomatic war will bear more fruit as each side builds a case against the other with charges of supporting terrorism. And as we can see from this latest Qatari TV interview, the United States itself will not be spared in this new open season of airing dirty laundry as old allies turn on each other.



via IFTTT