The Astounding Conspiracy Theories of Wall Street Genius Mark Gorton

Via American Kabuki …

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Mark Gorton is a prominent financier and a respected entrepreneur. He founded the music sharing site Limewire, and he runs Tower Research, a famed high-frequency trading firm. Gorton also believes that the “ruthless” secret cabal that assassinated JFK and planned 9/11 could be coming to kill his family.

Mark Gorton does not have a reputation as a crackpot. Quite the opposite. He’s been favorably profiled in the New York Times for his business acumen and charitable deeds. His experience as the head of Limewire—which disrupted the music industry and then lost a $100 million lawsuit as a result—was closely followed by the press. And when Michael Lewis’s blockbuster new book about high frequency trading was published recently, prominent media outlets turned to Gorton to learn what HFT firms are really like. The Huffington Post even dubbed him “the new face of Wall Street.” He is a very respected and very wealthy man.

This week, we were forwarded documents that Gorton was sending out to employees at Tower Research. These documents—embedded at the bottom of this post—are essays by Mark Gorton, laying out his theories on the secret high-level murderous criminal “Cabal” that is responsible for, among other things, the JFK and RFK assassinations, the presidential careers of the Bushes, Clinton, and Obama, the Oklahoma City bombing, the 9/11 plot, and the murder of countless witnesses, politicians, and journalists who sought to expose them, including Sen. Paul Wellstone and even Hunter S. Thompson. Everything, according to Gorton, has been an inside job.

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VT ~ Fixing Elections Through Fraud (From 2012)

From Veteran’s Today …

On the Need for a Royal Commission on Electoral Practices in Canada

by Anthony J. Hall

 

The declining credibility of elections in many countries is creating a crisis of legitimacy severing bonds of trust that once linked citizens to the institutions that govern us. Without credible proof that those governing on our behalf really have earned our supportive consent in free and fair elections, one of humanity’s greatest innovations is rendered null and void.

The implications of this breakdown put in doubt one of the West’s premier claims, namely that its core polities are beacons of democracy worthy of emulation. The democratic deficit arising from episodes of electoral malfeasance makes a mockery of the West’s frequent assertions that its expansionary enterprises are benign efforts to spread the benefits of governance through voter choice rather than the armed impositions of autocrats.

As shall be established in the main body of this essay, the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 in the United States are both textbook examples of systemic fraud that ushered into power the losing candidate. Many of the tactics for cheating developed primarily on the right wing of the political spectrum in the United States are being broadly exported. The evidence is mounting, for instance, that the unfolding controversy over the conduct and outcome of the 2011 federal election in Canada involves violations of the law by operatives who seem to have moved easily between the orbit of the Republican Party in the United States and the orbit of the Conservative Party in Canada.

The importation into Canada of Republican Party tactics for stealing votes and elections is an extension of a very old process that has seen the constitutional monarchy in the northern half of North America assimilated more and more into the political culture of the republic to the south. This process of assimilation tends to wreak havoc on Canada’s institutions of parliamentary democracy derived primarily from the Westminster Parliament in Great Britain.

As the leadership of the ruling Conservative Party of Canada looks more and more to the right-wing of the political spectrum in the United States for models of how to win and maintain power, the integrity of Canada’s own indigenous institutions of self-governance is increasingly imperiled. The assault on the indigenous conservatism inherited from the era of the civil war in British North America has been particularly brutal. Recall that Canada emerged from the conservative side of the conflict remembered in history as the American Revolution. The protests in Boston Harbor against the taxation of East India Company tea were a liberal attack on the conservatism of the British imperial red coats who are the founding fathers of my country, the polity that would in due course become the coast-to-coast-to-coast Dominion of Canada.

The activity of data collection and data mining in modern-day electioneering, including the most sophisticated forms of electoral cheating, tends to be organized along transnational lines. The development of digitalized electoral strategies encourages the application of hardware, software and professional expertise in ways that optimize efficiencies of scale by transcending national boundaries. The result is that the idiosyncrasies of many political cultures are denigrated not only in Canada but in many polities throughout the world where the democratic impulses of citizens are expressed through institutions rooted in the details of local history. In working through the issues that are arising from the electoral scandal in Canada, therefore, there is an opportunity to address more general sets of problem that are stripping legitimacy everywhere from procedures that are supposed to epitomize democracy in action.

Voter Suppression and Telephone Fraud

Among the revelations driving the political scandal presently sweeping Canada are indications that the triumphant party in the federal election of 2011 stole at least a portion of the vote by effectively disenfranchising some Canadians. Canadian law is clearly violated by voter suppression together with the fraudulent communications that often accompany it. Thus the operatives who study and apply techniques of voter suppression and related scams have ample cause to stay hidden from public view.

As the tactics of voter suppression move from cyberspace to the tangible world, real people are robbed of their franchise. This methodology for stealing votes and elections is just one of many strategies in a big and expanding repertoire of digital cheating in the age of the Internet. Computation through the interaction of high-powered computers throws up many new means of seizing power by manoeuvring around the rules, structures and referees that not long ago could be counted on to delver relatively free and fair elections.

As with so many other facets of human interaction, the revolution in information technology has swept aside old ways of doing things in electioneering. Some of the outcomes of this transformative surge are more retrograde than progressive. Those travelling the path to political power by engaging in digital chicanery in and around ballot boxes or voting machines often run roughshod over the very hallmarks of civil democracy once held up as the pride of the so-called West.

Many of the contemporary techniques of voter suppression were first developed and refined by Republican Party strategists in the United States. As Ron Shaiko, a senior fellow at the Rockefeller Centre at Dartmouth University observed, “In the U.S. the people who work to suppress voter turnout are the Republicans for a simple reason. Historically, the lower the turnout, the better it is for Republicans. High turnout means Democratic wins.”[i]

One means of suppressing votes has been to harass voters with obnoxious calls ostensibly coming from their preferred party. In an explanation that resembles similar reports of wrongdoing emanating from the Canadian election of 2011, Mark Crispin Miller outlines a Republican tactic for cheating in the US mid-term election of 2006. Miller writes, “The Bush Republicans deployed harassing robo-calls–obnoxious taped appeals, ostensibly from Democrats, that jammed your phone lines, making you so livid that, theoretically, you’d vote Republican or not at all–in at least 53 House districts nationwide”[ii]

Republican techniques to suppress votes are but a small part of a large and growing playbook. There is a large and rich literature on this subject. Much of it demonstrates that the presidential elections of both 2000 and 2004 were stolen by George W. Bush and his supporters. After studying the evidence on the 2004 election, University of Guelph English Professor Michael Keefer agrees that Bush could not have won if the votes had been counted accurately.[iii] He estimates that about 5 million votes for the Democratic Party candidate John Kerry went missing. Keefer concludes, “Previous elections were crooked, and sometimes stolen, but since 2004 there has been no more reason to trust the official results of any election in the United States than in Guatemala or Kenya.”[iv]

The effect of the many indications that Republican Party’s big black bag of dirty tricks has been imported into Canada has tainted the mandate of the Conservative Party whose candidates took control of a majority of seats in the Canadian House of Commons during the federal election of May 2, 2011. This is a date that, I predict, will come to live in infamy in future Canadian history books. The scandal over electoral fraud and voter suppression is injecting itself into Canadian consciousness and Canadian politics just as the opposition parties are trying to regroup and renew their leadership.

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Naomi Wolf ~ End of America

From Therapeuticmessenger …

Maybe a lot of you have seen this, but if you haven’t, Naomi has a caring soul and has a way of explaining things so that people get the point of the matter. This is some exceptional work and deserves to be past around again.

The repercussions since 2001 and the degree to which real freedoms have eroded is staggering. Wake up as many people as you can to the werewolf that is in the hen house.

Enjoy,

Spartan of Truth

LaRouche: It’s the End of the Old Imperial System

From LaRouche PAC …

In discussion on Christmas Day, Lyndon LaRouche addressed the explosive implications of the Christmas Eve Moscow meeting of the Eurasian Supreme Economic Council, reported earlier. There, the heads of state of the Customs Union of Belarus, Kazakstan, and Russia agreed on steps to form a Eurasian Union effective January 1, 2015. Heads of state of Kyrgyzstan and Armenia were also present, and plans were laid for their countries to join during 2014. The Prime Minister of Ukraine was present as an observer; Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych had earlier said that Ukraine is considering which Customs Union documents it can sign on to.

“Look back a bit in history, the history of these territories, it’s very clear,” LaRouche said. “If you take that Union, well how much territory of Eurasia does that include? A great deal.” (Note that Ukraine, for instance, is the largest country in Europe after Russia. And have a look at Kazakstan on the map.) “That’s what happened as I emphasized on Monday. I think many of our people have not paid attention to that. Some of the younger members have, but some of the older folks are still stuck in the mud. This is like the Soviet Union.”

In his opening remarks at that Eurasia meeting, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Eurasian integration “creates conditions for the dynamic development of our countries,” noting that despite adverse global economic conditions, the common market of the three member states is expanding, with trade among the Customs Union countries expanding threefold between 2010 and 2012.

“This is going to cause a real ruckus in Europe,” LaRouche said.

Putin said that “the share of raw materials in export-import operations is going down… I would like to stress that this is a very important part of our joint work. We are reducing mutual trade in raw materials and increasing trade in high-tech goods.”

“That’s exactly the opposite of what’s happening in the trans-Atlantic,” LaRouche noted. “All this stuff was there in 2011, in direction.”

That meeting was then followed by a Christmas Day meeting of the Supreme State Council of Belarus and Russia, reported on the Kremlin website, in which Putin said that the closer cooperation of Belarus and Russia was leading the way, calling it “extremely important for all integration processes in the post-Soviet era.” Two highlights of their agreements were a $3 billion loan from Russia, and more important, mutual cooperation in space. Belarus President Aleksander Lukashenka said that Belarus will be a space power. The background is that like Ukraine, although differing in important details, Belarus was also a high-tech center of the old Soviet Union.

“This goes to the post-imperial idea,” LaRouche said. “It’s the end of the old system. The old system as represented by the trans-Atlantic region, is now dead. Except the United States exists, but where is it located? What are the relationships? Because, the old imperial system is finished. This Eurasian integration is not a new imperial system: this is a new conception of statehood.”

Laura Poitras / Praxis Films

On the recent breakouts by whistleblower Edward Snowden and the reporters who have published his revelations, LaRouche said, “I would not underestimate the Snowden implication, because you have the Obama Administration, and its precedent, which is the Bush Administration. That process, that element, is disgusting and should be thrown away. And so therefore, the question is that you’re coming to a new period, where the present governing system of the United States,– the Constitution is fine. But the misinterpretation of the Constitution is something that has to be ejected. The old U.S. Constitution as it was, fits perfectly into this new accommodation on a global basis; but it’s the specific British-controlled aspect which has to be expunged.”

In his December 24 interview with Barton Gellman of the Washington Post, reported previously, Edward Snowden equated the NSA’s warrantless surveillance with the use of general warrants by the British in Colonial America, noting that “The last time that happened, we fought a war over it.”

“That is really a shrewd move,” said LaRouche. “Obviously his crew has been busy at this stuff, and who knows how broad that crew is? Obviously there’s careful discretion.

“The problem is, is that what’s happened is the destruction of the Constitution of the United States. And what is being done under the name of the Presidency, has actually been a destruction of the Constitution. This is especially clear since young Bush. Young Bush and on — this whole period is a matter of shame, of national shame! There were already some pretty shameful things before then, but this was the worst.”

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‘The Only Thing We Have to Fear…’ is the CIA

From Common Dreams …

President Truman’s true warning on the CIA

by Ray McGovern

Fifty years ago, exactly one month after John Kennedy was killed, the Washington Post published an op-ed titled “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence.” The first sentence of that op-ed on Dec. 22, 1963, read, “I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency.”President Harry S. Truman.

It sounded like the intro to a bleat from some liberal professor or journalist. Not so. The writer was former President Harry S. Truman, who spearheaded the establishment of the CIA 66 years ago, right after World War II, to better coordinate U.S. intelligence gathering. But the spy agency had lurched off in what Truman thought were troubling directions.

Sadly, those concerns that Truman expressed in that op-ed — that he had inadvertently helped create a Frankenstein monster — are as valid today as they were 50 years ago, if not more so.

Truman began his article by underscoring “the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency … and what I expected it to do.” It would be “charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without Department ‘treatment’ or interpretations.”

Truman then moved quickly to one of the main things bothering him. He wrote “the most important thing was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions.”

It was not difficult to see this as a reference to how one of the agency’s early directors, Allen Dulles, tried to trick President Kennedy into sending U.S. forces to rescue the group of invaders who had landed on the beach at the Bay of Pigs, Cuba, in April 1961 with no chance of success, absent the speedy commitment of U.S. air and ground support.

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Will P. Wilson Interviews Embassador Lee Wanta and Stew Webb

From willpwilson …

 

Published on Nov 1, 2013

All DAY LIVE , Nov 08, 2013, Will P. Wilson, http://www.WillPWilson.com, http://www.MediaCific.com, Embassador Lee Wanta, http://www.WantaRevelations.com, Stew Webb, http://www.StewWebb.com, http://www.VeteransToday.com, http://www.VeteransToday.com/author/s…,

 

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How Syria Unlocked America’s Dark Closet

From Veteran’s Today …

By Gordon Duff

 

Syria’s Trove of Secrets

“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive” –– Sir Walter Scott

—

Sir Walter Scott – who had a look about him

As the chances of American “boots on the ground” in Syria disappear, burying the secrets that Syria has exposed is critical, but to whom? 

Never has a single conflict exposed so much weakness, duplicity and criminality. These things have always been there but never so plain for all to see.

Chemical weapon inspectors overseeing the destruction, well underway, of Syria’s stockpiles can’t help but note clear indications that those stockpiles have not been touched for years.

The silence of this revelation is “deafening.”

Moreover, as it becomes increasingly obvious that Assad’s forces weren’t involved in chemical attacks, inspectors are now asking for Assad’s forces to, through military action, gain access to stockpiles of chemical weapons held by rebel forces.

News stories are reporting this but are trying very hard to hide this story “in plain sight.”  If inspectors are demanding access to rebel areas to assess chemical weapon stockpiles two things are obvious.

• They believe rebels control chemical weapons
• They feel that only military action by Assad led forces can secure Syria from further attacks

_______________________________

NEVER ASSUME IT IS “OVER”

Christiane Amanpour

The danger of world war isn’t over.  A veritable army of carefully groomed intelligence assets have been tasked with a last ditch effort to push the world over the brink.

Chief among these is Christiane Amanpour, the “friendly Muslim face” of CNN, long known in intelligence circles as a Mossad asset.

As the top “news celebrity” in the world with carefully groomed credibility, Amanpour is now on a mission to prove Assad is hiding chemical and biological weapons from UN inspectors, spending the credibility she gained in her recent interview with Iranian President Rohani.

_____________________________

CENSORED HISTORY EASILY REPEATED 

Gwenyth has built a new life

Her task has been to find a “Chalabi” for Syria.  Veterans Today Editor Gwyneth Todd met Chalabi in 1999.  Chalabi was with Paul Wolfowitz at PNAC (Project for a New American Century).

They were quite open about their plans to overthrow seven governments and set up dictatorships under the combined control of the Bush family and Zionist interests.

A “working group” was created to bring this about through what we were later to learn was “9/11.”

With several White House insiders from that time on staff, we get a front row view of that time, how AIPAC spies, Chalabi, White House insiders like Condi Rice and Richard Clarke operated in an environment of full-scale treason, large-scale espionage and manufactured false flag terrorism.

___________________________________

Does the “D” in DC Stand for “Depraved?”

Political obstruction of justice has a long history in America

Greasing the wheels, as is so often the case in Washington was an underworld of sexual perversion, prostitutes, “rent boys,” secret backroom homosexual liaisons in specially designated areas of the White House and even a president who entertained a special male friend who advertised gay sex for pay on the internet.

I have exhaustively interviewed those who were there.  We know the FBI had wiretapped the White House and had active investigations ongoing, targeting almost every top level Bush advisor.

Top AIPAC executives were arrested for espionage and later released.  Top Bush foreign policy and counter-terrorism advisors were all facing life sentences for a variety of crimes until the Justice Department removed FBI investigators and shut down operations, a political move.

Behind it all was sex, often involving kidnapped children.  Author John de Camp wrote about this in “The Franklin Cover-Up, Child Abuse, Satanism and Murder in Nebraska.

This was the first Bush presidency, “41,” and Republican Party officials called on the CIA to aid in silencing the investigation which was characterized as “an attempt to blackmail the President of the United States.” My knowledge of this is “first hand.”

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Continuity of Military Agenda: Syria Catastrophe Engineered Under Bush, Executed Verbatim Under Obama

From Global Research …

By Peter Phillips and Brady Osborne

Global Research, September 13, 2013

Project Censored

The rise of Al Qaeda in Syria and the predictable bloodbath that followed is the documented work of US, Israel, & Saudi Arabia.

 Tens of thousands of deaths, devastated cities, and the scattering of terrified Syrian minorities add up to a catastrophe that has unfolded in Syria over the last 2 years. International organizations including the UN call it the worst humanitarian catastrophe of the 21st century, and despite this, have put little effort into tracking down the actual genesis of the conflict, the key players perpetuating the violence, and in prescribing the obvious solutions to this conflict. With a recent initiative by Russia and Syria blunting the West’s pro-war drive, Western propagandists have attempted to reassert their crumbling narrative regarding the conflict, past, present, and future.

 The Genesis of Syria’s Conflict

 We are told by Western politicians and Western media houses that the conflict in Syria began with a spontaneous “peaceful,” “pro-democracy” uprising influenced by similar demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt. We are told that these peaceful protests were brutally crushed by the Syrian government and resulted in the militarization of the so-called “opposition.”

 This is a verified lie.

 In an April 2011 AFP report, Michael Posner, the assistant US Secretary of State for Human Rights and Labor, admitted that [emphasis added]:

 “US government has budgeted $50 million in the last two years [starting in 2009] to develop new technologies to help activists protect themselves from arrest and prosecution by authoritarian governments.”The report went on to admit that the US (emphasis added) “organized training sessions for 5,000 activists in different parts of the world. A session held in the Middle East about six weeks ago gathered activists from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon who returned to their countries with the aim of training their colleagues there.” Posner would add, “They went back and there’s a ripple effect.”

 Not only were the protests in Syria planned, funded, and directed by the US State Department, years before the so-called “Arab Spring” began, but so were the alleged protests that “triggered” events in Syria – namely similarly engineered protests in Tunisia, Egypt, and the violent US-led subversion carried out in Libya.

 What’s more disturbing is that the US-engineered “protests” were not designed to overthrow targeted governments, but instead to serve as a smokescreen for similarly pre-planned armed subversion. As early as 2007, under then President George Bush, the arming, funding, and otherwise supporting of sectarian extremists across the Middle East to undermine Lebanon, Syria, and Iran was put into motion.

 Admissions by administration officials, intelligence agents, and the very militant groups the US was funding and preparing for armed subversion in 2007 were documented in Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker extensive 9-page report,  ”The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” In it he would state clearly that:

 “To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.”

 Six years later, it could not be more obvious that indeed, militants aligned to Al Qaeda have been armed, equipped, and unleashed in an unprecedented wave of US-Saudi-Israeli state-sponsored terrorism against Syria and neighboring Lebanon. With safe havens in NATO-member Turkey, US-occupied Jordan, and pouring in from Saudi-friendly regions of Lebanon, it could not be clearer who is behind the rise and perpetuation of Al Qaeda in Syria.

Continue Reading Here…

The rise of Al Qaeda in Syria and the predictable bloodbath that followed is the documented work of US, Israel, & Saudi Arabia.

Tens of thousands of deaths, devastated cities, and the scattering of terrified Syrian minorities add up to a catastrophe that has unfolded in Syria over the last 2 years. International organizations including the UN call it the worst humanitarian catastrophe of the 21st century, and despite this, have put little effort into tracking down the actual genesis of the conflict, the key players perpetuating the violence, and in prescribing the obvious solutions to this conflict. With a recent initiative by Russia and Syria blunting the West’s pro-war drive, Western propagandists have attempted to reassert their crumbling narrative regarding the conflict, past, present, and future.

The Genesis of Syria’s Conflict

We are told by Western politicians and Western media houses that the conflict in Syria began with a spontaneous “peaceful,” “pro-democracy” uprising influenced by similar demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt. We are told that these peaceful protests were brutally crushed by the Syrian government and resulted in the militarization of the so-called “opposition.”

This is a verified lie.

In an April 2011 AFP report, Michael Posner, the assistant US Secretary of State for Human Rights and Labor, admitted that [emphasis added]:

“US government has budgeted $50 million in the last two years [starting in 2009] to develop new technologies to help activists protect themselves from arrest and prosecution by authoritarian governments.”The report went on to admit that the US (emphasis added) “organized training sessions for 5,000 activists in different parts of the world. A session held in the Middle East about six weeks ago gathered activists from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon who returned to their countries with the aim of training their colleagues there.” Posner would add, “They went back and there’s a ripple effect.”

Not only were the protests in Syria planned, funded, and directed by the US State Department, years before the so-called “Arab Spring” began, but so were the alleged protests that “triggered” events in Syria – namely similarly engineered protests in Tunisia, Egypt, and the violent US-led subversion carried out in Libya.

What’s more disturbing is that the US-engineered “protests” were not designed to overthrow targeted governments, but instead to serve as a smokescreen for similarly pre-planned armed subversion. As early as 2007, under then President George Bush, the arming, funding, and otherwise supporting of sectarian extremists across the Middle East to undermine Lebanon, Syria, and Iran was put into motion.

Admissions by administration officials, intelligence agents, and the very militant groups the US was funding and preparing for armed subversion in 2007 were documented in Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker extensive 9-page report,  ”The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” In it he would state clearly that:

“To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.”

Six years later, it could not be more obvious that indeed, militants aligned to Al Qaeda have been armed, equipped, and unleashed in an unprecedented wave of US-Saudi-Israeli state-sponsored terrorism against Syria and neighboring Lebanon. With safe havens in NATO-member Turkey, US-occupied Jordan, and pouring in from Saudi-friendly regions of Lebanon, it could not be clearer who is behind the rise and perpetuation of Al Qaeda in Syria.

– See more at: http://www.globalresearch.ca/continuity-of-agenda-syria-catastrophe-engineered-under-bush-executed-verbatim-under-obama/5349648?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=continuity-of-agenda-syria-catastrophe-engineered-under-bush-executed-verbatim-under-obama#sthash.g0e6L3Bh.dpuf

– See more at: http://www.globalresearch.ca/continuity-of-agenda-syria-catastrophe-engineered-under-bush-executed-verbatim-under-obama/5349648?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=continuity-of-agenda-syria-catastrophe-engineered-under-bush-executed-verbatim-under-obama#sthash.g0e6L3Bh.dpuf

– See more at: http://www.globalresearch.ca/continuity-of-agenda-syria-catastrophe-engineered-under-bush-executed-verbatim-under-obama/5349648?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=continuity-of-agenda-syria-catastrophe-engineered-under-bush-executed-verbatim-under-obama#sthash.g0e6L3Bh.dpuf

Counter Punch ~ When War is Swell: the Carlyle Group and the Middle East at War

From Counter Punch …

By Jeffrey St. Clair

Paris.

A couple of weeks ago, in a dress rehearsal for her next presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton, the doyenne of humanitarian interventionism, made a pit-stop at the Carlyle Group to brief former luminaries of the imperial war rooms about her shoot-first-don’t-ask-questions foreign policy.

For those of you who have put the playbill of the Bush administration into a time capsule and buried it beneath the compost bin, the Carlyle Group is essentially a hedge fund for war-making and high tech espionage. They are the people who brought you the Iraq war and all those intrusive niceties of Homeland Security. Call them the Knights of the Revolving Door, many of Carlyle’s executives and investors having spent decades in the Pentagon, the CIA or the State Department, before cashing in for more lucrative careers as war profiteers. They are now licking their chops at the prospect for an all-out war against Syria, no doubt hoping that the conflagration will soon spread to Lebanon, Jordan and, the big prize, Iran.

For a refresher course on the sprawling tentacles of the Carlyle Group, here’s an essay that first appeared in CounterPunch’s print edition in 2004. Sadly, not much has changed in the intervening years, except these feted souls have gotten much, much richer.  – JSC

Across all fronts, Bush’s war deteriorates with stunning rapidity. The death count of American soldiers killed in Iraq will soon top 1000, with no end in sight. The members of the handpicked Iraqi Governor Council are being knocked off one after another. Once loyal Shia clerics, like Ayatollah Sistani, are now telling the administration to pull out or face a nationalist insurgency. The trail of culpability for the abuse, torture and murder of Iraqi detainees seems to lead inexorably into the office of Donald Rumsfeld. The war for Iraqi oil has ended up driving the price of crude oil through the roof. Even Kurdish leaders, brutalized by the Ba’athists for decades, are now saying Iraq was a safer place under their nemesis Saddam Hussein. Like Medea whacking her own kids, the US turned on its own creation, Ahmed Chalabi, raiding his Baghdad compound and fingering him as an agent of the ayatollahs of Iran. And on and on it goes.

Still not all of the president’s men are in a despairing mood. Amid the wreckage, there remain opportunities for profit and plunder. Halliburton and Bechtel’s triumphs in Iraq have been chewed over for months. Less well chronicled is the profiteering of the Carlyle Group, a company with ties that extend directly into the Oval Office itself.

Even Pappy Bush stands in line to profit handsomely from his son’s war making. The former president is on retainer with the Carlyle Group, the largest privately held defense contractor in the nation. Carlyle is run by Frank Carlucci, who served as the National Security advisor and Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan. Carlucci has his own embeds in the current Bush administration. At Princeton, his college roommate was Donald Rumsfeld. They’ve remained close friends and business associates ever since. When you have friends like this, you don’t need to hire lobbyists..

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Obama Gives Bush “Absolute Immunity” For Everything

From Common Dreams …

by Abby Zimet

Days before Bradley – now Chelsea – Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for helping expose U.S. war crimes in Iraq, the Obama Department of Justice filed a petition in federal court arguing that the perpetrators of those crimes – Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al – enjoy “absolute immunity” against criminal charges or civil liability. The filing came in a suit brought by Sundus Shaker Saleh, an Iraqi single mother and refugee now living in Jordan, who alleges that the planning and waging of the Iraq war under false pretenses constituted a “crime of aggression” under a law used in the Nuremberg trials. With neither Congress nor Obama willing to hold Bush & Co. accountable for the Iraq catastrophe, supporters see the suit as a last-chance tactic to force the issue back into the public eye – an effort the Obama adminstration clearly opposes. More, all dispiriting, on the increasingly flawed Bush-Obama-lesser-of-two-evils thesis, and the current culture of impunity.

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