statism watch

  • Topicgate

  • Search

  • News Alerts

  • Recent Forum Posts

  • Recent Comments

  •  

  • Archives

Archive for July 13th, 2009

Dick Cheney ‘hid plans to kill al-Qaida operatives abroad’

Monday, July 13th, 2009

It seems likely these operations could also have been part of the operations of JSOC, which was already, as Seymour Hersh has already reported, running an assassination ring out of Cheney’s presidential vice-presidential offices. Now, the question is – who made the decision to hang Cheney out to dry? It would be naive to believe this sort of thing has suddenly stopped.

Flashback: Panetta Admits CIA Misled Congress on “Significant Actions” | Pakistani president Asif Zardari admits creating terrorist groups | Western Governments Funding Taliban & Al-Qaeda To Kill U.S. Troops, Destabilize Countries | Cheney Considered False Flag Operation to Justify War with Iran | Cheney Orders Media To Sell Attack On Iran

Chris McGreal, The Guardian
July 13, 2009

Ex-CIA officials say foreign leaders were also in dark, investigation demanded into post-9/11 strategy

Dick Cheney, the former vice president, ordered a highly classified CIA operation hidden from Congress because it pushed the limits of legality by planning to assassinate al-Qaida operatives in friendly countries without the knowledge of their governments, according to former intelligence officials.

Former counter-terrorism officials who retain close links to the intelligence community say that the hidden operation involved plans by the CIA and the military to launch operations, similar to those by Israel’s Mossad intelligence service, to hunt down and kill al-Qaida activists abroad without informing the governments concerned, even though some were regarded as friendly if unreliable.

(more…)

Tamils languish in Sri Lankan camps

Monday, July 13th, 2009

Let these people go. Look at the woman and child in the picture below – are they terrorists? Failure to do this will out the Singhalese as racist and genocidal. The back of the LTTE is already broken.

Flashback: Sri Lanka has ‘nothing to hide’ yet detains, deports Bob Rae enroute to observe camps | Oppressive anti-terror laws stay despite end of Sri Lankan civil war, Canadian embassy defaced by govt supporters | UN chief flies into Sri Lanka as Tamils herded into camps | Quarter of a million Sri Lankans face two years in camps | Tamil Tiger leader killed, insurgency crushed: officials | Tamil protesters blockade Gardiner expressway to highlight Sri Lankan plight | Cars moving, but Toronto Tamil protest questioned | UN satellite imagery attests to shelling of Tamil ’safe zone’ | Tamil civilians slaughtered as army shells ‘no-fire zone’ | Seventh Tamil suicide by self-immolation to protest Sri Lankan genocide | Sri Lankans protest genocide at Toronto’s Union Station

Lydia Polgreen, New York Times
July 13, 2009

CHEDDIKULAM, Sri Lanka – Hundreds of thousands of Tamils remain locked in camps almost entirely off-limits to journalists, human rights investigators and political leaders. The Sri Lankan government says that the people in the camps are a security risk because Tamil Tiger fighters are hiding among them. [Ed. Note: That's immaterial to letting people see how you;re treating them.]

But diplomats, analysts, aid workers and many Sri Lankans worry that the historic chance to finally bring to a close one of the world’s most enduring ethnic conflicts is slipping away, as the government curtails the rights of Tamil civilians in its efforts to stamp out the last remnants of the Tigers.

“The government told these people it would look after them,” said Veerasingham Anandasangaree, a prominent Tamil politician who has been a staunch supporter of the government’s fight against the Tamil Tigers. “But instead they have locked them up like animals with no date certain of when they will be released. This is simply asking for another conflict later on down the road.

(more…)

Don’t regulate traffic management, Internet providers argue

Monday, July 13th, 2009

These large ISPs knew when they entered the market that the Internet was conceived of as being transparent to all forms of data traffic. ‘Net Neutrality’ was one of the fundamental principles of the Internet from its inception, and they’ve profited handsomely from the popularity of this open and free regime. Now they’re attempting to seize control of the implicit Constitution of the Internet and bend it to their own aims. If you identify and slow any form of network traffic, you’re violating network neutrality, and this has implications for intellectual freedom. The hypocrisy is quite sickening.

Flashback: Net Neutrality hearings begin with conflicting claims | Internet speed control faces scrutiny at CRTC hearings | Bell continues throttling Internet, proposes bandwidth caps for resellers | Bell’s internet throttling illegal, Google says | Net neutrality bill hits House of Commons | Bell accused of privacy invasion

Chris Sorenson, Toronto Star
July 13, 2009

Companies say they slow down users sharing big files — but doesn’t identify users or files

Several of Canada’s biggest Internet service providers are defending their decision to “throttle” subscribers who use file-sharing protocols as a week-long regulatory hearing on the controversial issue nears completion.

Rogers Communications Inc. told a Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission panel today that such traffic management practices are necessary to keep a small number of heavy-bandwidth users – particularly those using peer-to-peer protocols such as BitTorrent to swap large music and video files – from overwhelming their networks.

Failing to do so, it argued, would result in congestion and degraded service levels for all subscribers. [Ed. Note: A claim to which there is no evidence to back it up whatsoever.]

(more…)

Temporary Cornwall border post opens, sidestepping native dispute

Monday, July 13th, 2009

It’s incredible that the native people even desire to be our friends, or to live in peace after all our European ancestors have done to them. We should be aligning with the Anishnabe and the Mohawks, rather than pushing them even further to the side. They’re like the canaries in the coal mine when it comes to the rising police state – they can see the military drones buzzing overhead, they see the border guards packing heat and hassling their kids in accordance with border integration initiatives. Wake up. At least, leave them alone on their little plots of land that remain, or we’ll see more following the Lakota’s initiative to declare sovereignty. Indeed, this journal is beginning to suspect they may be the only residents of this province with any cojones/ovaries.

Flashback: Military spycraft patrols Ontario border from Fort Drum | Mohawk protesters block Ontario bridge over arming of border guards | Akwesasne natives protest armed border guards, border crossing closed in retaliation | New border rules create ‘invisible Berlin Wall’: mayor | RCMP and US Coast Guard to integrate as Canada signs border pact with Homeland Security | New US border technology directed at insidious threat: Canadians | US Homeland Security forced to retract statement accusing Canada of importing 9/11 terrorists | Surveillance on the Great Lakes: U.S. tightens security along border | Drivers licences with chips spark heated debate | Border ‘two-headed monster,’ industry minister says | Canada, U.S. agree to use each other’s troops in civil emergencies | U.S. Northern Command, Canada Command establish new bilateral Civil Assistance Plan

CBC News
July 13, 2009

The Canada Border Services Agency opened a temporary border crossing Monday in Cornwall, Ont., more than a month after a permanent outpost was shuttered because of a dispute with local Akwesasne Mohawks.

The CBSA shut down the crossing on the Mohawk territory that straddles Quebec, Ontario and the U.S. on June 1.

The border guards were scheduled to start carrying 9-mm handguns under a new federal policy. Instead, guards left their posts at midnight on June 1, citing safety concerns, after hundreds of Akwesasne Mohawks set up camp near the border to protest the gun policy.

(more…)

Investors in alleged Ponzi scheme fear millions gone

Monday, July 13th, 2009

There have been so many collapsing Ponzi schemes in the last few months this journal has been hesitant to try to track and document them all. Of course, the Bernie Madoff scandal will be familiar to anyone that has been tracking the financial news because of his prominence as the former head of the NASDAQ stock exchange, the fact that the Securities and Exchange Commission turned a blind eye to his activities when notified of them years prior, and the famous clientele he swindled. There was also the financial advisor running a scam out of Chinatown in Toronto, and at least two other Canadian incidents in recent memory. We would be remiss in our duty, however, if we didn’t point out at least once that these pyramid schemes have been collapsing in droves simply because the entire Keynesian economic system functions as a massive Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme, briefly, requires new suckers – sorry, investors – to enter the scam in order to pay off earlier investors, since there are no actual investments involved. It’s a confidence scam built on lies. As the number of investors swells, more and more investors are required to pay off earlier ‘levels’ in the pyramid. (Contrast and compare with economic ‘bubbles’). Similarly, once the economic system was divorced from sound money (and this was a gradual process that began even before Bretton Woods, though most would mark that as the final sundering of money from gold), newer generations of workers are required to pay off the debt of prior generations of government spending. They don’t necessarily realize this, however, since the payment is executed by inflating the currency, which reduces its purchasing power. In effect, the labour of successive generations is stolen since you need to work harder to maintain the standard of living your parents had. As the system crumbles and credit is withdrawn, there are going to be fewer people available to invest in these small-time Ponzi schemes, which is why they have been falling along with the house of cards of which they are a part.

CBC News
July 13, 2009

More than 150 people packed into an investors meeting in Montreal on Sunday to learn more from police and lawyers about what financial adviser Earl Jones has done with their money and how they might get it back.

The self-styled financial adviser is nowhere to be found and the accounts containing his clients’ assets have been drained. Quebec authorities have frozen Jones’s accounts and are trying to locate him.

Local and provincial police attended the meeting at a hotel in Pointe-Claire to gather statements from investors who suspect they’ve lost millions of dollars in a Ponzi scheme. The losses amount to life savings for some people.

(more…)

Swine flu ‘related’ to 1918 pandemic virus – survivors exhibit resistance

Monday, July 13th, 2009

And why would that be? There has been more than one researcher that has pointed out how unlikely it is that human, avian, and porcine genetics from three seperate continents could have combined in this virus by accident. And this discovery that 1918 survivors have immunity should raise alarm bells around the fact that the 1918 virus was actually exhumed from a corpse in order to study (and potentially weaponize) it. Its complex of three genes which enabled deep lung penetration were placed into seasonal flu virii in the lab. The 1918 virus – and its genetic code – had been extinct up to that point.

Flashback: Did leak from a laboratory cause swine flu pandemic? | Swine Flu May Be Human Error; WHO Investigates Claim | Lessons of 1976: swine flu, fear, mass vaccinations, wasted millions | Swine Flu: In Mexico, an outbreak of police-state opportunism | Illinois-based Baxter working on vaccine to stop swine flu outbreak in Mexico | Army: 3 vials of virus samples missing from Maryland facility | ‘Accidental’ Contamination Of Vaccine With Live Avian Flu Virus Virtually Impossible | Researchers unlock secrets of 1918 flu pandemic

Maggie Fox, Reuters
July 13, 2009

Blood tests by top flu researcher also show that many survivors of the 1918 pandemic seem to have immunity to swine flu, but not to the seasonal flu that hits every year

The new H1N1 influenza virus bears a disturbing resemblance to the virus strain that caused the 1918 flu pandemic, with a greater ability to infect the lungs than common seasonal flu viruses, researchers reported Monday.

Tests in several animals confirmed other studies that have shown the new swine flu strain can spread beyond the upper respiratory tract to go deep into the lungs, making it more likely to cause pneumonia, the international team said. In addition, they found that people who survived the 1918 pandemic seem to have extra immune protection against the virus, again confirming the work of other researchers.

(more…)