Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Kurt Haskell has been on many shows discussing what he witnessed at the airport in Amsterdam, and both Kurt and his wife, Lori, gave statements at the trial of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (Umar), where the judge referred to Kurt’s statements as “reporting about conspiracy theories and the government”.

The Full Show:

American OverKill will be trying to keep updating this Website with new developments on this issue as well as the crumbling Euro and how that may effect the U.S. Here is one of the latest bits of information on Iran’s latest saga with the West from the Guardian:

Iran announces it has stopped selling crude oil to UK and France

Tehran takes step four months ahead of EU import ban amid heightening political tensions over country’s enriching of uranium

Jill Treanor  |  guardian.co.uk Sunday 19 February 2012 09.29 EST

Iran announced on Sunday that it had stopped selling crude oil to British and French companies, in a move that may put further pressure on the price of oil amid heightening political tensions.

The price of Brent crude – the benchmark for oil – had been rising last week because of tensions with Tehran, which had warned it might cut oil supplies to the Netherlands, Greece, France, Portugal, Spain and Italy in retaliation for Europe’s latest sanctions.

On Sunday, a spokesman was quoted on the Iranian oil ministry’s website as saying: “Exporting crude to British and French companies has been stopped … we will sell our oil to new customers. We have our own customers … The replacements for these companies have been considered by Iran.”

The EU has already agreed to stop importing Iranian crude oil from 1 July in an effort to stop Iran enriching uranium.

But BP is among a number of major companies that have already stopped importing oil from Iran, triggering speculation that Sunday’s announcement was just political sabre-rattling.

Tensions with the west have escalated with Iran last week making announcements about progress in its nuclear programme.

Iran says it is using the uranium for civilian purposes, but it can also be used to build nuclear warheads.

Europe has reportedly taken measures to reduce imports from Iran in advance of the sanctions, although the biggest impact on prices would come from any military action to close the strait of Hormuz, through which about 35% of seaborne-traded oil moves.

Brent registered its fourth weekly consecutive gain last week, having fallen back following expectations of reduced demand caused by slower-than-expected economic growth in many European economies.

Last week, when local state media in Iran reported that oil exports to six European countries had been halted, an oil ministry spokesman denied the reports, saying such a move would be announced by the country’s supreme national security council.

The statement on Sunday with regards to the UK and France was said to have been made by Alireza Nikzad, a spokesman for the oil ministry.

Data from the US energy information administration shows that China, Japan, India and Italy were the largest importers of Iranian oil in 2010.

Iran relies on crude sales for 80% of its exports revenue, which will be the main source of any foreign currencies into the country.

An oil tanker carrying Iranian crude leaves dock at Kharg Island in Iran. Photograph: Roger Wood/Corbis

Photo from:

http://now.msn.com/now/0218-obama-shark-fin.aspx

This article also appeared in Al Jazeera on Feb 17, 201

Washington, DC – It’s not often that Univision, the leading Spanish-language television network in the United States, releases its content in languages other than Spanish. It is, after all, a Spanish-language television network. But earlier this month the broadcaster did something out of the ordinary, screening an English version of a recent report on Iran that’s received a rapturous reception from neoconservatives in Washington. And it at least appears to have done so at the behest of its hawkish new fan club.

Why would a network best known for sappy telenovelas shift to producing sloppy war propaganda – and English-language propaganda at that? Perhaps, as is usually the case with the corporate press, Univision’s bias and peculiar programming choices are best explained by simply noting who owns it: Israeli-American businessman Haim Saban, a self-described “one-issue guy” – that issue being Israel – who has been up front about purchasing media outlets to promote his own political views.

While those views are well-known if you look for them – hint: his public statements on Iran have invoked the Holocaust – they’re also not hard to gather from the right-wing-infused investigative reports Univision has been airing since he took over.

Originally broadcast in Spanish late last year, the ever-so-subtly titled report that’s driving the neoconservative community wild – “La Amenaza Iraní”, or “The Iranian Threat” – received an unusual February 8 screening, in English, at the neoconservative Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank that counts former Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, convicted felon Lewis “Scooter” Libby, as one of its top scholars. Focussed on Iran’s relations with Latin America, the hour-long piece regurgitates all the pro-war right’s by now familiar talking points about nefarious Islamists acting in concert with leftist Bolivarians to bring Terror to the US’ doorstep, complete with all the ominous music and images of swarthy foreigners one would expect from a Hollywood movie or a corporate news report.

“Iran is looking for all the support that it can get to fight back against its fiercest enemies, Israel and the United States,” declares reporter Vytenis Didziulis in the opening minute of the piece. “Latin America, because of its geographical and cultural proximity, may present the most direct way for Iran to challenge – or even attack – the US.”

What follows is a string of allegations about Iran’s dealings with Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and other Latin American countries notable mostly for how little there is to them. A former Ecuadorian intelligence official, for instance, fired by President Rafael Correa for insubordination amid charges that he was a CIA asset, is given time to claim – without so much as an incriminating Word file – that his former boss is “sending intelligence agents to secret Iranian training facilities” in South America. Viewers are also presented with the information that the Venezuelan military, as part of efforts to prepare for a feared US invasion back in 2005, reportedly distributed a manual on asymmetric warfare written based on the tactics employed by the Lebanese group Hezbollah – tactics the US military has itself studied.

The “exclusive!” meat of the report is video footage from 2007 purporting to show the Iranian ambassador to Mexico at the time, Mohammad Hassan Ghadiri, discussing a plot to launch cyber-attacks against the US government with a group of Mexican college students who were posing as hackers. Nowhere in the footage, though, is there any evidence to dispute Ghadiri’s claim he was merely entertaining a group of kids he suspected, not without cause, were actually CIA agents.

During a panel discussion following the screening, Didziulis – seemingly unconcerned with what an appearance at a far-right think tank would say about the objectivity of his reporting – acknowledged that his network was the only one to run with the story; every other media outlet that received the footage declined to run it. Such are Univision’s standards.

False assertions

And such are the network’s standards that, beyond the idle speculation, assertions capable of being debunked with no more than 30 spare seconds and an Internet connection are presented as fact. Univision news anchor María Elena Salinas, for instance, states in the programme that, “In November of 2011, the International Atomic Energy Agency indicated that Iran is in fact developing a nuclear weapon as part of a covert military operation.”

The agency’s actual report, of course, declares no such thing, instead noting “concerns” about “possible” military dimensions to Iran’s declared, civilian nuclear energy programme while nevertheless unambiguously stating that it “continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material” in the country.

But the report is not without its moments. Those who appreciate dark, funny-if-these-people-didn’t-have-power comedy will appreciate the segment where Salinas presents the head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, far-right Florida Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, as an authoritative expert on Latin America. And they’ll laugh out loud when the congresswoman’s efforts to stir the American public into a jingoistic rage ends with her suggesting, amazingly, that Iran just may well bomb the very countries she regularly accuses of being in Tehran’s pocket.

“Are we going to wait for a bomb to explode in Buenos Aires again? Or in Managua? Or in La Paz?” Ros-Lehtinen says in Spanish, the last two cities being the capitals of Nicaragua and Bolivia, which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad just visited on a diplomatic trip she herself dubbed a “tour of tyrants” during a recent congressional hearing.

But consistency, facts – they are silly, tiresome things. And they are of little import in Washington, where scary portrayals of messianic Muslims armed with WMDs have long trumped boringly rational assessments of the world. And those attending the Hudson Institute screener, certainly, were clearly ecstatic to hear their own factually challenged rhetoric rebroadcast under the auspices of objective journalism.

“If there are still scholars, journalists and policymakers who remain skeptical, Univision’s extraordinary documentary should erase all doubt,” declared Hudson’s Jaime Daremblum, the US ambassador to Costa Rica under George W Bush who is on record declaring Iran’s dealings with the likes of Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua stem from a “messianic” desire to attack the United States and its interests. The report, Daremblum said, “persuasively shows that Iranian activities represent a major threat to hemispheric security”.

Douglas Farah, a terrorism “expert” who once claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood had “made tremendous strides in occupying positions of influence within the Obama administration”, was equally gushing in his praise for the report, to which he and a host of other usual suspects on the right contributed. During the panel discussion following the screening, he explained he was so impressed with the original Spanish-language report that he lobbied for an English version to present to Washington’s policymakers.

“When I saw the final product, I thought it was important to bring that to a broader audience,” said Farah. “The Univision audience is largely the Latin American community, and in Spanish, and it was not as broadly circulated in Washington policy circles as I felt it should be. And so I approached Jaime about the possibility of hosting something here.”

Neither Farah, the Hudson Institute nor Univision responded to several requests for comment. But then, you don’t really need a comment from a spokesperson to understand what’s going on here.

Saban’s role

In 2006, Univision was purchased for $1.1bn by a group of investors led by Saban, who now serves as its chairman. One of the wealthiest men in the US, Saban is a major donor to the Democratic Party who, according to a Fortune magazine profile, regularly “gossips with Rupert Murdoch, vacations with Bill Clinton … and confers with former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres.”

As journalist Belén Fernández notes, Saban’s political views tend to mirror those of his hawkish establishment friends. And when it comes to perceived threats to Israel, he’s about as subtle as the reports his media properties produce.

“When I see Ahmadinejad, I see Hitler,” Saban said of the Iranian president the same year he purchased Univision. “His motivation is also clear: the return of the Mahdi is a supreme goal … [and] worth the liquidation of five and a half million Jews. We cannot allow ourselves that.”

This past December, meanwhile, Saban hosted a “Friends of the Israel Defence Forces” fundraiser that, according to the Jewish Journal, was “teeming with Los Angeles’ most hawkish, hard-line lovers of Israel”. And, lest anyone think he separates his personal views from his businesses, at a 2009 conference in Israel he outlined “three ways to be influential in American politics,” which according to New Yorker magazine consist of “mak[ing] donations to political parties, establish[ing] think tanks, and control[ing] media outlets.”

And in “targeting media properties”, the New Yorker noted, “Saban frankly concedes his political agenda, as evidenced by his repeated efforts to purchase the Los Angeles Times.”

“I thought it was time that it turn from a pro-Palestinian paper into a balanced paper,” Saban said when asked to explain his interest in the paper.

But as the fifth-largest television network in the US, with a rapidly growing audience among 18-49 year olds, Univision reaches a much bigger audience than the Times. And it provides a much larger platform from which to promote a hawkish line on Israel’s perceived foes, particularly to the under-propagandised and rapidly growing Hispanic market – a market of roughly 50 million that one Zionist organization, The Israel Project, recently labelled the world’s “most hostile towards Israel.”

With the network reportedly in talks with the Walt Disney Company to launch an English-language cable news channel, Univision’s dishonest – and strangely English – documentary on the “Iranian threat” may just be an example of what’s to come. At a minimum, it suggests yet again that when it comes to corporate news, objective facts and evidence are less important than who’s paying to keep the lights on.

Charles Davis is an activist and writer who splits his time between Washington, DC, and Nicaragua. He is a contributor to the newswire Inter Press Service and his work has aired on public radio stations across the United States. To read more of his work, visit his website.

Follow Charles on Twitter: @charlesdavis84

This article also appeared at Al Jazeera and is being republished at American OverKill in “Fair Use”

2

This video is allowed under DMCA Fair Use Act. Look in video response for the last freedom watch. Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act Of 1976 Allowance is made for fair use to inform ,educate ,non profit.
by littletammy20 on Feb 12, 2012

http://www.debtocracy.gr/indexen.html

Posted February 18, 2012 Uploaded by kryfos0kosmo

Editor/Script Katerina Kitidi
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2011 – BitsnBytes.gr

The Founding Fathers weren’t particularly anti-Islam.

But millions of Americans believe that Christ will not come again until Israel wipes out its competitors and there is widespread war in the Middle East. Some of these folks want to start a huge fire of war and death and destruction, so that Jesus comes quickly.

According to French President Chirac, Bush told him that the Iraq war was needed to bring on the apocalypse:

In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:

“And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”

Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:

“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins”…

There can be little doubt now that President Bush’s reason for launching the war in Iraq was, for him, fundamentally religious. He was driven by his belief that the attack on Saddam’s Iraq was the fulfilment of a Biblical prophesy in which he had been chosen to serve as the instrument of the Lord.

And British Prime Minister Tony Blair long-time mentor, advisor and confidante said:

“Tony’s Christian faith is part of him, down to his cotton socks. He believed strongly at the time, that intervention in Kosovo, Sierra Leone – Iraq too – was all part of the Christian battle; good should triumph over evil, making lives better.”

Mr Burton, who was often described as Mr Blair’s mentor, says that his religion gave him a “total belief in what’s right and what’s wrong”, leading him to see the so-called War on Terror as “a moral cause”…

Anti-war campaigners criticised remarks Mr Blair made in 2006, suggesting that the decision to go to war in Iraq would ultimately be judged by God.

Bill Moyers reports that the organization Christians United for Israel – led by highly-influential Pastor John C. Hagee – is a universal call to all Christians to help factions in Israel fund the Jewish settlements, throw out all the Palestinians and lobby for a pre-emptive invasion of Iran. All to bring Russia into a war against us causing World War III followed by Armageddon, the Second Coming and The Rapture. See this and this.

This all revolves around what is called Dispensationalism. So popular is Dispensationalism that Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series has sold 65 million copies.

Dispensationalists include the following mega-pastors and their churches:

• Jerry Falwell

• Pat Robertson

• Billy Graham

They are supported by politicians such as:

• Newt Gingrich

• Joseph Lieberman

• John McCain

• Texas Senator John Cronyn

• Former House Minority Whip Roy Blunt

• Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay

• And others

Dr. Timothy Webber – an evangelical Christian who has served as a teacher of church history and the history of American religion at Denver Seminary and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Vice-President at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in Lombard, IL, and President of Memphis Theological Seminary in Tennessee – notes:

In a recent Time/CNN poll, more than one-third of Americans said that since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, they have been thinking more about how current events might be leading to the end of the world.

While only 36 percent of all Americans believe that the Bible is God’s Word and should be taken literally, 59 percent say they believe that events predicted in the Book of Revelation will come to pass. Almost one out of four Americans believes that 9/11 was predicted in the Bible, and nearly one in five believes that he or she will live long enough to see the end of the world. Even more significant for this study, over one-third of those Americans who support Israel report that they do so because they believe the Bible teaches that the Jews must possess their own country in the Holy Land before Jesus can return.

Millions of Americans believe that the Bible predicts the future and that we are living in the last days. Their beliefs are rooted in dispensationalism, a particular way of understanding the Bible’s prophetic passages, especially those in Daniel and Ezekiel in the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation in the New Testament. They make up about one-third of America’s 40 or 50 million evangelical Christians and believe that the nation of Israel will play a central role in the unfolding of end-times events. In the last part of the 20th century, dispensationalist evangelicals become Israel’s best friends-an alliance that has made a serious geopolitical difference.

***

Starting in the 1970s, dispensationalists broke into the popular culture with runaway best-sellers, and a well-networked political campaign to promote and protect the interests of Israel. Since the mid-1990s, tens of millions of people who have never seen a prophetic chart or listened to a sermon on the second coming have read one or more novels in the Left Behind series, which has become the most effective disseminator of dispensationalist ideas ever.

***

During the early 1980s the Israeli Ministry of Tourism recruited evangelical religious leaders for free “familiarization” tours. In time, hundreds of evangelical pastors got free trips to the Holy Land. The purpose of such promotional tours was to enable people of even limited influence to experience Israel for themselves and be shown how they might bring their own tour group to Israel. The Ministry of Tourism was interested in more than tourist dollars: here was a way of building a solid corps of non-Jewish supporters for Israel in the United States by bringing large numbers of evangelicals to hear and see Israel’s story for themselves. The strategy caught on.

***

Shortly after the Six-Day War, elements within the Israeli government saw the potential power of the evangelical subculture and began to mobilize it as a base of support that could influence American foreign policy. The Israeli government sent Yona Malachy of its Department of Religious Affairs to the United States to study American fundamentalism and its potential as an ally of Israel. Malachy was warmly received by fundamentalists and was able to influence some of them to issue strong pro-Israeli manifestos. By the mid-1980s, there was a discernible shift in the Israeli political strategy. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Jewish state’s major lobbying group in Washington, D.C., started re-aligning itself with the American political right-wing, including Christian conservatives. Israel’s timing was perfect. It began working seriously with American dispensationalists at the precise moment that American fundamentalists and evangelicals were discovering their political voice.

***

Probably the largest pro-Israel organization of its kind is the National Unity Coalition for Israel, which was founded by a Jewish woman who learned how to get dispensationalist support. NUCI opposes “the establishment of a Palestinian state within the borders of Israel.”

***

In their commitment to keep Israel strong and moving in directions prophesied by the Bible, dispensationalists are supporting some of the most dangerous elements in Israeli society. They do so because such political and religious elements seem to conform to dispensationalist beliefs about what is coming next for Israel. By lending their support-both financial and spiritual-to such groups, dispensationalists are helping the future they envision come to pass.

***

Dispensationalists believe that the Temple is coming too; and their convictions have led them to support the aims and actions of what most Israelis believe are the most dangerous right-wing elements in their society, people whose views make any compromise necessary for lasting peace impossible. Such sentiments do not matter to the believers in Bible prophecy, for whom the outcome of the quarrelsome issue of the Temple Mount has already been determined by God.

Since the end of the Six-Day War, then, dispensationalists have increasingly moved from observers to participant-observers. They have acted consistently with their convictions about the coming Last Days in ways that make their prophecies appear to be self-fulfilling.

***

As Paul Boyer has pointed out, dispensationalism has effectively conditioned millions of Americans to be somewhat passive about the future and provided them with lenses through which to understand world events. Thanks to the sometimes changing perspectives of their Bible teachers, dispensationalists are certain that trouble in the Middle East is inevitable, that nations will war against nations, and that the time is coming when millions of people will die as a result of nuclear war, the persecution of Antichrist, or as a result of divine judgment. Striving for peace in the Middle East is a hopeless pursuit with no chance of success.

***

For the dispensational community, the future is determined. The Bible’s prophecies are being fulfilled with amazing accuracy and rapidity. They do not believe that the Road Map will-or should-succeed. According to the prophetic texts, partitioning is not in Israel’s future, even if the creation of a Palestinian state is the best chance for peace in the region. Peace is nowhere prophesied for the Middle East, until Jesus comes and brings it himself. The worse thing that the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations can do is force Israel to give up land for a peace that will never materialize this side of the second coming. Anyone who pushes for peace in such a manner is ignoring or defying God’s plan for the end of the age.

***

It seems clear that dispensationalism is on a roll, that its followers feel they are riding the wave of history into the shore of God’s final plan. Why should they climb back into the stands when being on the field of play is so much more fun and apparently so beneficial to the game’s outcome? As [one dispensationalist group's] advertisement read, “Don’t just read about prophecy when you can be part of it.”

Not a Problem with Judaism … Or Christianity

Most Americans confuse Zionism and Judaism.

But many devout Jews are against Zionism, and Zionists can be Christian.

Those who say that criticizing Zionism is anti-semitic are misleading people for their own ulterior motives which have nothing to do with ensuring the safety of the Jewish people.

Israeli Zionists are no more true to the cultural heritage of the Jewish people than Christian Zionists are.

Atheist War Hawks Manipulate Believers to Beat the Drums of War

Leo Strauss is the father of the Neo-Conservative movement, including many leaders of the current administration.

Indeed, many of the main neocon players – including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Stephen Cambone, Elliot Abrams, and Adam Shulsky – were students of Strauss at the University of Chicago, where he taught for many years.

The people pushing for war against Iran are the same neocons who pushed for war against Iraq. See this and this. (They planned both wars at least 20 years ago.) For example, Shulsky was the director of the Office of Special Plans – the Pentagon unit responsible for selling false intelligence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. He is now a member of the equivalent organization targeting Iran: the Iranian Directorate.

Strauss, born in Germany, was an admirer of Nazi philosophers and of Machiavelli. Strauss believed that a stable political order required an external threat and that if an external threat did not exist, one should be manufactured. Specifically, Strauss thought that:

A political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat . . . . Following Machiavelli, he maintained that if no external threat exists then one has to be manufactured

(the quote is by one of Strauss’ main biographers).

Indeed, Stauss used the analogy of Gulliver’s Travels to show what a Neocon-run society would look like:

“When Lilliput [the town] was on fire, Gulliver urinated over the city, including the palace. In so doing, he saved all of Lilliput from catastrophe, but the Lilliputians were outraged and appalled by such a show of disrespect.” (this quote also from the same biographer)

Moreover, Strauss said:

Only a great fool would call the new political science diabolic . . . Nevertheless one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.

So Strauss seems to have advocated governments letting terrorizing catastrophes happen on one’s own soil to one’s own people — of “pissing” on one’s own people, to use his Gulliver’s travel analogy. And he advocates that government’s should pretend that they did not know about such acts of mayhem: to intentionally “not know” that Rome is burning. He advocates messing with one’s own people in order to save them from some “catastophe” (perhaps to justify military efforts to monopolize middle eastern oil to keep it away from our real threat — an increasingly-powerful China?).

What does this have to do with religion?

Strauss taught that religion should be used as a way to manipulate people to achieve the aims of the leaders. But that the leaders themselves need not believe in religion.

As Wikipedia notes:

In the late 1990s Irving Kristol and other writers in neoconservative magazines began touting anti-Darwinist views, in support of intelligent design. Since these neoconservatives were largely of secular backgrounds, a few commentators have speculated that this – along with support for religion generally – may have been a case of a “noble lie”, intended to protect public morality, or even tactical politics, to attract religious supporters.

So is it any surprise that the folks who planned war against Iraq and Iran at least 20 years ago are pushing religious disinformation to stir up the evangelical community?

I’ve recently seen a swarm of spam claiming that all Muslims are evil, that they want to take over the world and establish a Muslim caliphate, and that they want to nuke Israel. They misquote Muslims and use false statements to try to stir up religious hatred.

They are simply promoting the Straussian playbook: stir up religious sentiment – even if you are personally an atheist – to create and demonize an “enemy”, so as to promote war …

Postscript 1: While there are certainly some Arab terrorists, Islam cannot be blamed for their barbaric murderous actions, just as Christianity cannot be blamed for the Norwegian Christian terrorist – Anders Behring Breivik’s – actions.

University of Chicago professor Robert A. Pape – who specializes in international security affairs – points out:

Extensive research into the causes of suicide terrorism proves Islam isn’t to blame — the root of the problem is foreign military occupations.

And the 9/11 hijackers used cocaine and drank alcohol, slept with prostitutes and attended strip clubs … but they did not worship at any mosque. See this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this.

Postscript 2: Neoliberals and Neoconservatives are very similar in many ways. And because Neocons are not conservative, nothing in this post is meant to criticize conservatism.

Postscript 3: Most evangelicals are not dispensionalists, and so do not want to bring on armageddon.

• Terrorism
• Natural Disasters
• Immigration
• Health Concerns
• Reports on DHS

Last year the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)  filed a lawsuit:

• EPIC – FOIA Documents Reveal Homeland Security is Monitoring Political Dissent: As the result of EPIC v. DHS, a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, EPIC has obtained nearly thee hundred pages of documents detailing a Department of Homeland Security’s surveillance program. The documents include contracts and statements of work with General Dynamics for 24/7 media and social network monitoring and periodic reports to DHS. The documents reveal that the agency is tracking media stories that “reflect adversely” on DHS or the U.S. government. One tracking report — “Residents Voice Opposition Over Possible Plan to Bring Guantanamo Detainees to Local Prison-Standish MI” — summarizes dissent on blogs and social networking cites, quoting commenters. EPIC sent a request for these documents in April 2004 and filed suit against the agency in December. For more information, see EPIC: EPIC v. Department of Homeland Security: Media Monitoring. (Jan. 13, 2012)
• EPIC Sues DHS Over Covert Surveillance of Facebook and Twitter : EPIC has filed a Freedom of information Act lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security to force disclosure of the details of the agency’s social network monitoring program. In news reports and a Federal Register notice, the DHS has stated that it will routinely monitor the public postings of users on Twitter and Facebook. The agency plans to create fictitious user accounts and scan posts of users for key terms. User data will be stored for five years and shared with other government agencies.The legal authority for the DHS program remains unclear. EPIC filed the lawsuit after the DHS failed to reply to an April 2011 FOIA request. For more information, see EPIC: Social Networking Privacy. (Dec. 20, 2011) (From Epic.org

It appears that many of these organizations WANT to instill more fear in Americans. People need to continue dissenting without fear. The reason they are spending so much of OUR money on spying on average people is because THEY are getting worried. The old establishment and Elites are being challenged. They will pull all stops when it comes to retaining their power grip.

cnn.com

by Mac Slavo
Originally Published on February 10th, 2012 at SHTFplan.com

The city of Detroit, which has been a harbinger for future trends soon to take hold across major metropolitan areas around the country, has no doubt experienced the worst of the depression thus far. Entire city blocks have become unlivable due to foreclosures and rampant crime, the jobless rate in 2009 exceeded 50% and a mass exodus has left the population at levels not seen since 1910.

By all accounts, the Motor City is ground zero for the collapse of America as we know it. Reminiscent of poverty stricken third world countries, it’s gotten so bad in Detroit that there are areas of the city where police and emergency services personnel refuse to go.

This has left law abiding residents of the city no choice but to arm themselves and start taking matters into their own hands.

The people of Detroit are taking no prisoners.

Justifiable homicide in the city shot up 79 percent in 2011 from the previous year, as citizens in the long-suffering city armed themselves and took matters into their own hands. The local rate of self-defense killings now stands 2,200 percent above the national average. Residents, unable to rely on a dwindling police force to keep them safe, are fighting back against the criminal scourge on their own. And they’re offering no apologies.

“We got to have a little Old West up here in Detroit. That’s what it’s gonna take,” Detroit resident Julia Brown told The Daily.

The last time Brown, 73, called the Detroit police, they didn’t show up until the next day. So she applied for a permit to carry a handgun and says she’s prepared to use it against the young thugs who have taken over her neighborhood, burglarizing entire blocks, opening fire at will and terrorizing the elderly with impunity.

“I don’t intend to be one of their victims,” said Brown, who has lived in Detroit since the late 1950s. “I’m planning on taking one out.”

…

Average police response time for priority calls in the city, according to the latest data available, is 24 minutes. In comparable cities across the country, it is well under 10 minutes.

Citizens like Brown feel they have been left with little choice but to take the law into their own hands.

…

Detroiters are arming themselves with shotguns and handguns and buying guard dogs. Anything to take care of their own. And privately, residents say neighborhood watch groups in Detroit are widely armed. 

“It’s like the militiamen who stepped up way back when. That’s where the neighborhood folks are,” said James “Jackrabbit” Jackson, a 63-year-old retired Detroit cop who has patrolled the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood for years.

“They’re ready to fight,” Jackson said. “We don’t hardly see police anymore.”

The city’s wealthier enclaves have hired private security firms. Intimidating men in armored trucks patrol streets lined with gracious old homes in a scene more likely seen in Mexico City than the United States.

…

The Detroit Police Department, grappling with deep funding cuts in a city with a spiraling budget crisis, acknowledges that response times are high and says it is working on a plan to lower them. But a spokeswoman for the department insists the rise in justifiable homicides is unrelated.

“It’s not about police response time because often the act has already taken place by the time the police are called,” said Sgt. Eren Stephens. She said citizens have a right to defend themselves.

“Anytime a life is lost, we’re concerned,” she said. “But we can‘t be on every corner in front of every home. And we know that there are citizens who will do what they have to do to protect themselves.”

Source: The Daily

Is it any wonder why recent firearms sales statistics indicate that 2011 was the largest year ever for gun sales in America, with a record 10.8 million guns sold?

All of us should take heed. Budget cuts, economic woes and a rising criminal element throughout our country are leaving the populace more susceptible to violent crime than ever before. Like our fellow Americans in Detroit, it’s only a matter of time before we’re faced with similar paradigm shifts in our own cities, communities and neighborhoods.

Get armed, get trained, and when faced with a life threatening situation, take no prisoners.

Hat tip Satori

Author: Mac Slavo
Date: February 10th, 2012
Website: www.SHTFplan.com

Copyright Information: Copyright SHTFplan and Mac Slavo. This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to www.shtfplan.com. Please contact us for permission to reproduce this content in other media formats.

$24,000,000,000,000 (give or take a few bucks)

http://usdebtclock.org/current-rates.html

Whither Gold

February 12, 2012 – Max Keiser and co-host, Stacy Herbert, discuss the gold standard extremism and how your dollar got to be worth just 3.8 cents. In the second half of the show, Max talks to Francine McKenna of reTheAuditors.com about the crimes and illegitimate activity of the MF Global collapse.

cover photo from:

http://www.thespecialistsltd.com/

BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — A cyber attack on the Palestinian internet network on Saturday evening originated in Italy, the PA minister of communication and information technology Mashour Abu Daqqa told Ma’an.

Palestinian servers and websites have been disabled by a series of cyber attacks in recent months. Abu Daqqa said internet communications had been disturbed by hackers for three months, but the attacks on Palestinian internet providers since Wednesday used new tactics to shut down servers.

Earlier, presidential communications advisor Sabri Saidam said huge quantities of emails are being sent in order to disable Palestinian servers.

Abu Qaqqa said his ministry will ask Palestinian security services to coordinate with Italian security to combat the attack.

While the server is being hacked from abroad, recent attacks on Palestinian websites are from local cyber activists, he said.

Last week, hackers shut down Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, and several websites affiliated with Ma’an Network, including its news page.

The ministry of communication and information technology have called the national team for information security to convene Sunday morning, he said.

Due to Israel’s occupation, Palestine does not have its own connection to the internet but hires lines from international companies, increasing the country’s vulnerability to foreign cyber attack, he added.

Full Article…

“I Will Always Love You”

“Saving All My Love For You” – 1985 Arista Records Inc.

“Greatest Love of All” – Music video by Whitney Houston performing Greatest Love Of All. (C) 1985 Arista Records, Inc.

“Run to You”

“I’m Every Woman”

Two new polls show that almost half of Americans will go along with a military strike against Iran if it is determined they are weaponizing their nuclear program:

Rasmussen Poll:
If Israel Attacks Iran, 48% Want U.S. to Help Israel

Poll from The Hill:
49% polled said YES when asked “should US Be Willing to Use Military Force to Prevent Iran from Getting Nuclear Weapons”?

“There is no means of avoiding a final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as the final and total catastrophe of the currency involved.” – Ludwig von Mises

The last week has offered an amusing display of the difference between the cheerleading corporate mainstream media, lying Wall Street shills and the critical thinking analysts like Zero Hedge, Mike Shedlock, Jesse, and John Hussman. What passes for journalism at CNBC and the rest of the mainstream print and TV media is beyond laughable. Their America is all about feelings. Are we confident? Are we bullish? Are we optimistic about the future? America has turned into a giant confidence game. The governing elite spend their time spinning stories about recovery and manipulating public opinion so people will feel good and spend money. Facts are inconvenient to their storyline. The truth is for suckers. They know what is best for us and will tell us what to do and when to do it.

The false storyline last week was the dramatic surge in new jobs. This fantastic news was utilized by the six banks that account for 80% of the stock market trading to propel the NASDAQ to an eleven year high and the Dow Jones to a four year high. The compliant corporate press did their part with blaring headlines of good cheer. The entire sham was designed to make Joe the Plumber pull out one of his 15 credit cards and buy a new 72 inch 3D HDTV for this weekend’s Super Bowl. When you watch a CNBC talking head interviewing a Wall Street shyster realize you have the 1% interviewing the .01% about how great things are.

What you most certainly did not hear from the MSM is that the NASDAQ is still down 42% from its 2000 high of 5,048. None of the brain dead twits on CNBC pointed out the S&P 500 is trading at the exact same level it reached on April 8, 1999. Twelve or thirteen years of zero or negative returns are meaningless when a story needs to be sold. On Friday the hyperbole utilized by the media mouthpieces was off the charts, leading to an all-out brawl between the critical thinking blogosphere and the non-thinking “professionals” spouting the government sanctioned propaganda. Accusations flew back and forth about who was misinterpreting the data. I found it hysterical that anyone would debate the accuracy of BLS (Bureau of Lies & Swindles) data.

The drones at this government propaganda agency relentlessly massage the data until they achieve a happy ending. They use a birth/death model to create jobs out of thin air, later adjusting those phantom jobs away in a press release on a Friday night. They create new categories of Americans to pretend they aren’t really unemployed. They use more models to make adjustments for seasonality. Then they make massive one-time adjustments for the Census. Essentially, you can conclude that anything the BLS reports on a monthly basis is a wild ass guess, massaged to present the most optimistic view of the world. The government preferred unemployment rate of 8.3% is a terrible joke and the MSM dutifully spouts this drivel to a zombie-like public. If the governing elite were to report the truth, the public would realize we are in the midst of a 2nd Great Depression.

Continue to full article at Washington’s Blog

The CIA’s drone campaign targeting suspected militants in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to rescue victims or were attending funerals. So concludes a new report by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism. It found that since President Obama took office three years ago, as many as 535 civilians have been killed, including more than 60 children. The investigation also revealed that at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims. More than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. We speak to Chris Woods, award-winning reporter with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. “We noted that there were repeated reports at the time, contemporaneous reports in publications like New York Times, news agencies like Reuters, by CNN, that there were these strikes on rescuers, that there were reports that there had been an initial strike and then, some minutes later, as people had come forward to help and pull out the dead and injured, that drones had returned to the scene and had attacked rescuers,” Woods says. “We’ve been able to name just over 50 civilians that we understand have been killed in those attacks. In total, we think that more than 75 civilians have been killed, specifically in these attacks on rescuers and on mourners, on funeral-goers.”

Full Transcript at www.democracynow.org