Archive for the ‘Global’ Category
2009
“Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds dropped a bombshell on the Mike Malloy radio show, guest-hosted by Brad Friedman (audio, partial transcript).In the interview, Sibel says that the US maintained ‘intimate relations’ with Bin Laden, and the Taliban, ‘all the way until that day of September 11.’
These ‘intimate relations’ included using Bin Laden for ‘operations’ in Central Asia, including Xinjiang, China. These ‘operations’ involved using al Qaeda and the Taliban in the same manner “as we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict,” that is, fighting ‘enemies’ via proxies. As Sibel has previously described, and as she reiterates in this latest interview, this process involved using Turkey (with assistance from ‘actors from Pakistan, and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia’) as a proxy, which in turn used Bin Laden and the Taliban and others as a proxy terrorist army.”
source: infowars.com
“There’s a McDonald’s on the high street, suburban houses, rats the size of dogs and 229 of the world’s most high-profile prisoners. Six months after President Obama declared that he would close it down, Naomi Wolf heads to Guantánamo Bay to see whether anything has changed.
Six months ago this week President Obama, on his second day in office, promised to close the Guantánamo detention camp within a year, and to undo the secretive and coercive detention and interrogation policies of George W. Bush. But has Obama been as good as his word…”
source: truthout.org
“We live in an era defined by its brutality. Our challenge is whether to accept this – or to take the risks necessary to transform our world commons in beloved community.
A year ago this August, forty-four ordinary people from seventeen different countries sailed to Gaza in two, small wooden boats. We did what the world would not do – we broke through the siege of Gaza. Over the last year the Free Gaza Movement has organized seven more voyages, successfully arriving to Gaza on five separate occasions. Ours remain the only international ships to reach the Gaza Strip in over forty-two years.
In the Middle-East, the struggle for justice is an uncertain endeavour in the best of times. On all sides human rights workers are beset with difficulties and distress. The Arab states are tyrannies, their peoples subject to secret police, arbitrary arrest, torture, and oppression. Within their societies, the Arab world is equally fractured by ethnic and class tensions, poverty, and political stagnation. From the outside, from the West, the Middle-East faces both open and covert acts of intimidation, intervention, economic destabilization, and even war, invasion, and mass killings…”
source: counterpunch.org
“Britain may need to send more troops to Afghanistan despite the success of Operation Panther’s Claw, military chiefs admit.
The scale of the challenge was revealed yesterday as it emerged that British soldiers have faced nearly 1,000 roadside bombs in the past three months. Although 3,000 troops managed to drive out about 500 Taleban during the five-week offensive, they will be fully deployed holding an area in Helmand province about the size of the Isle of Wight, their commanding officer admitted.
Brigadier Tim Radford, commander of Task Force Helmand, said that the existing troops could not be expected to mount further significant operations without reinforcements. Gordon Brown hailed the offensive as an ‘heroic’ military success, saying it had made Britain safer and ‘pushed back the Taleban’. David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, however, called for renewed efforts to engage the Taleban politically…”
source timesonline.co.uk
“For more than half a century the Alpine nation of Switzerland has built a reputation as the world´s centre for tax evasion, fraud accounting, money laundering, racketeering, and above all a staunch ally of corrupt third world leaders and a great beneficiary of third world corruption.
Various categories of persons including Popes, presidents, prime ministers, corrupt dictators, wealthy business men, and drug dealers have all used and benefited from the banking secrecy laws of Switzerland. As a result her economy has been described as an underground economy, a deposit box for dirty money and a ‘dirt-driven economy’…
However, of all the victims of Swiss banking secrecy laws and her shady banking practices, developing countries and Africa in particular seem to have suffered the most. The global infrastructure of international financial secrecy with headquarters in Switzerland has helped bleed trillions of dollars in illicitly generated money out of Africa and the rest of the developing world. The activities of Swiss banking institutions and real estate companies have plunged third world nations into debts, poverty, misery, malnutrition, diseases, economic meltdown, infrastructure decay and political instabilities through the help they give to corrupt politicians, civil servants, the business elite and corrupt multinational corporations who collude and connive with the corrupt entities to loot and hide the proceeds of their ill-gotton gains.
Many third world countries especially those in Africa lack the infrastructures needed to run successful economies. They lack schools, hospitals, roads, harbours, rail infrastructure, irrigation facilities, electricity, clean water, telecommunication, sanitation facilities because of the loots. Many children are orphaned and malnourished and many do not have access to education and healthcare because money meant for all that are stolen and are sitting in Swiss banks such UBS, Credit Suisse. There has not been a single corrupt politician or dictator in Africa, Latin America and Asia who has not had dealings with this secretive alpine country. While third world countries continue to struggle to provide the basic necessities of life Swiss economy is washed with money that could save millions from hunger, starvation and diseases…”
via Lord Aikins Adusei and wikileaks.org
“The Science and Public Policy Institute announces the publication of Climate Money, a study
by Joanne Nova revealing that the federal Government has a near-monopsony on climate science funding. This distorts the science towards self-serving alarmism. Key findings:
The US Government has spent more than $79 billion of taxpayers’ money since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, administration, propaganda campaigns, foreign aid, and tax breaks. Most of this spending was unnecessary.
Despite the billions wasted, audits of the science are left to unpaid volunteers. A dedicated but largely uncoordinated grassroots movement of scientists has sprung up around the globe to test the integrity of ‘global warming’ theory and to compete with a lavishly-funded, highlyorganized
climate monopsony. Major errors have been exposed again and again.”
via scienceandpublicpolicy.org
“In a hare-brained nightmare scenario dreamed up by the Center for Strategic and International Studies — home-base for neocon crackpots such as Michael Ledeen and war criminals of Madeleine Albright’s caliber — Iran manages to produce a nuclear weapon and drops it on Israel, ultimately killing 800,000 people. ‘Retaliatory Israeli nuclear strikes, with higher-yield bombs and accurate rocket delivery systems, would be far more destructive,’ writes Peter Goodspeed for the National Post. ‘A full-fledged Israeli nuclear response, using some, but not all, of its 200 nuclear weapons, would target most major Iranian cities and major military bases. It would kill 16 million to 28 million people within three weeks.’
It is estimated Israel has around 400 nuclear weapons. As Israeli arms technician Mordecai Vanunu revealed in 1986, the Israelis have produced 100 to 200 advanced fission bombs and have mastered a thermonuclear design. In 1986, it appeared to have a number of thermonuclear bombs ready for use. According to the Institute for Defense Analyses, Israel’s facilities at Soreq and Dimona have the same mission as the Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories in the United States. More than twenty years ago, Israel was developing the computer ‘codes which will enable them to make hydrogen bombs.’
Meanwhile, Iran is not up to speed, never mind the scary science fiction story weaved by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Iran did manage to enrich a small amount of uranium using a cascade of 164 centrifuges that spin uranium hexafluoride gas at supersonic speed. The enriched uranium that Iran produced cannot be used in a nuclear weapon because it contains just 3.5% U-235, whereas a nuclear weapon typically requires highly-enriched uranium that contains more than 90% U-235…”
via infowars.com
“An anti-government armed Somali group controlling large swathes of the country has said it will shut down three UN agencies and prevent them from working in areas under its control.
Armed men from the al-Shabab group looted a UN compound in Baidoa in south-central Somalia on Monday following the announcement.
In a statement broadcast on local radio, al-Shabab accused the UN agencies of corruption and allegedly conspiring against Islam.”
via aljazeera.net
“…Error One was to permit a bubble in the 1980s. Error Two was to wait a decade before opting for monetary “shock and awe” through quantitative easing.
The US Federal Reserve has moved faster but already seems to think the job is done. “Quantitative tightening” has begun. Its balance sheet has contracted by almost $200bn (£122bn) from the peak. The M2 money supply has stagnated since January. The Fed is talking of “exit strategies”.
Is this a replay of mid-2008 when the Fed lost its nerve, bristling over criticism that it had cut rates too low (then 2pc)? Remember what happened. Fed hawks in Dallas, St Louis, and Atlanta talked of rate rises. That had consequences. Markets tightened in anticipation, and arguably triggered the collapse of Lehman Brothers, AIG, Fannie and Freddie that Autumn.
The Fed’s doctrine – New Keynesian Synthesis – has let it down time and again in this long saga, and there is scant evidence that Fed officials recognise the fact. As for the European Central Bank, it has let private loan growth contract this summer…”
via telegraph.co.uk
“A coalition of digital lobbying groups and library organizations are demanding that the US government drop its support for the most controversial part of the (generally controversial) Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement: Internet-related issues
ACTA, currently being negotiated secretly by the US, Japan, Canada, the EU, and others, will cover a host of cross-border concerns. And what could be more cross-border than the Internet? That’s why ACTA contains a blank section on Internet issues; the text is still being negotiated, but we already know that copyright holders hope that goodies like ISP filtering and graduated response end up in the final language of the treaty. Government negotiators refuse to give hints about what sorts of measures they are pushing for inclusion in this key section of the treaty.”
via arstechnica.com