Uh oh, Ukraine used cluster bombs

October 21, 2014October 20, 2014 ~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Why, I know exactly what we’ll do — we’ll pretend it never happened! Because it muddies the narrative, don’t you know:

DONETSK, Ukraine — The Ukrainian Army appears to have fired cluster munitions on several occasions into the heart of Donetsk, unleashing a weapon banned in much of the world into a rebel-held city with a peacetime population of more than one million, according to physical evidence at the scene and interviews with witnesses and victims.

Sites where rockets fell in the city on Oct. 2 and Oct. 5 showed clear signs that cluster munitions had been fired from the direction of army-held territory, where misfired artillery rockets still containing cluster bomblets were found by villagers in farm fields.

The two attacks wounded at least six people and killed a Swiss employee of the International Red Cross based in Donetsk.

If confirmed, the use of cluster bombs by the pro-Western government could complicate efforts to reunite the country, as residents of the east have grown increasingly bitter over the Ukrainian Army’s tactics to oust pro-Russian rebels.

Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy

October 20, 2014October 19, 2014 ~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Sure, why doesn’t everyone start their own spy agency? What could possibly go wrong?

The mysterious workings of a Pentagon office that oversees clandestine operations are unraveling in federal court, where a criminal investigation has exposed a secret weapons program entwined with allegations of a sweetheart contract, fake badges and trails of destroyed evidence.

Capping an investigation that began almost two years ago, separate trials are scheduled this month in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., for a civilian Navy intelligence official and a hot-rod auto mechanic from California who prosecutors allege conspired to manufacture an untraceable batch of automatic-rifle silencers.

The exact purpose of the silencers remains hazy, but court filings and pretrial testimony suggest they were part of a top-secret operation that would help arm guerrillas or commandos overseas.

The silencers — 349 of them — were ordered by a little-known Navy intelligence office at the Pentagon known as the Directorate for Plans, Policy, Oversight and Integration, according to charging documents. The directorate is composed of fewer than 10 civilian employees, most of them retired military personnel.

Court records filed by prosecutors allege that the Navy paid the auto mechanic — the brother of the directorate’s boss — $1.6 million for the silencers, even though they cost only $10,000 in parts and labor to manufacture.

Much of the documentation in the investigation has been filed under seal on national security grounds. According to the records that have been made public, the crux of the case is whether the silencers were properly purchased for an authorized secret mission or were assembled for a rogue operation.

A former senior Navy official familiar with the investigation described directorate officials as “wanna-be spook-cops.” Speaking on the condition of anonymity because the case is still unfolding, he added, “I know it sounds goofy, but it was like they were building their own mini law enforcement and intelligence agency.”

Two Palestinians kids run over and killed by Israeli settler

October 20, 2014October 19, 2014 ~ susie ~ 2 Comments

The terrorist group that the American media never talks about:

Numerous sources in Israel-Palestine are reporting that an Israeli settler ran over two young Palestinian girls with a car, killing 5-year-old Enas Shawkat and injuring the other, in a terrorist attack at a kindergarten in the occupied West Bank today, near Ramallah.

The exact details are still being fleshed out, yet it is clear that it was a hit-and-run, while the children were crossing the main street in Singel, a small Palestinian village often attacked by Israeli settlers and their military.

Al Quds already has a report out about the murder: “The Martyrdom of a child and injuring another Dhshma settlers near Singel.” It notes that the two young girls, who were struck in the head in the attack, were immediately taken to an intensive care unit. Enas was announced dead, and the other child appears to be in a coma.

It also includes a video (in Arabic) interviewing one of the young girls’ bereaving mother, clinging desperately to her daughter’s pink Hello Kitty backpack.

This loss comes only three days after the murder of another Palestinian child. 13-year-old Bahaa Samir Badir was shot three times in the chest, at close range, by Israeli military forces.

Studies show that, for the past 12 years, a Palestinian child has been killed, on average, every three days. Bahaa was killed on the 16th, Enas on the 19th. Unfortunately, we can expect another murder in just a few days.

Gee, I’m shocked

October 15, 2014 ~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Who could have guessed that the CIA would have tried to influence the outcome of an investigation into something that showed signs of CIA involvement?

WASHINGTON — It was nearly four decades ago that Eddie Lopez was hired by a congressional committee to reinvestigate the 1963 murder of President John F. Kennedy, a role that had him digging through top secret documents at the CIA.

In the end, the House Select Committee on Assassinations reported in 1978 that it believed the assassination was probably the result of a conspiracy, although it couldn’t prove that, and its conclusions are disputed by many researchers.

But now Lopez is seeking answers to a lingering question: Could still-classified records reveal, as he and some of his fellow investigators have long alleged, that the CIA interfered with the congressional investigation and placed the committee staff under surveillance?

While Lopez’s latest effort to uncover new information may seem quixotic, given the seemingly endless spate of JFK conspiracy theories, it has taken on new meaning in the wake of revelations that the CIA earlier this year spied on the Senate Intelligence Committee in an unrelated case.
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Part 2

October 13, 2014October 12, 2014 ~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Gary Webb was right.

In an interview with The Huffington Post, former LA County Sheriff’s Deputy Robert Juarez, who served with the department from 1976 to 1991 and was later convicted along with several other deputies in 1992 during a federal investigation of sheriff officers stealing seized drug money, described a drug war culture that frequently put law enforcement officers into morally questionable situations that were difficult to navigate.

“We all started getting weapons,” said Juarez, who served five years in prison for skimming drug-bust money. “We were hitting houses coming up with Uzis, AK-47s, and we’re walking in with a six-shooter and a shotgun. So guys started saying, ‘I’m going to get me a semi-automatic and the crooks are paying for it.’ So that’s how it started.”

But Juarez, who served in the LA County Sheriff’s narcotics division for nearly a decade, explained that what started as a way for some officers to pay for extra weapons and informants to aid in investigations quickly devolved into greed. Since asset forfeiture laws at the time allowed the county to keep all cash seized during a drug bust, Juarez says tactics changed.

“It got to where we were more tax collectors than we were dope cops,” Juarez recalled. “Everything seized was coming right back to the county. We turned into the same kind of crooks we’d been following around … moving evidence around to make sure the asshole goes to jail; backing up other deputies regardless of what it was. Everyone, to use a drug dealer’s term, everyone was taking a taste.”

And now we find out exactly how much the CIA had to do with destroying his reputation and hounding him to his death.

Conspiracy theory

October 3, 2014October 14, 2014 ~ susie ~ 3 Comments

I really don’t think there’s any question that something’s screwy with the JFK assassination. Why are so many of the documents still classified? Anyway, here’s another purported piece of the puzzle:

A former Cuban exile anti-Castro militant told a conference audience Sept. 26 in a blockbuster revelation that he saw accused presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald with their mutual CIA handler six weeks before the killing and there would have been no anti-Castro movement in Cuba without the CIA funding.

Antonio Veciana, the acknowledged leader of the Alpha 66 assassination squad of Cuban exiles in the early 1960s, made the statements in a dignified but emotion-laden manner at this year’s major conference analyzing the Warren Commission report on murder of President John F. Kennedy Nov. 22, 1963 in Dallas. Alpha 66 is alleged to have tried to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro on two occasions, but Veciana, a onetime certified public accountant for a wealthy Cuban in the years before the revolution, has never been been charged with an attempt.

David Atlee Phillips. Separately, the general counsel of the last major government investigation into the killing issued a statement saying the CIA had deceived him and the rest of the public during the late 1970s inquiry into the validity of the Warren report. Former House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) General Counsel G. Robert Blakey issued the statement during the conference Sept. 26-28 organized at the Bethesda Hyatt Regency Hotel in Bethesda, MD by the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC).

Veciana said he is convinced the CIA organized the president’s murder and that he saw Oswald meeting with a CIA official in Dallas because Veciana arrived at his meeting fifteen minutes too early. Veciana said he believes Oswald was a CIA operative whom the agency decided to blame for a killing it organized in a complex plot.

Via Karin Riley Porter Attorney at Law.

Where’s Saudi Arabia?

October 1, 2014October 14, 2014 ~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Go, Bernie, go!

Washington (CNN) — Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the Senate’s leading doves, said Tuesday he doesn’t want the United States leading the fight against ISIS. Instead, said the Vermont senator, who is eyeing a 2016 presidential bid, the nation should be focused on helping the middle class.

Sanders, an Independent who caucuses with Democrats, said he doesn’t want to see the United States fall into another “quagmire in the Middle East,” and he put the onus on Muslim countries to take on ISIS.

“I’m sitting here wondering where Saudi Arabia is, where Kuwait is, where Qatar is,” Sanders said on CNN’s “New Day.” “I’ll be damned if kids in the state of Vermont — or taxpayers in the state of Vermont — have to defend the royal Saudi family, which is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.”
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Kill the messenger

October 1, 2014September 30, 2014 ~ susie ~ 2 Comments

I am happy that, after all this time, Gary Webb’s amazing investigative work will finally be vindicated — but sorry the journalism establishment helped push him to suicide:

Kill the Messenger, an actual film coming soon to a theater near you, is the true story of Sacramento-based investigative reporter Gary Webb, who earned both acclaim and notoriety for his 1996 San Jose Mercury News series that revealed the CIA had turned a blind eye to the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan Contras trafficking crack cocaine in South Central Los Angeles and elsewhere in urban America in the 1980s. One of the first-ever newspaper investigations to be published on the Internet, Webb’s story gained a massive readership and stirred up a firestorm of controversy and repudiation.

After being deemed a pariah by media giants like The New York Times, Los Angeles Timesand The Washington Post, and being disowned by his own paper, Webb eventually came to work in August 2004 at the alt-weekly Sacramento News & Review. Four months later, he committed suicide at age 49. He left behind a grieving family—and some trenchant questions:

Why did the media giants attack him so aggressively, thereby protecting the government secrets he revealed? Why did he decide to end his own life? What, ultimately, is the legacy of Gary Webb?

Like others working at our newsweekly in the brief time he was here, I knew Webb as a colleague and was terribly saddened by his death. Those of us who attended his unhappy memorial service at the Doubletree Hotel in Sacramento a week after he died thought that day surely marked a conclusion to the tragic tale of Gary Webb.

But no.

Because here comes Kill the Messenger, a Hollywood film starring Jeremy Renner as Webb; Rosemarie DeWitt as Webb’s then wife, Sue Bell (now Stokes); Oliver Platt as Webb’s top editor, Jerry Ceppos; and a litany of other distinguished actors, including Michael K. Williams, Ray Liotta, Andy Garcia and Robert Patrick. Directed by Michael Cuesta (executive producer of the TV series Homeland), the film opens in a “soft launch” across the country on Oct. 10.

Members of Webb’s immediate family—including his son Eric, who lives near Sacramento State and plans a career in journalism—expect to feel a measure of solace upon the release of Kill the Messenger. “The movie is going to vindicate my dad,” he said.

Beheading vs. drones

October 1, 2014October 14, 2014 ~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Coleen Rowley:

Why do Americans hate beheadings but love drone killings? What accounts for our irrational response to these two very different forms of illegal execution, one very profitable and high-tech, usually resulting in many collateral deaths and injuries, and the other very low-tech, but provoking fear and righteous condemnation from the citizens whose country prefers the high-tech?

The answer lies in human psychology. And probably like the old observation about history, people who refuse to understand human psychology are doomed to be victims of psychological manipulation. How is it that even members of peace groups have now come to support U.S. bombing?

One woman framed the issue like this: “I request that we discuss and examine why the videotaped beheading of a human being is understood to be more egregious than the explosion (almost totally invisible to the public) of a human being by a missile or bomb fired from a drone.”

H/t Terry Eaton.

John Oliver on the drone selection process

September 29, 2014September 29, 2014 ~ susie ~ 3 Comments

God, I love this guy:

In a Congressional hearing last year, Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown professor and former Pentagon official under President Obama, explained how the administration sees drone strikes thusly: “Right now we have the executive branch making a claim that it has the right to kill anyone, anywhere on Earth, at any time, for secret reasons based on secret evidence, in a secret process undertaken by unidentified officials. That frightens me.”

It frightens John Oliver too, who spent fifteen minutes last night laying out exactly why the US drone program is so disturbing. Among the highlights:

* Military-age males killed in strikes are allegedly considered guilty of being “militants” by the CIA until proven innocent.
* The US government doesn’t actually know the specific identities of many people it kills, or indeed how many people it has killed overall.

According to the Justice Department, for something to be an imminent threat justifying a strike “does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on US persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,” despite, as Oliver notes, that being “what the fucking word imminent means.”

“It is completely natural for us not to want to think about the consequences of our drone program,” Oliver concludes, after airing testimony from a 13-year-old drone strike survivor. “But when children from other countries are telling us we’ve made them fear the sky, it might be time to ask some hard questions.”