Via Weasel Zippers – Reports of fires across Caracas, unknown as to their cause or origin. What is known is international media are being told to leave the country. Ones who won’t leave are threatened with violence and death if they do not.
“@ChicagoPhotoSho: This is not #Ukraine its #Venezuela. Media is not allowed. CNN removed by gunpoint. pic.twitter.com/5i9t8gqk4k”
— Jean 🦋 (@setislady) February 20, 2014
They could always name the target town “Ruby Ridge”. It shouldn’t be hard to find a few friends willing to role-play the bad guys. Rumor has it during a recent patriot movement strategy session they decided the new camo would be burka’s… Wouldn’t that just throw a monkey wrench into the PC Posse Comitatus.
(Via Telegraph) The US army has built a fake city designed to be used during combat training exercises. The 300 acre ‘town’ includes a five story embassy, a bank, a school, an underground subway and train station, a mosque, a football stadium, and a helicopter landing zone.
Located in Virginia, the realistic subway station comes complete with subway carriages and the train station has real train carriages.
The subway carriages even carry the same logo as the carriages in Washington DC There are also bridges and several other structures which can be transformed into different scenarios. (more…)
This one will be interesting to see if there is a follow-up. The question I have is why would the pentagon destroy the pictures? The court would, most likely, be on their side if they took a position of national security as reason for denial – so why destroy them? Something not passing the sniff test….
WASHINGTON DC – Judicial Watch announced Monday that it received documents through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit showing that Admiral William McRaven ordered the immediate destruction of any photos of Osama bin Laden’s death within hours of a Judicial Watch FOIA request.
According to the Pentagon documents, McRaven sent his email on “Friday, May 13, 2011 5:09 PM.” The documents do not detail what documents, if any, were destroyed in response to the McRaven directive. The Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit seeking the documents was filed in the United States Court for the District of Columbia only hours earlier. Judicial Watch also announced the filing at a morning press conference. […]
The move by McRaven to purge the photos appears to have come, at least in part, in response to aggressive efforts by Judicial Watch to obtain images of the deceased bin Laden that President Obama, in a rewrite of federal open records law, had refused to disclose.
In addition to its May 2, 2011, FOIA request with the Pentagon Judicial Watch filed an identical request on May 3, 2011, with the CIA. When neither the Defense Department nor the CIA complied with the FOIA requests, Judicial Watch, in June 2011, filed FOIA lawsuits against both agencies. In the course of the litigation, the Pentagon claimed that it had “no records responsive to plaintiff’s request.” (CONTINUE READING)
ROSIE O’DONNELL: Parker is 18. There he is in his military uniform. He’s been accepted to the Citadel. He’s very into the military because, you know, how do you annoy your left-wing liberal pacifist mother? You become a big military man. He’s the number one cadet at his school, Valley Forge Military Academy. He’s very interested. When he was really, you know, I said to him, “Why, honey? Why do you want to do –’ He said, only in America, mom, could somebody like you who came from a horrible childhood, grow up and adopt kids like me who needed a family and I owe something to this country.” And I said, “No, my son. You owe something to me.”
(Via MediaIte) In the new book HRC, by The Hill’s Amie Parnes and Bloomberg’s Jonathan Allen, General David Petraeus praised Hillary Clinton as a potential president, specifically citing what many consider her biggest obstacle as a candidate: her role as Secretary of State overseeing the American compound in Benghazi when it was attacked in 2012.
“She’d make a tremendous president,” Petraeus said. “Like a lot of great leaders, her most impressive qualities were most visible during tough times. In the wake of the Benghazi attacks, for example, she was extraordinarily resolute, determined, and controlled.”
On This Week With George Stephanopoulos, Jon Karl brought this up to Representative Tom Cole (R-OK) and asked if it “took the wind out of the sails” of Benghazi as an anti-Hillary talking point. (read more with video)
The Summary Version is: IOWA Police execute a search warrant based on suspected credit card fraud – However, they smashed down the door in a “no-knock” raid replete with full battle armor. Then the police tried to destroy the CCTV system which was recording their behavior.
When questioned about the ridiculously excessive “use of force” things get worse because the police justify the execution of the warrant, the extreme measures invoked, based around the principle the occupant was a legally registered gun owner and therefore represented a more significant risk to them. <—- Think about that.
Personally I have come to the difficult determination that the police are now a danger to us. We have as much likelihood to be victimized by paid law enforcement as we do criminals. It has taken me several years to accept this ‘new-normal’ reality with police militarization; however, there is simply too much empirical evidence to dismiss the obvious. This story is only atypical in that the owner had CCTV systems to document the reality.
Several reports to review. Here is the original story: Family calls Ankeny police raid excessive – Justin Ross was in the bathroom next to his bedroom when a squad of Ankeny police officers rammed through a side door of his home. (more…)
In order to fully conceptualize. It is perhaps important to reference 2001 “The Dawn Of Man” segment which introduced 2001 – A Space Odyssey.
Only after watching the above – should you consider the below:
When Clinton, Rice and Power launched operation R2P in Benghazi Libya they specifically helped the Libyan “Rebels” to overthrown Kaddaffi. This gave the al-Qaeda operatives, who made up the majority coalition of the “rebels”, immediate access to weapons warehouses and massive stockpiles of ManPads (Man Portable Air Defense Systems), otherwise known as surface to air missiles – the missiles were a specific manufacture coming originally from Russia. 20,000 such missiles immediately went missing.
This past weekend one of those missiles was used.
All five soldiers in the helicopter were killed, security officials said.
“This is what everyone has long assumed could happen, and it is a confirmation of those fears — that substantial and advanced weaponry came into the country in the aftermath of the Libyan war,” said Michael Wahid Hanna, an Egypt scholar at the Century Foundation in New York.
New York Times – Islamist militants shot down an Egyptian military helicopter in the Sinai Peninsula with a surface-to-air missile over the weekend, raising new alarms about the terrorist insurgency that developed there in response to the military takeover last summer.
EGYPT – Egypt will hold a presidential vote before parliamentary polls, President Adly Mansour said on Sunday, in a change to a political roadmap that could pave the way for the swift election of army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
Parliamentary elections were supposed to be held first under the timetable drawn up after the army overthrew President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood in July following mass protests against his rule.
The decision to revise the order of elections is likely to deepen tensions in Egypt, which is struggling to cope with waves of political violence. Forty-nine people were killed in anti-government marches on Saturday, the third anniversary of the popular uprising that toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak. (more…)
BigfurHat@iOTW Notes the “creepy factor” of the NSA for Kids website. http://www.nsa.gov/kids/
In my humble opinion, it’s not really all that creepy.
Central U.S. Government agencies have been doing this for years under a few semi-secretive programs that measure IQ, aptitude and propensity for problem solving. In the modern era it’s appropriately called DAAD’s.
What’s new is the platform, the internet. In the “olden days” it was puzzle books and subscriptions. Or, sometimes trade craft engagement could come from word of mouth (old school word for networking) inside various educational platforms such as “Spelling Bees”, “Debate Teams” or the various state “science fairs”, the latter still being predominantly utilized today. (more…)