According to Daniel Hopsicker in MadCow Morning News, it turns out Ruslan Tsarni, the uncle of the two alleged Boston bombers, was married to the daughter of former top CIA official Graham Fuller. Uncle Ruslan, in turn, had a decade-long business relationship with Halliburton, the oil company/defense contractor formerly run by Dick Cheney that awarded billions of dollars in no-bid contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Back in the nineties, Tsarni served for two years as a “consultant” for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan. It’s been well-documented that USAID (which is funded by the US State Department) is often used as a front for CIA and other US intelligence operations.

In the early 1990s Ruslan Tsarni married the daughter of former top CIA Graham Fuller, who spent 20 years as operations officer in Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Hong Kong. In 1982 Fuller was appointed the National Intelligence Officer for Near East and South Asia at the CIA, and in 1986, under Ronald Reagan, he became the Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, with overall responsibility for national level strategic forecasting.

At the time of their marriage, Ruslan Tsarni was known as Ruslan Tsarnaev, the same last name as his nephews Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the alleged bombers.

It is unknown when he changed his last name to Tsarni.

Coincidentally Graham Fuller is listed as one of the American Deep State rogues on FBI translator whistleblower Sibel Edmonds’ State Secrets Privilege Gallery. According to Edmonds, the gallery features subjects of FBI investigations she became aware of during her time as an FBI translator.

She asserts that these individuals engaged in criminal activities subsequently protected under the doctrine of State Secrets. After Attorney General John Ashcroft went all the way to the Supreme Court to silence her, she posted the twenty-one photos to the Internet with no names.

One photo has been subsequently identified as Graham Fuller.

All this is just the tip of the iceberg. Read full post here: MadCow Morning News

photo credit: ford via photopin cc

Crossposted at Daily Censored

BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast published a fascinating article in Vice Magazine this week (Nicolas Maduro Did Not Steal the Venezuelan Election) about being hired by Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro in 2004 to investigate the possibility the US might tamper with Venezuela’s elections (following Palast’s 2001 expose detailing how Florida governor Jeb Bush stole the election for his brother).

The article describes how he presented Chavez and Maduro with a collection of secret FBI memos revealing that ChoicePoint Corp – under a no-bid contract (from the US government) – had “shoplifted” Venezuela’s voter rolls, as well as the voter rolls of Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, Mexico and Honduras, all of whom were on the verge of electing presidents from the political left.

By coincidence it was a subsidiary of ChoicePoint Jeb Bush engaged in 2000 to illegally “purge” more than 56,000 voters, the vast majority black and poor, from Florida’s voter rolls. A maneuver which would ultimately give George Bush the US presidency by just 537 ballots.

After reading Palast’s report, Chavez moved swiftly to establish a virtually tamper-proof electoral system. In Venezuela every voter gets TWO ballots. One is electronic; the second is a paper print-out of the touch-screen ballot, which the voter reviews, authorizes and places in a locked ballot-box. Fifty-four percent of the boxes are opened at random and checked against the computer tally – making the system virtually tamper proof.

When Maduro’s opponent Henrique Capriles officially challenged the recent outcome, he was allowed to add as many precincts as he wanted (12,000) to this automatic audit.

It would appear the US State Department doesn’t have a leg to stand on in backing opposition claims that Maduro’s win is fraudulent. Thus, according to Palast, they have turned to another old CIA trick, violent street demonstrations protesting the electoral outcome. He points out that most, but not all, of the voters killed in street protests are Chavistas.

photo credit: sterno_inferno via photopin cc

Crossposted at Daily Censored

Within hours of President Hugo Chavez’s untimely death (he was 58), US civil rights groups filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with numerous federal agencies seeking information and documents that “relate to or reference or discuss any information regarding or plans to poison or otherwise assassinate the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. ” The records demands have been made to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of State, and the Defense Intelligence Agency and have been filed by the civil rights legal organization, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, the anti-war group, ANSWER Coalition and Liberation Newspaper.

The Venezuelan government is also calling for an investigation into the circumstances of President Chavez’s illness, specifically whether he was poisoned or deliberately exposed to cancer causing elements.

The FOIA request makes reference to the recent exhumation of Palestinian leader Yassar Arafat’s body. His body was exhumed in November to have samples taken for possible poisoning. This was after abnormal levels of polonium 210 were discovered in his personal belongings. Results should be available later this month.

Read more here

photo credit: ¡Que comunismo! via photopin cc

Crossposted at Daily Censored

General Carter Ham, the AFRICOM commander for the Pentagon, admitted last week that the US had helped trained the Mali rebels, including Captain Amadou Sanogo, who led the military coup which overthrew Mali’s constitutionally-elected government.

In describing the statement Ham made at the Ralph Bunche center, Veterans Today editor Gordon Duff is highly critical of Ham’s support for widening US military involvement in the region, including the recent establishment of drone bases in Niger.

Duff is extremely concerned that the US lacks the intelligence resources in Africa to prevent the horrendous “collateral damage” nightmares drones have caused in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.

He goes on to describe Mali as a “domino” in a misguided and poorly thought out destabilization effort aimed at creating a generation of warfare.

Read more here here

Photo credit: US Army Africa via photopin cc

Cross posted at Daily Censored

Going Postal by Mark Ames

The best analysis I’ve read about the root cause of the rage massacre in Connecticut last week comes from Michael Rechenwald, founder of Citizens for Legitimate Government in Seeking Definitive Causes and Solution for Rage Massacres. Rechenwald agrees with Mark Ames’ premise in Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion — From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton‘s Columbine and Beyond. Ames argues that rage massacres are committed by self-identified rebels seriously disenchanted by some aspect of American life who are lacking both support and a viable plan for change. As Rechenwald and Ames point out, they are not psychotic because they have a clear rationale and a clear set of targets for their rage, which is largely reality based. Schools are often a target because, as Rechenwald points out, this is where Americans are fed most of the crap ideology that induces them to buy into a political and economic system that exploits and oppresses them.

Borrowing from political scientist Benjamin Barber (in Jihad vs McWorld), Rechenwald describes them as jihadists (in tending to embrace tradition, nationalism and religious extremism) who terrorize and kill those they view as responsible for their failure to achieve the American dream they were promised.

Rechenwald argues that neither gun control nor any other short term measures will end these horrible tragedies: “Nothing short of changing everything — the capitalist system, the imperialist agenda, the poor to (for many) non-existent health care system, the greater incidences of mental illness and their aggravation in an agonistic social order, the ideological basis of capitalist triumphalism — will suffice.”

I agree.

Two very different bin Laden clones (Veterans Today)

Paul Craig Roberts isn’t your garden variety conspiracy nut. We’re talking about a former US Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration, a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week and Scripps Howard News Service. In a November 29^th article at Information Clearinghouse Roberts, who has been highly critical of both the Bush and Obama administration for destroying US Constitutional protections, the senseless and exorbitantly expensive War on Terror and US policy on Palestine, republishes a November 2001 interview with bin Laden in which the late Saudi financier specifically denies responsibility for 9-11. It was originally published in Urdu in Pakistan’s daily newspaper Unmat on September 28, 2001. It was translated by the BBC’s World Monitoring Service and made public on September 29, 2001. In the interview, bin Laden asserts attacks on innocent civilians are inconsistent with his religious beliefs, as well as expressing the opinion that the attacks originated with people “who are part of the US system but dissenting against it.” I first learned about the interview from David Ray Griffin’s 2009 book, Osama Dead Or Alive? As both Griffin and Roberts carefully document, all the post-2001 videos and audiotapes supposedly claiming responsibility for the Twin Tower attacks have been discredited as fakes by bin Laden lookalikes.

As Roberts points out, Osama bin Laden’s sensational denial was never reported by the US print or TV media, except for a one minute CNN segment that quotes from an al Jazeera report regarding bin Laden’s Unmat interview and concludes “we can all weigh that in the scale of credibility and come to our own conclusions.” There was no effort to investigate bin Laden’s September 2001 claims by either the White House or Congress.

Ironically, as Roberts notes, the corporate media did widely report on bin Laden’s death from kidney and lung failure in December 2001. Several post-2001 videos, in which a person alleging to be bin Ladin takes credit for the attacks, have also be widely promoted in the corporate media. Careful analysis by a range of international experts (which Griffin details in his book) have discredit all of them as fakes.

Roberts is scathingly critical of the insipid hoax the Obama administration is perpetuating that Navy Seals assassinated someone in Abbottabad Pakistan last year who already died in 2001. In addition to testimony from neighbors who report that the helicopter allegedly transporting the Seals couldn’t have evacuated anyone because it crashed and burned, there are a lot of strange coincidences: for example, the unfortunate death of 30 members of the SEAL unit in a mysterious helicopter crash in Afghanistan and the failure of any of the thousands of sailors on the USS Carl to witness bin Laden’s alleged burial at sea.

The obvious question is why. Why would the Bush administration fabricate such a monstrous lie and more importantly, why on earth would Obama perpetuate it?

In my mind answer is simple: because they can. It’s a measure of the absolute power and corruption of a despotic political system when political leaders can invent their own truth at will for political expediency. It forces all of us to confront the painful reality that the US government is no less corporate-controlled or corrupt (it’s probably a little more so) under Obama than under Bush. To believe otherwise is wishful thinking.

Read the entire interview and Roberts’ commentary here.

Security guards break up Black Friday fight in Kentucky (AP photo)

Stuff.co.nz compares America’s Black Friday to “something you might see might see amid a humanitarian crisis, a war or in the aftermath of a natural disaster.”

They link to a video which originally appeared on the Sydney Morning Herald website (the Australian accent is a giveaway):  http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/americas/7999238/Stampedes-and-gun-threats-during-Black-Friday

Read full article here: Stampedes-and-gun-threats-during-Black-Friday

UnitedHealth Care CEO Stephen Hemsley - highest paid CEO in US ($102 million)

Source credit: Entertainment Money

An upcoming International Journal of Health Services study reveals that Medicare has massively overpaid private insurance companies under the Medicare Advantage program and its predecessors over the past 27 years. The authors, Drs Hellender, Himmelstein and Woolhandler, come up with a startling $282.6 billion in excess payments, most of them in the past eight years. In 2012 alone, private insurers are being overpaid $34.1 billion, or $2,526 per Medicare Advantage enrollee. Instead of being used to improve patient care, shoring up Medicare’s trust fund or reducing the federal deficit, these funds have gone to stockholder dividends and the exorbitant salaries paid to insurance CEOs.

The article appears at a time when some lawmakers, including vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, have proposed a dramatic expansion of private Medicare. Private Medicare plans – previously referred to as Medicare HMOs and now called Medicare Advantage plans – have been in existence for about three decades. Medicare pays these privately run plans a set “premium” per enrollee for hospital and physician services (averaging $10,123 in 2012). However the study’s authors find that private insurers exploit loopholes to garner overpayments above and beyond what it costs them to care for their enrollees. For example, Medicare gives private insurers a full premium for each enrollee, even for those who get most of their care for free at the Veterans Health Administration.

In addition, private insurance plans cherry-pick by selectively recruiting the healthiest seniors whose care will cost much less than the premiums they generate for the company. As the article concludes, both Republicans and Democrats who championed Medicare HMOs in the eighties and nineties argued that “market-based” privately financed Medicare would be more efficient and save money. In fact the opposite is the case. As with privatized prisons, charter schools, public water systems and private military contractors like Blackwater and Halliburton, this is yet another form of corporate welfare – another way to bilk taxpayers out of hundreds of billions of dollars to increase CEO salaries and shareholder dividends. Health-care CEOs had the highest median pay of any industry in the 2010 The Wall Street Journal CEO Compensation Study.

The US is the only country in the world where insurance companies have inserted themselves, as finance brokers, into the doctor-patient relationship. It’s time to end the health care rip-off by totally removing private insurance from the health care equation. We can only do this by repealing ObamaCare and replacing it with a publicly funded and administered single payer health care system like all the other industrial companies enjoy.

Yet another great reason to vote for Green Party candidate Dr Jill Stein on Tuesday November 6^th.

Read full study here

Ex-Panther Larry Pinkney

In an scorching indictment of Obama’s first four years as president, Black Panther veteran Larry Pinkney (former Minister of Interior of the Republic of New Africa) weighs in on the betrayal of African Americans by Obama and the black “intelligentia.”

At his website Intrepid Report, Pinkney castigates Black America’s so-called intelligentsia for placing “pigmentation and hollow pride” above principles and selflessness.

According to Pinkney, “They have betrayed (and continue to betray) the masses of everyday ordinary Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people in this nation and throughout Mother Earth. What they have done and who they are must never be forgotten.”

The article continues: “The Black intelligentsia (Pinkney identifies Cornell West and Angela Davis by name) knew, or should have known, better than many, that any person, irrespective of color or gender, who rises to become the head (i.e., chief executive) of the U.S. Empire would not hesitate to:

1) Give trillions of dollars of the people’s money to corporate banksters and other Wall Street robber barons.

2) Federally eliminate the much needed single payer universal health care option.

3) Militarily bomb Africa.

4) Murder women, men and children with incessant predator drone missile strikes upon other sovereign nations.

5) Utilize a self-legitimized ‘kill list’ to commit extrajudicial murders of Americans and non-Americans alike, without the bother of legitimate due process.

6) Sign into law the draconian NDAA—which calls for the indefinite detention in this nation of U.S. citizens—without charge, trial, judge, jury, or legal defense.

7) Continue operating the torture chamber at the U.S. gulag known as Guantanamo.”

Later he writes, “Notwithstanding his double-speak political rhetoric, Barack Obama has indeed ‘redistributed the wealth’ of this nation. He has massively redistributed the wealth from the public sectors, the dwindling middle classes, and the poor to the super-rich corporate/military elite—which is a fact which cannot possibly escape the awareness of the Black intelligentsia and which is precisely why he was overwhelmingly supported by the corporate elite of Lockheed, Goldman Sachs, and the assorted and sordid banking and pharmaceutical multinationals of Wall Street, etc.”

Read more here.