Astroturf and manipulation of media messages | Sharyl Attkisson | TEDxUn...

Nuremberg: A Fair Trial? A Dangerous Precedent

The Nuremberg War Trial has a strong claim to be considered the most significant as well as the most debatable event since the conclusion of hostilities. To those who support the trial it promises the first effective recognition of a world law for the punishment of malefactors who start wars or conduct them in bestial fashion. To the adverse critics the trial appears in many aspects a negation of principles which they regard as the heart of any system of justice under law.

This sharp division of opinion has not been fully aired largely because it relates to an issue of foreign policy upon which this nation has already acted and on which debate may seem useless or, worse, merely to impair this country's prestige and power abroad. Moreover, to the casual newspaper reader the long-range implications of the trial are not obvious. He sees most clearly that there are in the dock a score of widely known men who plainly deserve punishment. And he is pleased to note that four victorious nations, who have not been unanimous on all post-war questions, have, by a miracle of administrative skill, united in a proceeding that is overcoming the obstacles of varied languages, professional habits, and legal traditions. But the more profound observer is aware that the foundations of the Nuremberg trial may mark a watershed of modern law.

Before I come to the discussion of the legal and political questions involved, let me make it clear that nothing I may say about the Nuremberg trial should be construed as a suggestion that the individual Nuremberg defendants or others who have done grievous wrongs should be set at liberty. In my opinion there are valid reasons why several thousand Germans, including many defendants at Nuremberg, should either by death or by imprisonment be permanently removed from civilized society. If prevention, deterrence, retribution, nay even vengeance, are ever adequate motives for punitive action, then punitive action is justified against a substantial number of Germans. But the question is: Upon what theory may that action properly be taken?

The starting point is the indictment of October 18, 1945, charging some twenty individuals and various organizations, in four counts, with conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Let me examine the offenses that are called in Count 3 of the indictment "war crimes," in the strict sense...

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1946/04/nuremberg-a-fair-trial-a-dangerous-precedent/306492/?single_page=true

OLC: President May Withhold WMD Info from Congress

Despite an explicit statutory requirement to keep Congress “fully and currently informed” about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the President may withhold proliferation-related information from Congress if he determines that doing so could harm the national security, according to a sweeping opinion from the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that was prepared in 2003.

The opinion, written by then-OLC deputy John C. Yoo, was released this week under the Freedom of Information Act. See Presidential Authority to Protect National Security Information, January 27, 2003.

The OLC opinion takes an uncompromising view of presidential authority. It reviews multiple statutes that mandate disclosure of various types of information to Congress, including requirements to report on WMD proliferation and to keep the intelligence committees “fully and currently informed of all intelligence activities.” It then concludes that those statutes cannot override, modify or limit the President’s constitutional prerogatives.

“Despite Congress’s extensive powers under the Constitution, its authorities to legislative [sic] and appropriate cannot constitutionally be exercised in a manner that would usurp the President’s authority over foreign affairs and national security,” the OLC opinion said.

Even to a layman, the Yoo opinion seems muddled and poorly argued, in several respects...

http://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2015/08/olc-nsi/

9/11 survivor known as 'Dust Lady' in iconic photo dies at 42

New York (CNN)Many remember the haunting photograph: A woman wearing business attire and pearls is covered head-to-toe in white dust, her hands held out helplessly before her, as she makes her way out of the World Trade Center's damaged North Tower on September 11, 2001.

She survived that day, getting out before both towers of the trade center crumbled and killed 2,753 people in the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil.

But the woman in the photos, known to most as the "Dust Lady," died Tuesday, her family said. Marcy Borders was 42.

She had been battling stomach cancer since last year, daughter Noelle Borders told CNN...

http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/26/us/9-11-survivor-dust-lady-dies/index.html

Barbara Honegger 2014 “9/11 Museum Virtual Walking Tour” PART 2 of 2

Resisting Surveillance: it's is not just about the metadata

The History of CIA-Funded Foundations: Why the CIA Deliberately Funds Socialists and Liberals

Who Paid the Piper: The Cultural Cold War1 by Frances Stoner Saunders (1999)  is about the covert “cultural” propaganda the CIA carried out between 1950 and 1967. The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the centerpiece of this operation, had offices in 35 countries, published over 20 magazines, held art exhibitions and provided major financial support for American artists, poets, authors and playwrights. Its primary purpose was to “nudge” the intelligentsia of Western Europe away from Marxism and communism towards a more accommodating view of US interests.

At the end of World War II, Europeans tended to view the US as “a culturally barren nation of gum chewing, Chevy driving, Dupont-sheathed Philistines.” To counteract this stigma, Truman issued an appendix to executive order NSC-4A, directing the CIA director to undertake covert psychological activities in support of American anti-Communist policies.

As Saunders details, this strategy included CIA support for both US and foreign Non-Communist Left (NCL) organizations, trade unions who agreed to weed out “dangerous radicals” and leftist intellectuals. The rationale was to create and support “parallel” organizations to provide an alternative to Communist groups over which the CIA had no control...

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2014/09/01/the-history-of-cia-funded-foundations/

Dr. Phillip Alvelda: The Future of Neural Interface, DARPA BiT

Hollywood Insiders - Beneath the Surface

True Detective: Chicago, El Chapo, & Vince Vaughn’s Mom

Actor Vince Vaughn, in the news for his starring role in HBO’s True Detective and recent controversial statements advocating more guns in schools, now has a new source of notoriety guaranteed to keep him in face time: his family.

Vaughn’s mother, Sharon Vaughn, a sparkling and vivacious Chicagoland socialite, and his step-father, Stephen Ferrone, a lawyer and former brokerage manager, both have links to a criminal enterprise involved in the biggest seizure of drugs on a plane in Mexican history.

Vince Vaughn’s intemperate comments spurred a second look at the financial fraud his mother was involved in seven years ago. That brought new details to light which finally bring some much-needed clarity to the case of the American-registered DC-9 busted in Mexico with 5.5 tons of cocaine, first reported and investigated in dozens of stories published here.

Sharon Vaughn, Vince Vaughn’s mother, was a longtime savvy financial consultant who once ranked 105th in the nation on Bloomberg Wealth Manager’s annual list of high-end personal money managers.

From her multi-million dollar mansion in the tony suburb of Lake Forest, near Chicago, she managed a hedge fund called Directors Performance Fund. In June of 2003 she made an unusual—and dubious—investment.

According to a criminal affidavit filed by a Secret Service Agent, she put $9.7 million into a recently-incorporated shell corporation called Argyll Equities LLC in Boerne Texas, a subsidiary of Argyll Group...

http://www.madcowprod.com/2015/08/12/true-detective-chicago-el-chapo-vince-vaughns-mom/

NSA Spying Relies on AT&T’s ‘Extreme Willingness to Help’

THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY’S ability to spy on vast quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States has relied on its extraordinary, decades-long partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T.

While it has been long known that American telecommunications companies worked closely with the spy agency, newly disclosed NSA documents show that the relationship with AT&T has been considered unique and especially productive. One document described it as “highly collaborative,” while another lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.”

AT&T’s cooperation has involved a broad range of classified activities, according to the documents, which date from 2003 to 2013. AT&T has given the NSA access, through several methods covered under different legal rules, to billions of emails as they have flowed across its domestic networks. It provided technical assistance in carrying out a secret court order permitting the wiretapping of all Internet communications at the United Nations headquarters, a customer of AT&T.

The NSA’s top-secret budget in 2013 for the AT&T partnership was more than twice that of the next-largest such program, according to the documents. The company installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its Internet hubs on American soil, far more than its similarly sized competitor, Verizon. And its engineers were the first to try out new surveillance technologies invented by the eavesdropping agency...

https://www.propublica.org/article/nsa-spying-relies-on-atts-extreme-willingness-to-help

Copy of Postal Service Audit Shows Extent of Mail Surveillance

WASHINGTON — In what experts say is the first acknowledgment of how the United States Postal Service’s mail surveillance program for national security investigations is used, the service’s internal watchdog found that inspectors failed to follow key safeguards in the gathering and handling of classified information.

The overall program, called mail covers, allows postal employees working on behalf of law enforcement agencies to record names, return addresses and other information from the outside of letters and packages before they are delivered to the home of a person suspected of criminal activity.

The information about national security mail covers, amid heated public debate over the proper limits on government surveillance, was contained in an audit conducted by the Postal Service’s inspector general last year. Although much of the information was public, sections about the national security mail covers were heavily redacted. An unredacted copy of the report was provided to a security researcher in response to a Freedom of Information Act request this year. The researcher, who goes by a single legal name, Sai, shared the report with The New York Times...

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/us/copy-of-postal-service-audit-shows-extent-of-mail-surveillance.html

CIA and Assassinations: The Guatemala 1954 Documents

Washington, D.C. – These documents, including an instructional guide on assassination found among the training files of the CIA's covert "Operation PBSUCCESS," were among several hundred records released by the Agency on May 23, 1997 on its involvement in the infamous 1954 coup in Guatemala. After years of answering Freedom of Information Act requests with its standard "we can neither confirm nor deny that such records exist," the CIA has finally declassified some 1400 pages of over 100,000 estimated to be in its secret archives on the Guatemalan destabilization program. (The Agency's press release stated that more records would be released before the end of the year.) An excerpt from the assassination manual appears on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times on Saturday, May 31, 1997.

The small, albeit dramatic, release comes more than five years after then CIA director Robert Gates declared that the CIA would "open" its shadowy past to post-cold war public scrutiny, and only days after a member of the CIA's own historical review panel was quoted in the New York Times as calling the CIA's commitment to openness "a brilliant public relations snow job." (See Tim Weiner, "C.I.A.'s Openness Derided as a 'Snow Job'," The New York Times, May 20, 1997, p. A16)

Arbenz was elected President of Guatemala in 1950 to continue a process of socio- economic reforms that the CIA disdainfully refers to in its memoranda as "an intensely nationalistic program of progress colored by the touchy, anti-foreign inferiority complex of the 'Banana Republic.'" The first CIA effort to overthrow the Guatemalan president--a CIA collaboration with Nicaraguan dictator Anastacio Somoza to support a disgruntled general named Carlos Castillo Armas and codenamed Operation PBFORTUNE--was authorized by President Truman in 1952. As early as February of that year, CIA Headquarters began generating memos with subject titles such as "Guatemalan Communist Personel to be disposed of during Military Operations," outlining categories of persons to be neutralized "through Executive Action"--murder--or through imprisonment and exile. The "A" list of those to be assassinated contained 58 names--all of which the CIA has excised from the declassified documents.

PBSUCCESS, authorized by President Eisenhower in August 1953, carried a $2.7 million budget for "pychological warfare and political action" and "subversion," among the other components of a small paramilitary war. But, according to the CIA's own internal study of the agency's so-called "K program," up until the day Arbenz resigned on June 27, 1954, "the option of assassination was still being considered." While the power of the CIA's psychological-war, codenamed "Operation Sherwood," against Arbenz rendered that option unnecessary, the last stage of PBSUCCESS called for "roll-up of Communists and collaborators." Although Arbenz and his top aides were able to flee the country, after the CIA installed Castillo Armas in power, hundreds of Guatemalans were rounded up and killed. Between 1954 and 1990, human rights groups estimate, the repressive operatives of sucessive military regimes murdered more than 100,000 civilians...

http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/

Anonymous Documentary - The Story of the Anonymous Hacktivists Full Docu...

Wiki: Water fluoridation controversy

Many who oppose water fluoridation consider it to be a form of compulsory mass medication.[10]

Water fluoridation was characterized in at least one journal publication as a violation of the Nuremberg Code and the Council of Europe's Biomedical Convention of 1999.[1]...

...Fluoride can occur naturally in water in concentrations well above recommended levels, which can have several long-term adverse effects, including severe dental fluorosis, skeletal fluorosis, and weakened bones.[15] ...

...In rare cases improper implementation of water fluoridation can result in overfluoridation that causes outbreaks of acute fluoride poisoning, with symptoms that include nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. Three such outbreaks were reported in the U.S. between 1991 and 1998, caused by fluoride concentrations as high as 220 mg/L; in the 1992 Alaska outbreak, 262 people became ill and one person died.[18] In 2010, approximately 60 gallons of fluoride were released into the water supply in Asheboro, North Carolina in 90 minutes—an amount that was intended to be released in a 24-hour period.[19]...

...Water fluoridation is effective at reducing cavities in both children and adults.[7] Studies have shown that water fluoridation has led to reductions of 50–60% in childhood cavities; while more recent studies show lower reductions (18–40%), likely due to increasing use of fluoride from other sources, notably toothpaste, and also to the halo effect of food and drink made in fluoridated areas and consumed in unfluoridated ones.[22]...

...Most countries in Europe have experienced substantial declines in cavities without the use of water fluoridation.[26] For example, in Finland and Germany, tooth decay rates remained stable or continued to decline after water fluoridation stopped. Fluoridation may be useful in the U.S. because unlike most European countries, the U.S. does not have school-based dental care, many children do not visit a dentist regularly, and for many U.S. children water fluoridation is the prime source of exposure to fluoride.[27].The effectiveness of water fluoridation can vary according to circumstances such as whether preventive dental care is free to all children.[28]..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_controversy

A Frightening FBI Raid after 9/11 - Nadine Hamoui

The New Devil’s Dictionary

“DICTIONARY, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.” — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
Published August 5th, 2015

Ambrose Bierce’s last words were found in a letter he sent to an intimate friend in the winter of 1913. “As to me,” he wrote, “I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination.” Then he disappeared in Mexico and was never heard from again.

A famed journalist and essayist of the late 19th century, Bierce was also one of America’s sharpest cynics. His legacy was entombed in The Devil’s Dictionary: a satirical lexicon originally published in 1906. The dictionary is a collection of comic definitions that he wrote over several decades as a columnist for the San Francisco News Letter and other publications.

As with all dictionaries, Bierce’s work was a comment on his own time, though some of the best Devil’s Dictionary entries are timeless:

APOLOGIZE, v. To lay the foundation for a future offence.

KILL, v. To create a vacancy without nominating a successor.

YEAR, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments...

http://www.theverge.com/a/new-devils-dictionary

GCHQ AND ME: My Life Unmasking British Eavesdroppers

I STEPPED FROM the warmth of our source’s London flat. That February night in 1977, the air was damp and cool, the buzz of traffic muted in this leafy North London suburb, in the shadow of the iconic Alexandra Palace. A fellow journalist and I had just spent three hours inside, drinking Chianti and talking about secret surveillance with our source, and now we stood on the doorstep discussing how to get back to the south coast town where I lived.

Events were about to take me on a different journey. Behind me, sharp footfalls broke the stillness. A squad was running, hard, toward the porch of the house we had left. Suited men surrounded us. A burly middle-aged cop held up his police ID. We had broken “Section 2″ of Britain’s secrecy law, he claimed. These were “Special Branch,” then the elite security division of the British police.

For a split second, I thought this was a hustle. I knew that a parliamentary commission had released a report five years earlier that concluded that the secrecy law, first enacted a century ago, should be changed. I pulled out my journalist identification card, ready to ask them to respect the press.

But they already knew that my companion that evening, Time Out reporter Crispin Aubrey, and I were journalists. And they had been outside, watching our entire meeting with former British Army signals intelligence (Sigint) operator ≈, who at the time was a social worker.

Aubrey and I were arrested on suspicion of possessing unauthorized information. They said we’d be taken to the local police station. But after being forced into cars, we were driven in the wrong direction, toward the center of London. I became uneasy...

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/03/life-unmasking-british-eavesdroppers/

Edward Heath abuse claims: Five forces investigating ex-PM

The Met, Wiltshire, Kent, Jersey and Hampshire forces are conducting separate inquiries into the late MP.

The BBC understands Wiltshire Police halted an inquiry into a brothel keeper in the 1990s after she said Sir Edward was involved in child sexual abuse.

The Sir Edward Heath Charitable Foundation said it was confident he would be cleared of any wrongdoing.

'Case dropped'
On Tuesday night, Hampshire became the fifth force to say it was investigating "allegations", but gave no further details.

The BBC's home affairs correspondent Dominic Casciani says claims made by the brothel keeper, that Sir Edward was a client, meant that she had left herself open to prosecution.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-33770021

Geometric modulation A more effective method of steerable ELF VLF wave generation with continuous HF heating of the lower ionosphere

Geometric modulation A more effective method of steerable ELF VLF wave generation with continuous HF heatin...

Stanford VLF Group

The Stanford University VLF Group investigates the Earth's electrical environment, its upper atmosphere, lightning discharges, radiation belts, and the ionized regions of upper atmosphere known as the ionosphere and magnetosphere. Much of our work involves the use of very low frequency (VLF) electromagnetic waves which are generated by lightning discharges, by man-made transmitters and by energetic radiation belt electrons. We investigate the generation of these waves and the manner in which they propagate in and scatter from various regions of the upper atmosphere. We use VLF waves as diagnostic tools to investigate physical processes in the Earth's plasma environment. Under the direction of Professor Umran Inan, the VLF group carries out extensive observational programs at multiple sites around the world and on satellites. In addition, extensive theoretical modeling and interpretation work is carried out, on quantitative modeling of high-altitude optical emissions known as sprites, blue jets, and elves, on modeling the propagation and scattering of electromagnetic waves in the Earth-ionosphere waveguide, and on other related electromagnetic wave and plasma physics problems...

http://vlf.stanford.edu