Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency embarked on a highly classified program of secret detention and extraordinary rendition of terrorist suspects. The program was designed to place detainee interrogations beyond the reach of law. Suspected terrorists were seized and secretly flown across national borders to be interrogated by foreign governments that used torture, or by the CIA itself in clandestine “black sites” using torture techniques.
Globalizing Torture is the most comprehensive account yet assembled of the human rights abuses associated with CIA secret detention and extraordinary rendition operations. It details for the first time what was done to the 136 known victims, and lists the 54 foreign governments that participated in these operations. It shows that responsibility for the abuses lies not only with the United States but with dozens of foreign governments that were complicit.
More than 10 years after the 2001 attacks, Globalizing Torture makes it unequivocally clear that the time has come for the United States and its partners to definitively repudiate these illegal practices and secure accountability for the associated human rights abuses.
Cold War joint CIA-FBI-Pentagon front with extensive ties to death squads, drug trafficking, pedophile entrapment networks and other criminal covert operations.
ROME (AP) — Matthew Festing — aka His Most Eminent Highness The Prince and Grand Master of the Knights of Malta — bounds into the sitting room of his magnificent Renaissance palazzo sweaty and somewhat disheveled, and asks an aide if he should take off his sweater to be photographed.
Garrulous and self-effacing, Festing embodies some of the paradoxes of a fabled Catholic religious order that dates from the medieval Crusades: Steeped in European nobility and mystique, the order’s mission is humility and charity — running hospitals, ambulance services and old folks’ homes around the globe. It has many trappings of a country, printing its own stamps, coins, license plates and passports, and yet — a stateless state — it rules over no territory.
When Rudi Dekkers, the man who ran the flight school where terrorists who crashed airliners into the Twin Towers learned to fly was arrested for drug trafficking in Houston last week, one of the first congratulatory calls I received, after covering his continuing criminal activity for the past ten years, was from his son.
That’s right…his son.
By almost any measure, the 9/11 attack was the most spectacular event in recorded history, witnessed worldwide—live—by many hundreds of millions (some say billions) of people. For dramatic impact, nothing else comes even close.
That’s why it was so strange that the American institution which played a crucial role in the story—Huffman Aviation in the tiny retirement community of Venice, on Florida’s sleepy Gulf Coast—was completely ignored as a subject for investigative journalism by the mainstream media.
Like his spiritual hero, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robespierre retained an enduring affection for dogs. He delighted in their companionship, and after long days spent toiling in the National Convention, was often seen walking his beloved hound, Brount, through the Champs-Élysées in Paris. Such a detail might seem immaterial to other biographers, but it represents the kind of factual embellishment that captures the tone of Peter McPhee’s new and highly accomplished study of the person who came to be known as the Incorruptible. McPhee, a specialist on revolutionary France, guides us assuredly from Robespierre’s upbringing in Arras, a provincial town in northeast France, through the stormy crucible of the Revolution, which saw him reach the apex of power, to his painful execution in 1794.
In tracing this narrative arc, McPhee’s primary endeavour, in which he succeeds admirably, is to humanise a figure commonly depicted as a murderous tyrant, presiding over the bloody maelstrom that swept across France between September 1793 and July 1794. Such a view has traditionally seen Robespierre take on a role analogous to the Roman deity Saturn, ravenously devouring the children of the Revolution, severing the heads of ‘fripons’ whose counter-revolutionary instincts threatened France’s inexorable march toward republican rhapsody. He was the blood-spattered forefather to the despotic progenies of the 20th century, and, according to Lord Action, ‘the most hateful character in the forefront of history since Machiavelli’.(1) McPhee rescues Robespierre from such venom, stripping away the layers of myth and prejudice that have set over the years to show us a somewhat tragic figure, more slave than master to the events of his time.
For a long time I’ve held back on my actual thoughts on things, but nowadays I could care less. The actual operation of the entire society has become so absurd, backward, and irrational that it is now comical. For those aware, it is quite evident there is a long term plan to re-engineer and reorganize the western world in particular. The modern world is under the delusion that it has been freed from the prison of “superstition” and “dogma”: Altar and throne have been overthrown and now the “New Man” can arise from the ash heap of millennia of “dark ages” and oppression. Modernity has given us medicine and personal computers, right? Indeed, so onwards towards the great utopia! But is this so? Why do the day-to-day lives of those of use in modernity seem like everything but the great utopia? The previous millennia has seen a multitude of millenialist demagogues hellbent on establishing the “Great Society,” yet the he awakening public is becoming aware of the sense that modern utopia is really another form of enslavement, as even Zbigniew Brzezinski has noted on multiple occasions.
Founded in 1946, the Soil Association is at the forefront of a global movement to promote organic farming. According to their Web site, the Association was formed “by a group of far-sighted individuals who were concerned about the health implications of increasingly intensive agricultural systems.” However, as one might expect, nowhere does the Soil Association’s Web site mention their longstanding connections to the occult community. Indeed, one would hardly guess from their promotional spiel that the description of their founders as being “far-sighted” might equally be interpreted as referring to their ability to communicate with the spiritual realm. This mystical element of the Soil Association’s history has consequently been largely overlooked, which is why Erin Gill’s recently published doctoral thesis, Lady Eve Balfour and the British Organic Food and Farming Movement, is so valuable, especially given the study’s focus on the life of Lady Eve Balfour OBE (1898-1990) — an individual who acted as “a principal force in the creation of the Soil Association in 1946, which she [then] led for more than two decades.” By undertaking the first serious evaluation of the spiritual interests of Eve and her colleagues, Gill comes to the intriguing “conclusion that the early Soil Association should be viewed as a religiously-infused or quasi-religious body and that Eve Balfour’s and other Soil Association members’ New Age beliefs influenced and, indeed, dominated the organisation’s management for many years.”
Lady Eve Balfour’s interest in “muck and mystery” would continue to play “a highly significant and, at times, possibly a dominant role” in her life, and when she wrote the introduction to the New Age book Co-operation Between Workers on Different Planes of Consciousness (Stockwell, 1954), authored by Veronica, “she referred to ‘the life-giving force of all creation — Divine Love’.” As Gill writes: “More than once, Eve distinguished between materialists and non-materialists, asserting that the Soil Association was made of non-materialists and that the number of people who recognised the limitations of a materialist conception of life was growing.” Eve’s personal papers and correspondence likewise attest to the significance of her anti-materialist convictions, and “provide a large amount of documentary evidence indicating that she had a great and wide-ranging interest in unconventional forms of healing, including spiritual and occult methods.”
Introduction: Structural Deep Events and the Strategy of Tension in Italy
From an American standpoint, it is easy to see clearly how Italian history was systematically destabilized in the second half of the 20th century, by a series of what I call structural deep events. I have defined these as “events, like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in, or 9/11, which violate the … social structure, have a major impact on … society, repeatedly involve law-breaking or violence, and in many cases proceed from an unknown dark force.”2
The examples in Italy, well known to Italians, include the Piazza Fontana bombing of 1969, the Piazza della Loggia bombing of 1974, and the Bologna railway bombing of 1980.
These bombings, in which over one hundred civilians were killed and many more wounded, were attributed at the time to marginal left-wing elements of society. However, thanks chiefly to a series of investigations and judicial proceedings, it is now clearly established that the bombings were the work of right-wing elements in collusion with Italian military intelligence, as part of an on-going “strategy of tension” to discredit the Italian left, encourage support for a corrupt status quo, and perhaps move beyond democracy altogether.3 As one of the conspirators, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, later stated, “The December 1969 explosion was supposed to be the detonator which would have convinced the political and military authorities to declare a state of emergency.”4
Vinciguerra also revealed that he and others had also been members of a paramilitary “stay-behind” network originally organized at the end of World War II by the CIA and NATO as “Operation Gladio.”
Revelation Exposed in Email Correspondence Between Private Intelligence Firm and Mexican Diplomat
By Bill Conroy
Special to The Narco News Bulletin
August 20, 2012
A high-ranking Sinaloa narco-trafficking organization member’s claim that US officials have struck a deal with the leadership of the Mexican “cartel” appears to be corroborated in large part by the statements of a Mexican diplomat in email correspondence made public recently by the nonprofit media group WikiLeaks.
The Mexican diplomat’s assessment of the US and Mexican strategy in the war on drugs, as revealed by the email trail, paints a picture of a “simulated war” in which the Mexican and US governments are willing to show favor to a dominant narco-trafficking organization in order to minimize the violence and business disruption in the major drug plazas, or markets.
In 2008, Democrats were eager to draw a contrast with what they then portrayed as Republican excesses in the fight against Al Qaeda. Since then, the Obama administration has in many cases continued the national security policies of its predecessor—and the Democratic Party’s 2012 platform highlights this reversal, abandoning much of the substance and all of the bombast of the 2008 platform. Here are a few places where the differences are most glaring:
Indefinite Detention
2008: “To build a freer and safer world, we will lead in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people. We will not ship away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries, or detain without trial or charge prisoners who can and should be brought to justice for their crimes, or maintain a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of the law. We will respect the time-honored principle of habeas corpus, the seven century-old right of individuals to challenge the terms of their own detention that was recently reaffirmed by our Supreme Court.”
2012: Nothing. The Obama administration has maintained the practice of indefinitely detaining certain suspected terrorists. It has also made use of “proxy detention,” by which foreign countries detain US citizens under questionable conditions, although the administration did do away with the Bush-era “black sites.”
Warrantless Surveillance/PATRIOT Act
2008: “We support constitutional protections and judicial oversight on any surveillance program involving Americans. We will review the current Administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. We reject illegal wiretapping of American citizens, wherever they live. We reject the use of national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. We reject the tracking of citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war…We will revisit the Patriot Act and overturn unconstitutional executive decisions issued during the past eight years.”
2012: The platform is silent on this issue. This isn’t surprising since, at the urging of the Obama administration, congressional Democrats passed up the opportunity to reform the PATRIOT Act when they had a majority in both houses of Congress.
If European commissioners attend the Bilderberg ’shadow world government’ events at the taxpayers’ expense, doesn’t the public have a right to know what goes on behind the closed doors? PublicServiceEurope.com dissects the commissioners’ latest expenses claims, including first-class flights
European Commissioners who attended the latest meeting of the secretive Bilderberg group have been accused of double standards for refusing to reveal any details of what was said during the seminars while charging the taxpayer more than €4,000 each to cover their expenses. Spanish Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia put in an expenses bill of €4,322 following the four-day meeting in the American state of Virginia - which brought together political leaders, the private sector and royalty in what has been dubbed a ’shadow world government’.
Meanwhile, the expenses of Dutch European Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes totalled €4,167, while the expenses of Belgian Trade Commissioner Karel de Gucht came to a mere €980 as he combined attendance at the May event with a separate trip to Washington. The figures were revealed by the commission itself in response to a parliamentary question by Philip Claeys, a Belgian MEP who wanted to know if the bureaucrats were attending as private individuals or as representatives of the European Union. According to the event’s official website “participants attend Bilderberg in a private and not an official capacity”, although according to commission president Jose Manuel Barroso the three were indeed representing the Brussels executive. Responding to Claey’s question, Barroso said that “the travel expenses incurred were paid by the commission, as for any mission”.
An impassioned Brian Lilley tells us what we already know: that the mainstream media is lying when they report that the mohammadan riots are a response to the film “The Innocence of muslims.”
The U.S. Army and DARPA have concluded field tests on next-generation binocular replacements that read human brain signals and have a 91% threat detection success rate. They might just help you control your car with your thoughts too (seriously).
Binoculars on the battlefield are fine, as long as soldiers know what they’re looking at. But when a target’s not so clear or, say, a shopkeeper with a broom could easily be mistaken for an insurgent with an RPG, the eyes–even the conscious, rational mind–might not be the best tool for threat-spotting and quick reaction.
So a new system from military think tank DARPA is instead going straight to soldiers’ brainwaves to spot real threats–from far away, or amid a crowded landscape.
The concept might sound familiar to science fiction readers: Augmenting human soldiers with brainwave-reading computers. The Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System (CT2WS) is a threat detection system for troops in the field that simultaneously scans warfighters’ brainwaves while a camera surveys the area. The binocular replacement system detects a specific kind of brainwave (the P300, which is involved in stimulus evaluation and categorization), combines that info with a camera feed, and processes it all through an algorithm in near-real time to feed back an almost-instant threat assessment. (Think: every cyborg POV shot in every Terminator movie ever made.) Sounds pretty out there, but testing indicates 91% of enemy targets were identified in the field, compared with the 47% spotted by U.S. warfighters in action today who aren’t using the new system.
PERFECTIBILISTS: The 18th Century Bavarian Order of the Illuminati
The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship
Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism
Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith
America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones