Inconsistencies and Unanswered Questions: The Risks of Trusting the Snowden Story

By Kevin Ryan
Global Research

Last June, Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian revealed that Edward Snowden was the NSA insider behind “one of the most significant leaks in US political history.” Snowden explained his motivations through Greenwald by saying, “There are more important things than money…. harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”

Such altruistic motivations were welcome news at the time but have come into question recently given that only a tiny fraction of the documents have been released nearly a year after Snowden started working with Greenwald. Perhaps more importantly, billionaire Pierre Omidyar is funding Greenwald’s slow release of those documents. It is worth noting that Omidyar’s Paypal Corporation has links to the NSA.

Checkbook Journalism & Leaking to the Highest Bidders; BFP Roundtable

By Sibel Edmonds
Podcast by Corbett Report

In this blockbuster no-holds-barred conversation, Sibel Edmonds, Guillermo Jimenez and James Corbett discuss Edmonds’ recent series of articles on Glenn Greenwald and his connection to billionaire Pierre Omidyar. We talk about the NSA/PayPal connection and Greenwald’s refusal to discuss this issue, and Edmonds reveals specific examples of publicly documented cases that Greenwald has been covering up for years: LISTEN HERE: http://www.corbettreport.com/mp4/bfpr02.mp4

Sibel’s Checkbook Journalism article:

The NSA Whistleblowing Case: Something is Awfully Rotten in the State of …?Imagine a major government whistleblower who leaks his evidence and obtained documents to the highest bidders in the mainstream media and mega corporations. Does that sound awful, disgraceful and despicable? Okay. Now, imagine a pseudo journalist who obtains over 50,000 documents from a government whistleblower, and then takes some of this information and puts it out for bid, reserves a certain portion for a lucrative book deal, and saves the rest for a mega corporation that has a record of screwing whistleblowers. How does that sound? This is what I mean by the title of this commentary: Checkbook Journalism & Leaking to the Highest Bidders.

Gary Webb: An American Hero

By Volaar

Eight years ago, December 10, 2004, respected and award-winning investigative journalist Gary Webb was murdered by a conspiracy of an apathetic citizenry, corporate malfeasance and government corruption.  The Sacramento County coroner, Robert Lyons, publically, if hastily, characterized the gunshot wounds in Gary Webb’s head three times before finally ruling the double-gunshot wound to Webb’s face a “suicide,” noting the use of a .38 caliber revolver, the presence of a suicide note and Webb’s close friend and ex-wife, Sue Bell, claiming that Gary, “had been depressed about being unable to obtain employment from another major newspaper for some time.” The San Jose Mercury News, on orders from “on high,” had terminated Gary Webb’s career progression after they claimed they had discovered errors in trivial matters of fact in his career-capping exposé, “A Dark Alliance” (ADA).

Side to Side

By Chris Pratt
COTO Report

We live in a country where corruption and secrecy are so pervasive, so systemic, so evil and so vast that even progressive thinkers are becoming overwhelmed, discouraged and desperate for some positive energy (including me).

It is easy to see why. There is not a facet of our lives that has not been touched by one of these organizations or concepts and in a negative way: FDA, EPA, FBI, CIA, NSA, UFOs, DOD, Homeland Security, NASA, the Fed, IMF, World Bank, WTO, BIS, CFR, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group, Carlyle Group, Skull and Bones, Free Masons, Illuminati, globalization, 9/11, war, terrorism, military industrial complex, Patriot Act, NDAA, destruction of the constitution, loss of Habeas Corpus, rendition, torture, indefinite detention, loss of civil liberties, “kill lists,” HAARP, chemtrails, predatory capitalism, nuclear, coal, oil, fracking, pollution, global warming, and on.

The Innocence of U.S. Foreign Policy

 

By Robert C. Koehler
COTO Report

The Saturday headline in the Wall Street Journal was: “Anti-U.S. Mobs on Rampage.”

The next day, a NATO airstrike killed eight women collecting firewood in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, an event that garnered virtually zero mainstream U.S. headlines.

Somewhere in the gap between these two phenomena — the overheated news about our violent, irrational enemies in the Middle East and the silence surrounding our war and occupation of the region — lies American politics, values, the presidential race, the national identity. Beyond that gap lies the truth about who we are, and only when we have access to it does the future turn into creative possibility and peace become possible.

Totalitarianism in the US: An Accident Waiting to Happen

By Numerian
First appeared in The Agonist

Listening to Paul Ryan’s speech at the Republican National Convention, I couldn’t place where I had come across something quite like this before. Then it struck me – Pravda! I used to subscribe to Pravda in high school and college, first to learn Russian, and second, to pursue a college program in Soviet studies. Pravda was a newspaper that specialized in the Big Lie – the Five Year Plan was always ahead of schedule, Soviet industrial capabilities exceeded that of any other country, people were starving on streets all across America. The newspaper was a non-stop stream of lies, just as Paul Ryan’s speech was studded with Big Lies – lies that were easily disprovable, such as Barack Obama did nothing about the Simpson-Bowles recommendations to reduce the budget deficit (Paul Ryan didn’t mention he voted against these recommendations when the House killed any chance of enacting them); or that Obama made it easier for people to live off welfare (the President altered the enrollment rules of welfare at the request of Republican governors); or the Romney favorite – Obama cut over $700 billion of Medicare benefits for individuals (the cuts were imposed on hospitals and insurance companies, not beneficiaries, and Romney has the same cuts in his economic plan). (Image: Wikipedia)

Who Was Osama? Who Is Obama?

By Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, May 2, 2012

While the President and Commander in Chief of the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama “celebrates” the first anniversary of the alleged death of bin Laden, the substantive issue as to WHO WAS OSAMA BIN LADEN remains unheralded. (Remarks by President Obama in Address to the Nation from Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, see video at foot of article)

Through lies and fabrications, president Obama`s carefully scripted speech upholds a world of total fantasy, in which “bad guys” are lurking and “plotting acts of terror” Islamic “jihadists” are said to be threatening Western civilization.

Each and every statement in Obama’s May 1st speech at Bagram Air Force base regarding the role of Al Qaeda is a fabrication:

Where’s the criminal investigation of the Murdoch Empire? Shareholders to the rescue

By Michael Collins

There was something tawdry and disgusting about the phone hacking by Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World. The News Corporation owned tabloid hacked the phone mails of several thousand citizens of Great Britain. Victims included celebrities, politicians, and even a murdered eleven year old kidnap victim.

But that wasn’t enough to generate type of criminal investigation of News Corporation that would topple Rupert Murdoch and his clan from the throne of the $30 billion News Corporation.

The current revelations of cable television hacking, laid out in detail by Australia’s Financial Review and the BBC, provide a more concrete connection between outright criminality and the Murdoch run media giant. This alleged criminal behavior involves hackers on the payroll of a former Murdoch controlled Israel based company, NDS, and the demise of cable television competitors in Great Britain, the United States, and Australia due to that activity.

These allegations are reinvigorating the institutional shareholders revolt that may be the end of the Murdoch clan’s control of News Corporation.

9/11 Truth, Inner Consciousness and the Public Mind

By James Tracy
Global Research

With few exceptions, the news that will shape public discourse is subject to a de facto censorial process of powerful government and corporate elites beyond accountability to the public. It is here that Sigmund Freud’s notion of repression is especially helpful for assessing the decrepit state of media and public discourse in the United States. In Freud’s view, one’s collective life experiences are registered in the subconscious, with those particularly disturbing or socially impermissible experiences being involuntarily suppressed, only later to emerge as neuroses. Whereas suppression is conscious and voluntary, repression takes place apart from individual volition.

With opinion polls indicating at least half of the public distrusting the official account of September 11^th, the foremost basis for the “war on terror”, no public event has been more repressed in public consciousness via the mass media than 9/11. The enduring usefulness of Freud’s theory is suggested in repeated manifestations of the repressed episode to haunt the public mind for which a surrogate reality has been crafted.

Again, hundreds of Beebe birds die despite fireworks ban

 

 

UPDATES below.

By Rady Ananda

Another New Years Eve, another mass bird kill. On December 31, 2011, Beebe police chief Wayne Ballew initiated an emergency ban on fireworks around 7:15 pm after receiving reports of dead birds.

Little Rock television station KATV showed a radar image of a large mass over the Arkansas town and said that hundreds of birds had died, reports the Associated Press. Other news reports indicate only “dozens” were found.

Former Weapons Inspector: Iran Does Not Have Nuclear Weapons Test Chamber

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By Gareth Porter
Inter Press Service

The IAEA claim that a foreign scientist – identified in news reports as Vyacheslav Danilenko – had been involved in building the alleged containment chamber has now been denied firmly by Danilenko himself in an interview with Radio Free Europe published Friday.

The latest report by the IAEA cited “information provided by Member States” that Iran had constructed “a large explosives containment vessel in which to conduct hydrodynamic experiments” – meaning simulated explosions of nuclear weapons – in its Parchin military complex in 2000.

Sanity in Exile

Holiday season cycles around again, and my book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound, could be the right gift for someone who looks at life deeply and reflectively, or who seeks the miraculous in the commonplace. More info below.

By Robert C. Koehler

Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran …

Or as Mitt Romney put it, playing the irresponsible-lunatic game convincingly enough to become the leading Republican presidential candidate: “If we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon.”

The consensus congeals: Our next war must be with Iran. A report issued by the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, which the New York Times called “chillingly comprehensive” (though this is debatable), stoked this long- simmering agenda. It charges that Iran has conducted secret experiments on nuclear triggers and created computer models of nuclear explosions, among other things, which proves that the nation, despite its leaders’ protestations to the contrary, is pursuing . . . oh God, oh God . . . a nuclear weapons program.

The News of Empire

By Robert C. Koehler

“Mr. Obama and his senior national security advisers have sought to reassure allies and answer critics, including many Republicans, that the United States will not abandon its commitments in the Persian Gulf even as it winds down the war in Iraq and looks ahead to doing the same in Afghanistan by the end of 2014.”

I pluck a paragraph from the New York Times and for an instant I’m possessed by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, aquiver with puzzlement down to my deepest sensibilities. I hold you here, root and all, little paragraph. But if I could understand what you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what empire is, and hubris . . . and maybe even, by its striking absence, democracy.

The paragraph contains the careful verbiage of exclusion, which is the only language in which the geopolitical powers that be are able to communicate.

The Logical Outcome of the Occupy Movement

By Timothy V. Gatto
LiberalPro

Hopefully many of you are realizing exactly what options remain. If we can’t change American politics through the ballot box, what alternative is left?

When the media asks people in the Occupy Movement what it is they want, the answer given by those that understand what the movement is all about, give their reasons for being there but add that they are not speaking for the movement, only for themselves. This is the purest form of democracy. Claiming to represent anyone else besides you is the correct way to respond. Most of us have many of the same goals, but it would be presumptuous to say that anyone represents the movement.

One thing has become abundantly clear, and this is probably the most important part of the movement; most of the 99%’ers are not asking the United States government to do a thing.

The lies that will not die

By William Blum
Anti-Empire Report

Once again, Western media including Democracy Now, AFP, Washington Post and New York Post, lie about what Iranian president Ahmadinejad said about the Nazi Holocaust.

In his September 22 address at the United Nations, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad mentioned the Nazi Holocaust just twice:

“Some European countries still use the Holocaust, after six decades, as the excuse to pay fines or ransom to the Zionists.”

“They threaten anyone who questions the Holocaust and the September 11 event with sanctions and military action.”

That was it.

A thought police for the internet age: the dangerous cult of the Guardian

By Jonathan Cook
Redress

Jonathan Cook looks at how Britain’s Guardian newspaper is trying to maintain its role as gatekeeper of information and controller of public debate by vilifying, smearing and defaming those who test the bounds of permissible thought and challenge established truths, including musician and writer Gilad Atzmon, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, journalist John Pilger and academic Noam Chomsky.

There could be no better proof of the revolution – care of the internet – occurring in the accessibility of information and informed commentary than the reaction of our mainstream, corporate media.

For the first time, Western publics – or at least those who can afford a computer – have a way to bypass the gatekeepers of our democracies. Data our leaders once kept tightly under wraps can now be easily searched for, as can the analyses of those not paid to turn a blind eye to the constant and compelling evidence of Western hypocrisy.

NATO uses Mustard Gas in Bani Walid (confirmed)

By Ozyism

Reports that NATO has used Mustard Gas in Bani Walid have been coming from eye witnesses from within the beseiged town.  A gruesome image of a victim of such terrorism has come out in social networks.

Most argue that this terrorism is implemented to force Libyans into submission. They have refused to surrender and give the country to NATO, so NATO has resorted to terrorism and a slow genocide.

Amy Goodman walks the Dark Side on Libya invasion

Appalling Propaganda from Amy Goodman About Libya
By Scott Creighton

Amy Goodman of Democracy NOW! has become one of the most disingenuous news figures this country has to offer and that’s saying a lot because there are numbers of them. She is not worthy of your trust, she is not worthy of your time, she is not worthy of your respect… anymore.  Such a sad legacy she now leaves behind after a long and storied career as a dedicated teller of the truth in spite of the power aligned against her.

For whatever reason, she has become just another presstitute in service of the globalists who are at this minute still attacking the people of Libya, still bombing them and their infrastructure, still laying siege to cities and populations who refuse to surrender to NATO powers,  and still planning how to dice up the people of Libya’s state assets to hand them over to their favorite corporate contributors.

CIA told NY Times about 9/11 Warnings, Command Negligene: NY Times Lied

By Susan Lindauer, 9/11 Whistleblower
Former U.S. Asset covering Iraq and Libya

9/11 denialists like to swear smugly that the official 9/11 story must be true, because the government could never keep such an important secret without getting caught.

Somebody would spill the beans, right? In fact, a number of us tried. Media watchers should savvy up, as the air waves get blitzed this weekend with 9/11 emorials. If the corporate media had done its job as a watch dog, the world would have got an earful reliable intelligence sources debunking the official 9/11 story.

Unhappily, the corporate media has been a co-conspirator in the 9/11 Cover Up from day one. They have actively abetted the government with its dirty work. Say a truth teller got arrested on the Patriot Act—like me— and locked in prison on a military base, while the public debate raged over 9/11 and Iraq without access to knowledgeable sources. The government could rely on corporate media to squash the story, while the Justice Department fought my demands for a trial, playing every dirty trick in the book to stop a New York jury from hearing testimony about 9/11 and Iraq.

Barred From 9/11?