(WMR)—President Obama did not want an encounter with the press in Los Angeles during his brief remarks on June 7 about health care to turn into a press conference. Obama said he didn’t “want the whole day to just be a bleeding press conference.” Continue reading
(WMR)—Just as U.S. National Security Adviser Tom Donilon was wrapping up his meetings with top Chinese officials in Beijing to set the stage for President Obama’s June 7–8 summit meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Rancho Mirage, California, The Washington Post published from a leaked confidential report, prepared by the Defense Science Board, claiming that Chinese cyber-spies have gained access to the technological secrets of America’s most advanced weapon systems. Continue reading
(WMR)—Last week, President Obama proclaimed that George W. Bush’s “global war on terrorism” must come to a close and that, henceforth, the United States would respond to planned or actual acts of terrorism with traditional counter-terrorism, something short of full-blown global warfare. So-called liberals lauded Obama’s actions. Continue reading
(WMR)—Stung by criticism over his administration’s Nixonian-level surveillance of journalists, President Obama, in a May 23 policy speech at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington, DC, said he ordered Attorney General Eric Holder to review current law enforcement investigations of journalists and to set up a meeting with representatives of the media. Obama also reiterated his support for a media shield law. Continue reading
(WMR)—President Obama’s Nixonian assault on the press is rooted in the mistaken belief that leaks of “national security” information can do great harm to the country’s security. Therefore, Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, a former District of Columbia judge who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan and vetted by the ultra-conservative Federalist Society, have brought the government’s immense surveillance capabilities on reporters for The New York Times, the Associated Press, The Smoking Gun website, Fox News, and now, according to one of its Washington reporters, CBS News. Continue reading
(WMR)—President Obama, in his typical Machiavellian fashion, says he “offers no apologies” for the subpoena of two months of Associated Press phone calls covering the conversations, and quite possibly the cell phone text messages, of over 100 reporters. Continue reading
(WMR)—Attorney General Eric Holder announced that in June 2012 he recused himself from the Justice Department investigation of the alleged leak of classified information on a CIA counter-terrorism operation in Yemen after he was interviewed by the FBI as part of their investigation of the leak. The Associated Press published report in May 2012 about a classified CIA counter-terrorism operation in Yemen that intercepted an advanced underwear bomb destined for a passenger plane. Continue reading
(WMR)—Former neighbors of Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, the Republican candidate for governor of Virginia, paint a picture of a confrontational individual who was always spoiling for a fight, whether as the Sully region representative on the Advisory Committee for the Fairfax County Public Schools Social Studies curriculum or as the self-designated gauleiter of his North Riding community in Fairfax County in suburban Washington, DC. Continue reading
(WMR)—Twenty years ago it would have been unthinkable for a U.S. Navy museum dedicated to naval undersea warfare to all but totally ignore the late Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the Russian-born “father of the U.S. nuclear Navy.” Continue reading
(WMR)—Chabad Lubavitch Jews from Israel and the United States are moving in to the Jewish Autonomous Republic of Birobidzhan to build up the numbers, as well as economic and political power of the region’s current Jewish population of 4,000, which is only 2 percent of the republic’s overall population. Continue reading
MAKAH RESERVATION, Wash. (WMR)—Corporations, in league with federal and state governments, have established a new protocol to deal with major environmental disasters. Using the twin weapons of secretive clean-ups and public relations media blitzes, corporations have a new weapon to add to their other programs of austerity and privatization to seize control of the planet from the people who inhabit it. Continue reading
(WMR)—What does a prediction of a ricin attack on the United States, North Korea, Dennis Rodman, and punk rock fans have in common? The answer is a bizarre but well-funded magazine and documentary production company called “Vice,” which has alternated its headquarters between Montreal and Brooklyn. Continue reading
(WMR)—The Chechen origin and reported military training of the two suspect brothers in the Boston Marathon bombing, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsaraev, raises some pointed questions about past U.S. support for the Chechen insurgency and who sponsored the brothers to live in the United States, paid for their college tuition, receive military training abroad, and paid for Tamerlan’s Wai Kru mixed martial arts training in Boston. Continue reading
Europe’s anti-austerity popular revolt is not benefitting the political parties of the authentic left that should be reaping electoral support from disaffected workers, pensioners, and students. Instead, the parties of the far-right, which are in lockstep with the corporate-fascist goals of multinational banks and corporations, are gaining in strength. Continue reading
(WMR)—The Qatari- and Saudi-backed Salafists, Muslim radicals who follow the extreme radical Wahhabi sect of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the rest of the Gulf, have now moved into a governing position in the Central African Republic (CAR). Continue reading
(WMR)—A former high-level U.S. government official who has just returned from Iran reports to WMR that Western sanctions are having the opposite effect on Iran than what was expected. Instead of grounding Iran’s economy to a halt, Western sanctions have provided an impetus for Iran to grow an indigenous and self-sustaining economy. Continue reading
Just as with the April 2002 coup strife in Venezuela, stirred up by CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency provocateurs in the oil workers’ labor sector and in some parts of the military, the CIA is using a slightly different playbook prior to the April 14 election. The upcoming election pits Hugo Chavez’s designated successor, Nicolas Maduro, against the Western- and corporate-backed candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski, the governor of Miranda state. Continue reading
(WMR) — Apparently, the neocons never left the halls of power when Barack Obama became president. Just after mandatory budget sequestration kicked in, with White House tours for school kids being canceled and other government functions being pared back, the United States gave $60 million to the Free Syrian Army (FSA) battling the government of Syrian President Bashar al Assad. Continue reading
While budgets are being slashed by governments around the world, national intelligence agencies are not only flush with money but they are increasingly networking their resources against the “threat.” What is the threat? It is whatever national leaders and their governments deem it to be. One day it is “Al Qaeda,” the next day it is Iran, then North Korea, then global narco-terrorists, and so on and so on . . . Continue reading
(WMR)—During the Cold War, the CIA was so incensed at the role played by Mossad in coups and attempted coups against U.S. allies, it began leaking information to the media concerning the role played by Israeli Mossad agents and “dual loyalists” within the CIA’s own ranks about Israeli interference in the politics of America’s NATO allies. Continue reading
(WMR)—When William Casey took over as CIA director in 1981, he brought with him into Langley a team of fellow Wall Street businessmen whose first priority was to milk the intelligence agency for every drop of usable information they could gather in order to game the stock market while armed with top secret intelligence findings. Continue reading
Australia was founded as a British penal colony, a fact that most Australians have found to be a defining aspect in how they treat their own convicts and detainees. Continue reading
(WMR)—Only the Mossad would be so arrogant to believe that a 47-year old Israeli national found floating in the open waters of the South Pacific with water proof bags containing two mobile phones, a laptop computer, papers, but no passport would not engender any suspicion. But that is exactly what happened in the self-governing New Zealand territory of the Cook Islands on October 14 last year when boaters coaxed Israeli national Binjamin Nachshon from waters about a mile off Avarua, the capital of the Cook Islands. Continue reading
James Bond portrayer Sean Connery may be a strong supporter of Scottish independence and the fictional Bond may be a native Scot hailing from Skyfall Estate in Scotland, but 007′s employer, MI-6, is, in real life, covertly working to ensure that the 2014 referendum on Scotland’s independence goes down to defeat. WMR has learned that because a majority of MI-6′s top officials and agents are Scottish, Britain’s foreign spy agency would effectively wind up as an intelligence agency without a country if Scotland votes to go its own way. Continue reading
In one of the final acts of the 112th Congress, the U.S. Senate dealt a fatal blow to the U.S. Constitution by passing President Obama’s National Defense Authorization Act for 2013, which contains the same illegal detention of U.S. citizens as its 2012 predecessor, and defeating amendments to and enacting Texas Republican Representative Lamar Smith’s House Resolution 5949, the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act of 2012. Continue reading
At the turn of the last century workers and students around the world were willing to take to the streets, launch revolutions, and battle the agents of the wealthy elite to death, if need be, in order to advance basic human rights of justice and equality for all, fair and living wages, and tolerable living conditions. Continue reading
The Wall Street Journal, which, since being acquired by Rupert Murdoch, has been heavy on right-wing propaganda and weak on news, has exposed a major program by the Obama administration to conduct a massive sweep of government and private databases to build up terrorist suspect computerized dossiers on millions of Americans. Continue reading
Substitute “China” with “Japan” and “India” with “Britain” and the following story could have appeared in the newspapers prior to December 7, 1941, “Pearl Harbor Day.” Continue reading
The recent lopsided vote in the UN General Assembly to admit Palestine as a non-member state observer is a sure indication that in a post-imperial American world, Israel’s ability to secure allies is becoming more difficult. With the decreasing diplomatic and economic clout of the United States, those who govern from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv found it more difficult than ever to cajole, browbeat, or woo nations to vote against the Palestine statehood resolution. Continue reading
(WMR)—WMR previously reported that in 1984, CIA deputy director for intelligence Robert Gates, who later became CIA director under George H. W. Bush, renamed the CIA’s Political Psychology Division the Political Psychology Center (PPC) and transferred the group from the Office of Global Issues (OGI) to the Office of Scientific and Weapons Research (OSWR). Continue reading
The Washington punditocracy worked overtime the morning after the election postulating the winners and losers in the 2012 election. Continue reading
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Sanctions and austerity: The globalists’ twin weapons of mass destruction
Posted on April 5, 2013 by Wayne Madsen
The world’s global bankers and purveyors of new world order dictates are relying on two weapons of mass destruction to achieve their ends: the increasingly-antiquated weapon of sanctions and the supranational financial organization-driven weapon of mandatory austerity. Continue reading →