Download and burn the entire Cleaves site -
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anywhere anytime you wish!
Labeling a Reality, Conspiracy, is part of the Game
Mind control conducted by nefarious elites against the masses has always been the stuff of conspiracy theory -- after all, everybody 'knows' it's just not possible to control the people of an entire nation armed with nothing more than psychological methods!
It's impossible to imagine that nefarious elites would one day be able to remove all regulatory laws and restrictions placed on their business enterprises, primarily Banking and Transnational corporations, while at the same time implementing hyper-intrusive, repressive surveillance and oppressive new draconian indefinite detention laws on the public. But that is precisely what has occurred today, yet some people continue to insist that (successful) mass mind control is conspiracy theory!
Today, the inversion is complete; it is now the public that is faced with restrictive measures while elites enjoy only token restrictions. Constant surveillance, the complete loss of privacy, the threat of indefinite detention without charge or trial, profiling, secret searches on suspicion, etc, has today become reality for the public while once restricted institutions enjoy almost open slather freedoms. Who would have thought that the Liberties and Freedoms our forefathers fought and died to realize and protect would one day be simply erased without so much as a 'by your leave,' from the public?
The laws and regulations placed on powerful institutions were done-so in order to protect the public and national interest. It was understood that large financial and other commercial interests had the potential ability to undermine society and our democratic way of life.
As we should all be aware, Banks -- and to a lesser extent large Corporations -- have successfully removed most regulations restricting their 'business' practices; this has occurred while public Freedoms and Liberties have been steadily eroded. However, the most extraordinary aspect of these two diametrically opposed parallel processes is that the masses have not risen up in arms to protect lost liberties or maintain necessary social safeguards! Yet some people continue to maintain that controlling entire societies with nothing more than propaganda is impossible! Labelling a current prevailing reality as a 'conspiracy' is not only a shrewd trick it assists in veiling the processes at work!
If it is too painful to confront the current reality of American society today, I would refer to the original model -- Nazi Germany -- as evidence that it is simplicity itself to dupe entire nations with nothing more than feeble lies that cannot withstand the slightest scrutiny.
Do not be too quick to imagine that you are free or that your mind has not been tampered with -- it is Americans that submit to genital groping and indefinite detention, remember!
The following well written piece from New Dawn Magazine is a historical account of the pursuit of various methods of social and individual mind control; I leave it to you to determine whether or not the agencies involved have been successful:
Mind Control & the New World Order
by Len Kasten
On 28 November 1953, at 2 am, a man crashed through a closed window and fell to his death from the 10th floor of the Statler Hotel in New York City. He was identified as Frank Olson, a bacteriologist with the US Army Research Center at Fort Detrick, Maryland. He had fallen from a room he shared with another scientist, Robert Lashbrook. It was ruled a suicide.
Twenty-two years later, in 1975, William Colby, then CIA director, declassified documents that changed the complexion of the case. It was revealed that Olson had actually been an undercover CIA operative at Fort Detrick, and that one week prior to his death, he had been drinking Cointreau at a high-level meeting with scientists at Deep Creek Lodge in rural Maryland. The Cointreau was laced with a large dose of LSD administered by his CIA boss, Sidney Gottlieb. He was then sent to New York with Lashbrook, also with the CIA, to see a psychiatrist because the LSD had induced a psychosis.
It was also revealed that Olson had been part of the top secret CIA program that was known as Project MK-ULTRA, exploring the use of chemicals and drugs for purposes of mind control, and bacteriological agents for covert assassination. Olson had been working on ways to deliver anthrax in aerosol form, for use as a weapon. New evidence that came to light, through the persistent efforts of Olson’s son Eric, made the suicide ruling highly suspect.
It turned out that Olson had been labelled a security risk by British intelligence after getting upset witnessing human experimentation on a trip to Frankfurt, Germany the previous summer. Eric Olson now believes that his father was drugged and then murdered to make sure that he didn’t reveal the secrets of the MK-ULTRA project. Following the 1975 revelations, the government must have felt more than a little guilt about the affair because Olson’s family was given a 17 minute audience with US President Ford, who apologised to them, and they were awarded damages in the amount of $750,000.
Controlling Human Behaviour
The MK-ULTRA program was instituted on 13 April 1953 by CIA Director Allen Dulles, ostensibly to counter the brainwashing techniques of American prisoners being held by the North Koreans during the Korean War, and to duplicate those techniques on enemy prisoners, i.e. the creation of “Manchurian Candidates.” This was the claim used to obtain funding for the project. However, the Prisoner of War brainwashing program was just the tip of the iceberg, and the CIA-sponsored experiments ventured far and wide into areas of Mind Control under the aegis of MK-ULTRA that had little or nothing to do with methods of interrogation.
The Colby revelations were part of a sweeping investigation of the CIA in January 1975 by the “Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States,” chaired by Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller. The subsequent June 1975 Report to the President said: “The drug program was part of a much larger CIA program to study possible means for controlling human behaviour. Other studies explored the effects of radiation, electric-shock, psychology, psychiatry, sociology and harassment substances.”
Even though the program got off to a rocky start with the Olson affair, it recovered quickly and became an umbrella project with 149 sub-projects. The overall guiding principal was succinctly stated in an internal CIA memo dated January 1952: “Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature such as self-preservation?”
The drug program came under the aegis of the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff headed up by Sidney Gottlieb from 1951 to 1956. Gottlieb was a highly intelligent eccentric who drank goat’s milk, enjoyed folk-dancing, and raised Christmas trees on his farm outside Washington.
The Agency funded LSD research programs at major medical centres and universities including Boston Psychopathic, Mt. Sinai Hospital at Columbia University, University of Illinois Medical School, University of Oklahoma and others. The funding was carried out secretly through the Josiah Macy Foundation, and the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research in Washington, D.C. The CIA claimed the secrecy was necessary to keep it from the Russians, but we have already seen that it was part of much larger project to learn how to control human behaviour in general, so this is not credible.
Gottlieb told Dr. Harold Abramson at Mt. Sinai (who just happened to be the psychiatrist that Olson was supposed to see!) that he wanted “operationally pertinent materials [about]: a. Disturbance of Memory; b. Discrediting by Aberrant Behaviour; c. Alteration of Sex Patterns; d. Eliciting of Information; e. Suggestibility; f. Creation of Dependence.” That sounds like pretty deep stuff for the spy game. They were really afraid of public reaction and congressional condemnation, especially since the CIA charter did not allow domestic operations, and certainly prohibited experimentation on US citizens.
The callousness of the research is best exemplified by the CIA-funded work of Dr. Harris Isbell, the Director of the Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky. The drug addict hospital inmates, who were mostly black, were encouraged to volunteer for LSD research in return for hard drugs of their choice or time off their sentences. In most cases, they were given pure morphine or heroin. At one point Isbell kept seven men on LSD for 77 straight days. Many others were on it for up to 42 days.
Concerning extended LSD usage, John Marks in his landmark book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control says about writer Hunter S. Thompson (recently deceased) that he “frightened his readers with accounts of drug (LSD) binges lasting a few days, during which Thompson felt his brain boiling away in the sun, his nerves wrapping around enormous barbed wire forts, and his remaining faculties reduced to their reptilian antecedents.” The recent movie The Rum Diary, starring Johnny Depp, based on the autobiographical book by Hunter S. Thompson, presents an imaginative re-enactment of his LSD adventures.
The CIA Turns On the Counter-Culture
Not satisfied with university research, Gottlieb recruited New York narcotics agent George White to distribute LSD surreptitiously to the “borderline underworld.” Operating through safe houses in Greenwich Village, Haight-Ashbury and Marin County, White gave doses to prostitutes, pimps, drug addicts and other “marginal people” and then observed the results and reported to Gottlieb.
John Marks says they were people “who would be powerless to seek any sort of revenge if they ever found out what the CIA had done to them. In addition to their being unlikely whistle-blowers, such people lived in a world where an unwitting dose of some drug… was an occupational hazard anyway.”
Eventually, White started using it randomly all over New York and San Francisco. Regarding the results, Marks says, “The MKULTRA scientists reaped little but disaster, mischief, and disappointment from their efforts to use LSD as a miracle weapon against the minds of their opponents.” Yet, they continued this program for 10 years until 1963.
Ironically, since the CIA had pretty much cornered the market on LSD internationally, buying up all the product of Sandoz and Eli Lilly, the spread of the drug to the counter-culture was through the Agency. Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsburg and Tom Wolfe were first “turned on” thanks to the CIA, and that’s how the “flower children” became psychedelic.
But, the LSD experiments may have been more successful than Marks realised. They were carefully noting the precise effects on brain chemistry, and in the six areas that Gottlieb was concerned with: memory disturbance, aberrant behaviour, altered sexual patterns, eliciting information, suggestibility and creation of dependence. This became evident when they started using LSD as an adjunct in hypnotic and electronic experiments.
Re-Patterning the Brain
Perhaps the most notorious and nefarious MK-ULTRA sub-project was carried out at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, Canada under the directorship of Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, an American from Albany, New York. Cameron had trained at the Royal Mental Hospital in Glasgow, Scotland, under eugenicist Sir David Henderson, and founded the Canadian branch of the World Federation for Mental Health. At various times, he was elected president of the Canadian, American, and World psychiatric associations. In other words, Cameron was no renegade but had the full faith and endorsement of the world psychiatric establishment.
The CIA wanted Cameron to “depattern” the contents of the brain to make it receptive to new patterning. David Remnick in a Washington Post article on 28 July 1985 said, “The…. heart of the laboratory was the Grid Room…. The subject was strapped into a chair involuntarily, by force, his head bristling with electrodes and transducers. Any resistance was met with a paralysing dose of curare. The subject’s brainwaves were beamed to a nearby reception room crammed with voice analysers, a wire recorder and radio receivers cobbled together… The systematic annihilation or ‘depatterning’ of a subject’s mind and memory was accomplished with overdoses of LSD, barbiturate sleep for 65 days at a stretch and ECT shocks at 75 times the recommended dosage. Psychic driving, the repetition of a recorded message for 16 hours a day, programmed the empty mind. Fragile patients referred to Allan Memorial for help were thus turned into carbuncular jellyfish.”
Anton Chaitkin in his essay, ‘British Psychiatry: From Eugenics to Assassination’, says: “Patients lost all or part of their memories, and some lost the ability to control their bodily functions and to speak. At least one patient was reduced almost to a vegetable; then Cameron had the cognitive centres of her brain surgically cut apart, while keeping her alive. Some subjects were deposited permanently in institutions for the hopelessly insane.”
The CIA funded these horrors through a front called “The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology.” Other supporters of the Allan Institute were the Rockefeller Foundation, the Geschickter Foundation, and the Canadian government.
About Cameron’s work, Wikipedia says: “Naomi Klein states, in her book The Shock Doctrine, that Cameron’s research and his contribution to the MKUltra project was actually not about mind control and brainwashing, but ‘to design a scientifically based system for extracting information from “resistant sources.” In other words, torture’. And citing a book from Alfred W. McCoy it further says that ‘Stripped of its bizarre excesses, Cameron’s experiments, building upon Donald O. Hebb’s earlier breakthrough, laid the scientific foundation for the CIA’s two-stage psychological torture method’.” This method was codified in the infamous “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual” published by the CIA in July 1963, and in the Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual – 1983 that was used in CIA training courses in Latin American countries up until 1987. These manuals describe methods of psychological torture, far more potent than physical torture, to elicit information from “resistant sources.”
An Orwellian Nightmare
As one would expect, the technologies now available to the mind-controllers have zoomed off the chart to the point where George Orwell’s world of omni-surveillance now seems almost quaint. Of course, it is true that 1984 was 28 years ago. But even as far back as 1970, US congressman James Scheur was able to say, “As a result of spinoffs from medical, military aerospace and industrial research, we are now in the process of developing devices and products capable of controlling violent mobs without injury. We can tranquillise, impede, immobilise, harass, shock, upset, stupefy, nauseate, chill, temporarily blind, deafen or just plain scare the wits out of anyone the police have a proper need to control and restrain.”
A brief survey of some of the scariest products known to be in the arsenal of the secretive alphabet agencies arrayed against John Q. Public are such devices as the Neurophone, patented by Dr. Patrick Flanagan in 1968. It converts sound to electrical impulses which can be delivered from satellites. When aimed at individuals, the impulses travel directly to the brain where the sounds are re-assembled and appear to be voices inside the head, which can be perceived as coming from God, or telepathic aliens, or whatever. Or the sounds can come out of a turned-off TV or radio. Through software, the device can mimic anyone’s voice and translate into any language.
It is believed that the CIA, DIA, NSA et al use the Neurophone to deliver threats and propaganda to selected targets, or just to torment someone they don’t like. One can imagine the possibilities. Could this explain some of the killings by “psychopaths” who say they were instructed by God, such as Mark David Chapman, David Berkowitz, or Sirhan Sirhan? If they had been previously evaluated through sophisticated personality assessments and groomed by LSD or hypnosis, such voices could easily tip the balance and convince them to kill.
We’ve all heard about the “Thought Police” and laughed because it seemed so implausible. Well, the joke is on us. Brain scanning technology is now well-advanced. In 1974, Lawrence Pinneo, a neurophysiologist and electronic engineer with the Stanford Research Institute succeeded in correlating brain wave patterns from EEGs with specific words. In 1994, the brain wave patterns of 40 subjects were officially correlated with both spoken words and silent thought at the University of Missouri. It is believed that US intelligence agencies now have a brain wave vocabulary of over 60,000 words in most common languages.
Brain waves constitute a magnetic field around the head (the aura), each person having a unique, identifiable electromagnetic signature which becomes visible through Kirlian photography, and these fields can be monitored by satellites. The translated results are then fed back to ground-side super computers at speeds of up to 20 gigabytes/second. Neurophone messages can then be beamed to selected individuals based on their thoughts. It is believed that about one million people around the globe are now monitored on a regular basis. As these numbers increase, as they certainly will, to include most educated and important people in the world, the New World Order will definitely have arrived.
As Australian writer Paul Baird has observed, “no-one will ever be able to even think about expressing an opinion contrary to those forced on us by the New World Order. There will literally be no intellectual property that cannot be stolen, no writing that cannot be censored, no thought that cannot be suppressed (by the most oppressive/invasive means).” Baird also claims that ex-military/intelligence whistle-blowers have reported that experiments in controlling voters with these techniques have been tried in several foreign countries. So much for democracy.
Other technologies, such as microwave bombardment to confuse and disorient field personnel, microchip implantation, silently delivered acoustical subliminal messages, widespread population control through psychiatric drugs, and extreme close-up satellite-based viewing able to read documents indoors, are all well-developed and in use by military and intelligence agencies. This doesn’t even address the monitoring of overt spoken and written material. Under Project ECHELON, the NSA monitors every call, fax, e-mail and computer data message in and out of the US, Canada and several other countries. Their computers then search for key words and phrases. Anything or anyone of interest draws the attention of agency operatives, who can then commence surveillance operations by the NSA or other intelligence agencies.
Novel Capabilities
We conclude with a chilling vision of the future from the US Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. It is from New World Vistas of Air and Space Power for the 21st Century.
“Prior to the mid-21st century, there will be a virtual explosion of knowledge in the field of neuroscience. We will have achieved a clear understanding of how the human brain works, how it really controls the various functions of the body, and how it can be manipulated (both positively and negatively). One can envision the development of electromagnetic energy sources, the output of which can be pulsed, shaped, and focused, that can couple with the human body in a fashion that will allow one to prevent voluntary muscular movements, control emotions (and thus actions), produce sleep, transmit suggestions, interfere with both short-term and long-term memory, produce an experience set, and delete an experience set. This will open the door for the development of some novel capabilities that can be used in armed conflict, in terrorist/hostage situations, and in training…”
And based on the past clandestine abuses of MK-ULTRA reviewed above, one can predict with relative certainty that these capabilities will be used on civilians, with or without their knowledge or acquiescence, in the service of the New World Order.
[The fact that you are aware your freedoms and liberties have been eroded and you are incapable of doing anything about it, verifies the reality of mind control techniques -- making excuses is part of the process!]
Central Reserve Banks Rule, not 'Markets'
How Big Banks Victimize Our Democracy – with Government Help
The truth is we are slaves to slimy, unrepresentative financial elites and they have us believing (how?) we are 'free' and that it's only natural that we serve them. Well, it is not 'natural' and the situation is EASILY altered. Analyze the determining forces behind what are called 'free markets' and you'll soon see the reality of your shackles. WE have all been LED to BELIEVE ....
Mass mind control is not conspiracy it has been FACT/reality for decades. Do you think it may be time to release yourself from the lies and feeble propaganda and take back what is rightfully yours? Or would you rather make the usual trained excuses about your 'powerlessness.' Yet the fact remains, the people, whether they believe it or not, continue to be the most powerful social force that exists. Bankers and other self-serving minorities are COMPLETELY at the mercy of the masses, and they know it!
Barclays was found by watchdogs to be deliberately manipulating the rate at which banks lend to each other.
Barclays boss Bob Diamond has been shamed into giving up his bonus after his bank was fined £290million for trying to rig money markets.
The massive fine was imposed by the UK Financial Services Authority and US watchdogs after Barclays was found to be deliberately manipulating the rate at which banks lend to each other.
The bank knowingly fed false information into the system used to calculate the Libor rate for British banks and Euribor rate for European banks so its traders could make profits by speculating on rates.
Many people may have paid too much for financial products because of Barclays’ behaviour.
Chief executive Mr Diamond admitted the behaviour “fell well short of the standards to which Barclays aspires” and said he would give up his 2012 bonus.
But Labour last night called for a police investigation into the high street and investment bank.
Chris Leslie, Shadow Financial Secretary to the Treasury, said: “These are serious instances of market abuse and it is vital Treasury Ministers now review the regulation of Libor arrangements.
“We need to know what the Government plans to do to prevent traders manipulating the independent interest rates between the banks for their own advantage.
Mortgage repayments of ordinary householders up and down the country depend on a fair and true interest rate market mechanism.
“It is right for Barclays to be fined this record amount and for their senior executive to forfeit their bonuses.
"But we now need to know how many employees were complicit in this process, how many will be losing their jobs as a result, and whether this needs to now go beyond the regulators and into a criminal investigation.”
Lib Dem peer Lord Oakeshott, a close ally of Business Secretary Vince Cable, said last night Mr Diamond must go.
“The whole City knew Barclays Capital under Bob Diamond was a casino but not that they were loading the dice,” he said.
“If Bob Diamond had a scintilla of shame he would resign. If the Barclays board have an inch of backbone between them they will sack him and put in a responsible banker to clean out the cesspit.
“He’s got to go and Barclays must be broken up – it’s far too dangerous in these troubled times.”
Libor is used to price £200trillion of financial products. Barclays hoped to seem in better shape by appearing to be paying less than it was for its borrowings and help its traders’ predictions come true.
During some periods, Barclays put out false information every day.
Mr Diamond’s 2011 bonus was £2.7million. Last year he received £17million in pay, shares and perks. Several other senior executives will also give up their bonuses.
The fines come at the end of a long US and UK probe. Barclays will pay £59million to the FSA, £128million to the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission and £102million to the US Justice Department.
Barclays is unlikely to be the only bank fined for Libor violations following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the US.
Analysis by David Kuo of Motley Fool
THE Financial Services Authority has fined Barclays £290million for manipulating the LIBOR market.
But is that the best the regulator can come up with when a bank has deliberately influenced a multi-trillion pound market for its own gains?
What does a bank need to be found guilty of before heads are made to roll? How can customers and shareholders trust a bank that allows this to happen?
Does Barclays honestly think that Bob Diamond and three other executives forgoing their bonuses is adequate compensation for the people they have hurt?
Admittedly, Diamond was not directly involved in the manipulation.
But questions must be asked about what head honchos know about what is going on in the bank.
There is a wider question here too. Was Barclays acting alone in manipulating the LIBOR market?
If not, then we need to know which other banks are complicit.
Timbuktu world heritage site attacked by Islamists -- Reuters: June 30, 2012
Islamists armed with Kalashnikovs and pick-axes have destroyed the centuries-old mausoleums of saints in the Unesco-listed city of Timbuktu in front of shocked locals, witnesses say.
The attack by the al-Qaida-linked Ansar Dine group came days after Unesco placed Timbuktu on its list of heritage sites in danger and will recall the 2001 dynamiting by the Taliban of two sixth-century statues of Buddha carved into a cliff in Bamiyan in central Afghanistan.
"They are armed and have surrounded the sites with pick-up trucks. The population is just looking on helplessly," said a local journalist, Yeya Tandina.
Tandina and other witnesses said Ansar Dine had already destroyed the mausoleums of three local saints – Sidi Mahmoud, Sidi el-Mokhtar and Alfa Moya – and at least seven tombs.
"The mausoleum doesn't exist any more and the cemetery is as bare as a soccer pitch," a local teacher, Abdoulaye Boulahi, said of the Mahmoud burial place.
"There's about 30 of them breaking everything up with pick-axes and hoes. They've put their Kalashnikovs down by their side. These are shocking scenes for the people in Timbuktu," said Boulahi.
Ansar Dine backs strict sharia law, and considers the shrines of the local Sufi version of Islam to be idolatrous. Sufi shrines have also been attacked by hardline Salafists in Egypt and Libya in the past year.
Locals said the attackers had threatened to destroy all of the 16 main mausoleum sites. The Unesco director general, Irina Bokova, called for an immediate halt. Late on Saturday, Tandina said Ansar Dine had halted the attacks. Attempts to contact members of the group were unsuccessful.
Ansar Dine has gained the upper hand over less-well-armed Tuareg-led separatists since the two joined forces to rout government troops and seize control in April of the northern two-thirds of the inland west African state.
The sites date from Timbuktu's golden age in the 16th century. Located on an old Saharan trading route that saw salt from the Arab north exchanged for gold and slaves from the south, Timbuktu blossomed as an Islamic seat of learning, home to priests, scribes and jurists.
Mali had in recent years sought to create a desert tourism industry around Timbuktu, but even before April's rebellion many tourists were being discouraged by a spate of kidnappings of westerners in the region claimed by al-Qaida-linked groups.
Unesco's world heritage committee said this week it had accepted the request of the Malian government to place Timbuktu on its list of endangered heritage sites.
"The committee … also asked Mali's neighbours to do all in their power to prevent the trafficking in cultural objects from these sites," it said.
The rebel seizure of the north came as the southern capital, Bamako, was struggling with the aftermath of a coup on 22 March.
Mali's neighbours are seeking UN backing for a military intervention to stabilise the country but security council members say they need more details on the mission being planned.
Copyright applies.
[All 'Gods' (over 10,000 to date) and all so-called 'holy' texts were created by men -- Fact! That is the undeniable, enduring reality and there is nothing supernatural about writing fiction, religious or otherwise.]
Empire of the Absurd
by Finian Cunningham via stele - Global Research Thursday, Jul 5 2012, 12:54am
The United States and its Western allies are behaving increasingly like the doomed emperors of the late Roman Empire: decadent, self-indulgent and supremely arrogant.
There seems to be a reckless presumption of boundless, unilateral power. While the US and its left lieutenants, Britain and France, can claim to command the world’s fiercest military machine in the form of NATO, there is nevertheless, paradoxically, a growing sense of fragile, impotence in the face of a fast-changing world.
This past week we have seen yet another manifestation of this Roman Empire syndrome with the astoundingly arrogant conduct of the US, Britain and France at the Geneva conference on Syria. Ostensibly, the summit was called to oversee a peaceful political transition in Syria, which has been ravaged by 16 months of violence.
But the absurdity and obscenity of the Geneva meeting is that the mayhem raging in Syria has largely been inflicted on that country by the same Western powers along with their Turk and Arab proxies. Yet, these Western powers pontificated as usual about international law and respect for human rights. (Of course, the dissembling Western media provide a crucial cloak for their masters to hide what is otherwise a sickening farce.)
Since mid-March 2011, these parties have been arming, funding and directing mercenary militia groups to rip Syria apart from within. No cost in human lives and suffering is too high for the imperial powers to effect their strategic goal of regime change. No-warning car bombs in urban centres, roadside explosives, massacres of families and whole villages are part of the Western instruction manual to terrorise and subvert a sovereign country.
Civilian sources in Syria say communities are living in a state of fear from these NATO-backed foreign mercenaries and opportunistic internal criminal gangs. Families are evicted from their homes, which are then turned into sniper nests or bomb factories; shopkeepers are warned to close down their premises or see them burned to the ground. “These gangs are not Syrian. We can tell from their accents and beards that they are foreigners from Libya, Iraq, Saudi,” said one young woman from Damascus, who added that she feared her country would be turned into the NATO-induced post-apocalyptic disaster that is currently Libya.
So for the Western triumvirate of Washington, London and Paris to assume the position of drawing up a “peace plan” for Syria is as preposterous as expecting a group of arsonists to come up with proposals to quench a blaze that they have instigated.
To add insult to injury, even when the Geneva meeting over the weekend concluded with a statement on a political transition that does not exclude the incumbent Syrian President Bashar Al Assad - at the insistence of Russia and China - the imperium’s foreign ministers Hillary Clinton, William Hague and Laurent Fabius insisted that “Assad must step down”. Clinton, with magisterial arrogance, said: “Assad will still have to go… he cannot be part of Syria’s future… Russia and China will have to show him the writing on the wall.”
Indeed, Clinton gave notice that, in the wake of the Geneva summit, the US will be returning to the UN Security Council to demand more sanctions against Syria and to seek a mandate for “no fly zones” and “humanitarian corridors” - which is euphemistic language for NATO military intervention.
What we can be sure of in the coming weeks is a vice-like move by the Western powers. On the one hand, there will be an even greater escalation of violence on the ground against Syrian society by the NATO, Turkish and Arab-backed death squads. Ever since the supposed Kofi Annan peace plan was implemented on 12 April, avowedly with the support of Western powers, the NATO-backed mercenaries of the self-styled Free Syrian Army have ratcheted up the violence, making it impossible for any ceasefire to take hold. In the past week, in the run-up to the Geneva conference, the conflict and casualties surged, with explosions in Aleppo, Damascus, Hama, Homs, Dayr al Zawr and Idlib.
As Syria becomes ever more unstable and blood-soaked from NATO mercenaries, and with the Western corporate controlled media dutifully pumping out their government propaganda narrative that it is the state forces of Assad that are “massacring civilians”, the scene will be set for the diplomatic hand to tighten the vice-like grip.
The pressure on Assad to step down may become unbearable given the mounting civilian casualties and commercial mayhem inflicted by Western-backed covert war. This abdication would be unwarranted of course given the popular mandate, but the president may feel that sacrificing his office may be the only way to alleviate the pain on his people.
Alternatively, the US-led NATO powers will push for “responsibility to protect” no fly zones or safe havens. In fact, the latter development is already under way with Turkey’s militarization of its southern border with Syria after the downing of the Turk warplane last week and Ankara’s warning to Damascus to keep its troops removed from the frontier. This “humanitarian intervention” by NATO will follow the Libyan precedent in which NATO becomes the air force for its proxy militias on the ground. “Responsibility to protect” will quickly transmogrify into “responsibility to bomb” the Syrian government of Assad into defeat.
All of these pernicious designs on Syria over the past 16 months and in the coming weeks are utterly criminal. The NATO interference in Syria is aimed at regime change and is an integral part of a wider military roadmap for Western hegemony in the oil-rich Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa. To be sure, rhetorical pronouncements by Washington, London and Paris on democratic principles, human rights and respect for international law are displays of the most abject cynicism and duplicity. These powers are the diametric opposite to what they proclaim to represent: they are pariah terror states that are out of control.
The destruction of Syria by Western powers is apiece with the destruction by these same powers in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. News reports are coming in of the US now using drone air strikes in the West Africa country of Mali. This insatiable march to endless wars is accompanied by Western so-called democracies allying with the most repressive dictatorships of Saudi Arabia and other Arab monarchies, as well as enlisting the manpower of Al Qaeda and other shadowy Islamic extremists. The gap between Western pretentious rhetoric and grim reality has now diverged to a chasm.
As American author and analyst Webster Tarpley pointed out recently, Washington and its allies have no longer a modicum of respect for sovereignty of countries. The Western powers are on a mission to plunder the planet in a vain bid to salvage their own debt-ridden, bankrupt societies.
The seeming indifference of Western governments to the chasm in their rhetoric and reality - glaringly obvious to the rest of the world - is the mark of supreme arrogance, the Roman Empire syndrome.
But history shows that every empire has its day of reckoning. As with the Imperium Romani, the height of expansion by the Imperium Americana may also signal a fatal strain of over-reach. While its nefarious foreign military adventurism in Syria and elsewhere seems unstoppable at the moment, the latent social implosion in the US and across Europe may well herald the eventual sacking of this empire - from within.
Crime of the Century
by Robert Sheer via jude - TruthDig Thursday, Jul 5 2012, 9:23am
Forget Bernie Madoff and Enron’s Ken Lay—they were mere amateurs in financial crime. The current Libor interest rate scandal, involving hundreds of trillions in international derivatives trade, shows how the really big boys play. And these guys will most likely not do the time because their kind rewrites the law before committing the crime.
Modern international bankers form a class of thieves the likes of which the world has never before seen. Or, indeed, imagined. The scandal over Libor—short for London interbank offered rate—has resulted in a huge fine for Barclays Bank and threatens to ensnare some of the world’s top financiers. It reveals that behind the world’s financial edifice lies a reeking cesspool of unprecedented corruption. The modern-day robber barons pillage with a destructive abandon totally unfettered by law or conscience and on a scale that is almost impossible to comprehend.
How to explain a $450 million settlement for one bank whose defense, in a plea bargain worked out with regulators in London and Washington, is that every institution in their elite financial circle was doing it? Not just Barclays but JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and others are now being investigated on suspicion of manipulating the Libor rate, so critical to a $700 trillion derivatives market.
Caught as the proverbial deer in the headlights, Barclays Chairman Robert E. Diamond Jr. resigned this week and offered a plaintive defense to the British Parliament that he learned only recently that his bank was manipulating the index on which so large a part of international trade is based. That is plausible only if we assume he was paid $10 million a year to be deliberately ignorant. The Wall Street Journal had exposed this scandal fully four years ago but his bank continued to participate in it nonetheless.
“Study Casts Doubt on Key Rate” was the headline on the May 29, 2008, investigative report, which concluded: “Major banks are contributing to the erratic behavior of a crucial global lending benchmark, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows.” Even then, according to the report, it was known that the Libor rate was being manipulated “to act as if the banking system was doing better than it was at critical junctures in the financial crisis.”
Fast-forward four years to Diamond’s testimony before Parliament this week in which the CEO claimed his recent discovery of a pattern of interest manipulation by Barclays had made him “physically sick.” Who was to blame? According to the executive, subordinates acting behind his back.
The American-born banker, who has dual citizenship in the United States and Britain, is well versed in financial chicanery, having started by putting together derivatives packages at Credit Suisse First Boston back in 1996. He was compelled under parliamentary questioning Wednesday to admit that “I can’t sit here and say no one in the industry [knew] about the problems with Libor. There was an issue out there and it should have been dealt with more broadly.”
He couldn’t deny widespread chicanery within his bank because, as in the collapse of Enron a decade ago, investigators had uncovered an email record of market manipulation so glaring that if the top executives were unaware, it was because they didn’t want to know.
As The New York Times editorialized: “The evidence, cited by the Justice Department—which Barclays agreed is ‘true and accurate’—is damning. ‘Always happy to help,’ one employee wrote in an email after being asked to submit false information. ‘If you know how to keep a secret, I’ll bring you in on it,’ wrote a Barclays trader to a trader at another bank, referring to their strategies for mutual gain. If that’s not conspiracy and price-fixing, what is?”
The U.S. Justice Department made a deal with Barclays, and although it may prosecute some individuals in the scam, it agreed not to go after the bank itself. “Such an agreement makes sense only if that cooperation will allow prosecutors to nail other banks that have been involved in setting the rates, including potential cases against Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and HSBC ... ,” the Times editorial said.
Both Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase were reported by The Wall Street Journal years ago to be suspected of rigging the Libor interest rate. The leaders of those banks, despite such media exposure, clearly remained confident enough to continue on their merry way.
The sad reality is that they will probably get away with it. The world of high finance is by design as obscure and opaque as the bankers and their political surrogates can make it, and even this most recent crack in their defense of deception will soon be made to go away.
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