FBI Helped Facilitate Ransom for U.S. Hostage Killed in Drone Strike

WSJ

The Federal Bureau of Investigation helped facilitate a 2012 ransom payment to al Qaeda from the family of kidnapped aid worker Warren Weinstein, senior U.S. officials said, in an unsuccessful bid to secure the release of the American, who was killed in January in a U.S. drone strike.

The FBI’s previously undisclosed role reveals a contradiction in the U.S.’s longstanding position against paying ransoms for hostages.

While the White House sharply criticizes the practice in public and private, new details about the Weinstein case show how the FBI provides some families with guidance towards that end.

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White House Refuses to Disclose Secret Cellphone Kill Switch Order

Enacted almost ten years ago without public notice or debate, Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) 303, often referred to as the cellphone kill switch, has been shrouded in secrecy from its inception and has been targeted by civil liberties groups looking to make the policy public.

“We have no clue what’s in it or what it’s about,” Harold Feld, the senior vice president of Public Knowledge, a public interest advocacy group, told Al Jazeera America.

In 2012, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed suit in federal court seeking disclosure of information about SOP 303’s basic guidelines and policy procedures.

After a lower court ordered the policy be made public, the DOH successfully argued on appeal that releasing any information about SOP 303 would risk public safety.

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Russia building nuclear reactors – and influence – around the globe

Russia has been notoriously brazen in using state-owned companies as instruments of national power. President Vladimir Putin’s natural-gas wars with Belarus and Ukraine made headlines and sometimes left substantial parts of Europe in the cold. But Moscow’s exploits in other energy-related areas have been less noticed.

Recent revelations about the concerted Russian effort to buy up uranium resources across the globe may change that. For Moscow’s state-owned nuclear-energy company, Rosatom, has made successful inroads into markets around the world. It is Rosatom — not France’s Areva or the United States’ Westinghouse — that has 29 nuclear reactors in various stages of planning and construction in more than a dozen countries, the largest number of nuclear reactors being built internationally. In contrast, Areva, though largely owned by the French state, has not sold one reactor since 2007.

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Thousands of new Lerner emails found

An inspector general investigating the IRS’s improper scrutiny of Tea Party groups has found thousands of emails from Lois Lerner, the agency official at the center of that controversy, according to committees involved in the probe.

Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration (TIGTA) said it found roughly 6,400 emails either to or from Lerner from between 2004 and 2013 that it didn’t think the IRS had turned over to lawmakers, the congressional committees said. The committees have yet to examine the emails, aides on Capitol Hill said.

The IRS said last year that Lerner’s computer crashed in 2011, leaving it unable to reproduce an untold number of her emails over the prior two years. 

Of the emails the inspector general found, around 650 were from 2010 and 2011, while most were from 2012. The inspector general found about 35,000 emails in all as it sought to recover emails from recycled back-up tapes.

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Truth Has Been Murdered — Paul Craig Roberts

The Obama regime and its neocon monsters and European vassals have resurrected a Nazi government and located it in Ukraine. Read this statement by Elena Bondarenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament: http://slavyangrad.org/2015/04/18/statement-by-elena-bondarenko-peoples-deputy-of-verkhovna-rada-of-ukraine/

The Western media has created a fictional account of events in Ukraine. The coup organized by the Obama regime that overthrew the elected democratic government in Ukraine is never mentioned. The militias decked out in Nazi symbols are ignored. These militias are the principle source of the violence that has been inflicted on the Russian populations, resulting in the formation of the break-away republics. Instead of reporting this fact, the corrupt Western media delivers Washington’s propaganda that Russia has invaded and is annexing eastern and southern Ukraine. British and European politicians parrot Washington’s lies.

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The Limits of Propaganda

As Paul Craig Roberts has recently reported, the US government is in the process of launching an all-out war on truth. Those who express views contrary to the party line out of Washington will be labeled a threat. Eventually they may find themselves carted to one of the concentration camps which Halliberton (Dick Cheney's old company) has constructed for $385 million. But that may take a while. In the meantime, we can expect lots of other, less dramatic developments. Indeed, some of these are already happening. Here they are, listed in order of severity.

1. Self-censorship. Those who have previously tried to get the truth out no matter what become more reticent and prone to equivocation when reporting on “hot” issues.

2. Topic-avoidance. They start avoiding certain “hot” issues that they feel are most likely to get them into trouble.

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Top Iranian general: America was behind 9/11 attacks

The commander of Iran’s ground forces said that American officials planned and executed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to justify military intervention in the region.

“These wars and these threats stem from a comprehensive American strategy. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Americans felt that a new force was beginning to materialize, namely the union between Sunnis and Shiites,” said Ahmad Reza Pourdastan in an interview with Iran’s Arabic-language Al-Alam state news network.

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“The basis of this force was the blessed Islamic Revolution in Iran. This force is Islam, or the Islamic world. In order to prevent this force from materializing, the Americans did many things,” Pourdastan said, according to a translation of his remarks by the Middle East Media Research Institute.

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Why ARE Baltimore police hurling rocks?

Baltimore police officers targeted by rock-throwing protesters on Monday appeared to hurl projectiles toward crowds on at least two occasions.

One photo shows a projectile, possibly a rock or piece of concrete, leaving an officer's hand.

(AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

Video taken from a helicopter appears to show another officer hurling objects toward protesters, including many who appeared to be teenagers.

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Curfew implemented in Baltimore, Nat'l Guard called in

The National guard has been requested in Baltimore to try and restore order and peace in the city. The curfew will be in place for 1 week and will run from 10pm to 5am starting tomorrow! 15 police officers have been injured thus far!

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Out-of-Control FBI to Former Head of 9/11 Investigation: Butt out!

A top FBI official brazenly warned off the former chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence because of his persistence in pursuing connections between the Saudi royal family and the 9/11 attacks.

In a recent interview with WhoWhatWhy, Bob Graham, the former head of the Senate committee, co-chair of a congressional investigation of 9/11, and two-term governor of Florida, described a remarkable interaction with a “very senior” FBI official around the time of the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

Two journalists for an online investigative journal had just revealed a long-suppressed federal investigation of a Saudi family, living in a gated community in Sarasota, Florida, who had fled in great haste just before the 9/11 attacks, leaving their possessions behind.

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Encrypting Your Laptop Like You Mean It

Time and again, people are told there is one obvious way to mitigate privacy threats of all sorts, from mass government surveillance to pervasive online tracking to cybercriminals: Encryption. As President Obama put it earlier this year, speaking in between his administration’s attacks on encryption, “There’s no scenario in which we don’t want really strong encryption.” Even after helping expose all the ways the government can get its hands on your data, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden still maintained, “Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on.”

But how can ordinary people get started using encryption? Encryption comes in many forms and is used at many different stages in the handling of digital information (you’re using it right now, perhaps without even realizing it, because your connection to this website is encrypted).

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Rise of the New Black Radicals

CHRIS HEDGES

The almost daily murders of young black men and women by police in the United States—a crisis undiminished by the protests of groups such as Black Lives Matter and by the empty rhetoric of black political elites—have given birth to a new young black militant.

This militant, rising off the bloody streets of cities such as Ferguson, Mo., understands that the beast is not simply white supremacy, chronic poverty and the many faces of racism but the destructive energy of corporate capitalism. This militant has given up on electoral politics, the courts and legislative reform, loathes the corporate press and rejects established black leaders such as Barack Obama, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Michael Eric Dyson.

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Photojournalists 'taken down,' detained by police in Baltimore protests

A photographer for Reuters was detained and another for the Baltimore City Paper was thrown to the ground by Baltimore Police officers while covering protests over police brutality late Saturday, they said.

The incidents occurred near the Western District police station, the journalists said, as they were covering a particularly tense standoff between protesters, who were throwing rocks, and helmeted police officers, who wielded shields and batons.

J.M. Giordano, the photo editor at City Paper, said he was hit in the head with multiple police shields had his "face pretty much smushed down on the ground," and sustained multiple bruises after several officers rushed at him as he shot pictures.

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Fleeing Hillary: Top Dem money man departs

A top Democratic moneyman recruited by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign has put fundraising activities on hold, saying he can’t do it with a clear conscience because the former secretary of state has too many unanswered questions swirling around her.

New York businessman Jon Cooper, who Team Clinton enlisted for its elite corps of early fundraisers known as “HillStarters,” said that he decided not to tap his donor network for Mrs. Clinton because she hasn’t provided enough answers about foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation while she ran the State Department, her exclusive use of private email for official business as America’s top diplomat and her commitment to liberal priorities.

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The Obama Murders

Thousands of people are dying in the Mediterranean trying to flee the horror created by President Barack Obama’s criminal wars across the North Africa and the Middle East, leaving nations like Libya, Syria and Yemen in chaos under terrorist gangs backed by America’s “ally” Saudi Arabia. An estimated 3,000-5,000 people are crowding into boats every day, willing to die at sea rather than live in the Hell created by Obama’s insanity.

In discussion with the LaRouchePAC Policy Committee earlier this week, LaRouche emphasized:

"Not only do we have the drownings in terms of the Mediterranean coast, on a massive scale, but we also have, to complement that, we have from California in particular, we have a threat of depopulation, massive depopulation, from California on the United States.

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'Freddie Gray was me': frustration with police simmers after death in Baltimore

“If I’d been dropped two inches to the left, then Freddie Gray was me,” says Abdul Salaam. The 36-year-old mental health executive from north-east Baltimore unbuttons his collar to show deep, dark scarring on his left shoulder from the time he was beaten by three Baltimore police officers in front of his child.

“It was 1 July, 2013, 6.37 pm,” he says.

Salaam was approaching his driveway after grocery shopping for a family barbecue when an officer pulled him out of the car and threw him against a gate. They slammed him on the concrete five times, and then proceeded to punch and kick him. His three-year-old began screaming, officers threatened to send his son to social services, while Salaam lay on the floor, hog-tied.

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The Relentless Jewish Campaign Against Islam

HENRY MAKOW

For the last few months, I've reviewed accurate narratives about the life of Mohammed. The last great prophet died at the age of 63. On his deathbed, he attributed his premature death to his poisoning at the hands of an Arabian Jewess who successfully poisoned not only him but also other lieutenants who actually died immediately.

Mohammed died years later in 632 AD. The Jews of Arabia during Mohammed's day were the primary merchants of spirits and wines which Mohammed forbade his followers, so they naturally worked indefatigably to nip their Islamic problem "in the bud" so to speak.

This poisoning of the Islamic leadership was only one of numerous attempts to eliminate the Muslims from Arabia while the movement was still in its infancy.

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Baltimore police acknowledge mistakes in Freddie Gray's death

As Baltimore officials braced for large-scale protests Saturday over of the death of Freddie Gray, top police brass acknowledged that officers made mistakes during the arrest that ended with his slipping into a coma and dying a week later.

At a news conference Friday at police headquarters, Commissioner Anthony W. Batts said protesters have a right to speak out, but he urged them to remain nonviolent. He also provided an update on the investigation, saying that officers violated department policies while Gray was in their custody.

Police said Gray, who was dragged by officers to a transport wagon, should have gotten immediate medical attention.

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False Flag Weekly News with Kevin Barrett and Jim Fetzer

False flag weekly news is uploaded by No Lies Radio every Thursday!

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US drone strike killed American and Italian citizens held captive by al-Qaida

A US counter-terrorism operation in January killed two hostages, one American and one Italian, held by al-Qaida in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan, the White House announced on Thursday.

Barack Obama is due to make a statement shortly about the deaths of Warren Weinstein, an American held by al-Qaida since 2011, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian national who had been an al-Qaida hostage since 2012.

“Analysis of all available information has led the intelligence community to judge with high confidence that the operation accidentally killed both hostages,” Obama’s press secretary Josh Earnest said in a statement.

“The operation targeted an al-Qaida-associated compound, where we had no reason to believe either hostage was present, located in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan. No words can fully express our regret over this terrible tragedy.

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