U.S. Senator Slams Washington Post Defense Of Fed Secrecy

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), sponsor of S 604, the Federal Reserve Sunshine Act of 2009, has slammed a recent Washington Post editorial that contends the Federal Reserve should not be subject to a general audit.

Sanders vented his opinions in a letter to the editor which was published in the Post today.

“We must not equate ‘independence’ with secrecy.” Sanders writes in response to the Post’s Friday editorial entitled “Focus on the Fed” which attacked his own and Congressman Ron Paul’s efforts to enact the Federal Reserve Transparency Act, a move that would allow the American people to find out for the first time where trillions in taxpayer funded bailout dollars have been used.

“No matter how intelligent or well-intentioned the Fed chairman and his staff may be, it isn’t appropriate to give a handful of people the power to lend an unlimited supply of money to anyone it wants without sufficient oversight.” Sanders writes.

“Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The American people have a right to know what is being done with their hard-earned taxpayer dollars. This money does not belong to the Fed; it belongs to the American people.” Sanders urges.

The Washington Post’s editorial angered many readers late last week by essentially advocating the continuation of non-accountability in government.

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“Though the bill has attracted 276 co-sponsors in the House and 17 in the Senate, it is wrongheaded in the extreme.” the Post’s anonymously written piece stated.

“By opening up the Fed’s most sensitive interest rate and credit policies to public second-guessing, the bill would create a risk — real and perceived — of monetary policy bent to suit congressional overseers. This would destroy financial markets’ faith in the Fed and, by extension, the value of the U.S. dollar, just as surely as a political ‘audit’ of the Supreme Court’s deliberations would undercut public faith in the justice system.” the piece claimed.

“This article makes comparisons that are utterly dissimilar.” Libertymage writer Robin Grammer succinctly points out.

“Not only does our justice system make available verdicts and vote counts the same day that the court votes on the issue, they also make public the dissenting parties with the articulated minority opinion. This is a a world of difference from the transparency policy of the Federal Reserve, who graciously offers us meeting transcripts five years after the meetings occur. The transparency policies of these two groups are in no way similar and making such a comparison is disingenuous at best.” he concludes.

Furthermore, as Ron Paul himself explained during the Financial Services Committee hearings last week, the bill would do nothing to further politicize the Fed’s decision making given that the Fed is already overtly politicized anyway.

“Just the fact that they can issue a lot of loans and special privileges to banks and corporations, that’s political. This idea that it would be political because we know what happened afterwards just doesn’t seem to add up.” Paul beseeched.

The bill would not give anyone in Congress or elsewhere the authority to sit in on Fed hearings, thus it would have no impact monetary policy. All it would do is provide answers to the American people as to where their hard earned money is being spent.

The Federal Transparency Act would also expose the fact that it is the Federal Reserve that is responsible for the artificial inflation of the debt bubble and the issuing of credit out of thin air, the driving force behind the financial crises.

The Truth is that the Washington establishment knows that an audit would set the stage for a return of honest money and fiscal policies, in which the privately run Federal Reserve can play no role.

It comes as little surprise therefore to see the establishment media in Washington advocating a continuation of unaccountability and blanket secrecy.

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/u-s-senator-slams-washington-post-defense-of-fed-secrecy/

North Carolina Terror Arrests Timed to Coincide with NLE 09

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
July 28, 2009

On Monday, the feds swooped down on an alleged terror group plotting murder and mayhem in North Carolina. A federal indictment against the gang claims Raleigh drywall contractor Daniel Patrick Boyd and associates sought to wage “violent jihad” abroad and engaged in “military-style training at home,” according to the Associated Press. Specific details are not provided by the government.

	It is said drywall contractor Daniel Patrick Boyd — a poster child for “white al-Qaeda” if there ever was one — trained at a terrorist camp in Afghanistan in the late 1980s and fought against the Soviet occupation of that country.

It is said Boyd — a poster child for “white al-Qaeda” if there ever was one — trained at a terrorist camp in Afghanistan in the late 1980s and fought against the Soviet occupation of that country. Boyd was associated with Hezb-e-Islami, or Party of Islam.

Red flags should go up on this one. Hizb-e-Islami was led and founded by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was carefully selected by the Pakistani ISI and the CIA to wage jihad against the Soviets. Hekmatyar, a drug dealer with little support in Afghanistan, was a favored son of the CIA and the ISI. The U.S. worked with Hekmatyar over a ten year period and over half of all U.S. aid to the mujaheddin went to his faction (see Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, pp. 475 and Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, pp. 260-263).

CIA Director William Casey liked Hekmatyar because they shared a goal of extending the fighting beyond Afghanistan into the Soviet Union, according to Dreyfuss. In 1984 Hekmatyar developed a close relationship with another CIA-ISI operative, Osama bin Laden, who at the time ran Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), a front organization that funneled money and arms to the mujahideen. “MAK [is] nurtured by Pakistan’s state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA’s primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow’s occupation,” MSNBC reported in August of 1998, before everything changed. MAK was also known as al-Kifah and its branch in New York was called the al-Kifah Refugee Center. This branch played a pivotal role in the 1993 WTC bombing and also had CIA ties (see the History Commons profile on Gulbuddin Hekmatyar).

Another individual named in the indictment is Hysen Sherifi. “In July 2008, Sherifi left for Kosovo to engage in violent jihad, but it’s unclear if he did any actual fighting. He returned to North Carolina in April 2009 to solicit funds and warriors to support the mujahedeen, but again the indictment did not give details,” the AP reports.

Following the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the CIA-ISI contrivance al-Qaeda was inserted in Kosovo to help ethnic Albanian extremists of the KLA mount their terrorist campaign against Serb targets in the region. “The United States, which had originally trained the Afghan Arabs during the war in Afghanistan, supported them in Bosnia and then in Kosovo. When NATO forces launched their military campaign against Yugoslavia [in March, 1999] to unseat [Slobodan] Milosevic, they entered the Kosovo conflict on the side of the KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army], which had already received ’substantial’ military and financial support from bin Laden’s network, analysts say,” Isabel Vincent wrote for the National Post (see my From Afghanistan to Iraq: Transplanting CIA Engineered Terrorism, January 15, 2005).

But don’t take my word for it. Read the 1997 Congressional RPC report detailing the “Bosnian pattern” that was replicated in Kosovo. “With the complicity of NATO and the US State Department. Mujahideen mercenaries from the Middle East and Central Asia were recruited to fight in the ranks of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in 1998-99, largely supporting NATO’s war effort,” Michel Chossudovsky wrote in October, 2001. The KLA was armed and trained by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Services MI6, together with “former and serving members of 22 SAS [Britain's 22nd Special Air Services Regiment], as well as three British and American private security companies,” according to The Scotsman, 29 August 1999 (see previous link).

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In short, Hysen Sherifi and Daniel Patrick Boyd are intelligence operatives or more likely patsies. As Webster Griffin Tarpley has documented, patsies, dupes, useful idiots and fanatics are integral to any false flag terror operation.

The North Carolina arrests are of particular interest now that FEMA is conducting NLE 09. “The NLE 09 scenario will begin in the aftermath of a notional terrorist event outside of the United States, and exercise play will center on preventing subsequent efforts by the terrorists to enter the United States and carry out additional attacks. This scenario enables participating senior officials to focus on issues related to preventing terrorist events domestically and protecting U.S. critical infrastructure,” a FEMA press release explains.

The NLE 09 is considered “an important component of national preparedness, helping to build an integrated federal, state, tribal, local and private sector capability to prevent terrorist attacks, and rapidly and effectively respond to, and recover from, any terrorist attack or major disaster that occurs.”

The feds claim they have prevented a terrorist attack in North Carolina. This is a well orchestrated propaganda effort timed to coincide with NLE 09. It is particularly important to note this in the wake of the manufactured deluge of propaganda and federal and state reports portraying “rightwing” domestic terrorists as a threat to the homeland.

A particular egregious instance of this propaganda was released in June when the Washington Times — the cornerstone of Operation Mockingbird — reported counterterrorism officials “authenticated” a video by a supposed al-Qaeda recruiter who claimed he had the ability to smuggle a biological weapon into the United States via tunnels under the Mexico border. In the video, Abdullah al-Nafisi suggested that al-Qaeda might want to collaborate with “members of native U.S. white supremacist militias who hate the federal government.”

It is no mistake Daniel Patrick Boyd is white.

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/north-carolina-terror-arrests-timed-to-coincide-with-nle-09/

About That New Jersey Organ Scandal

The Wall Street Journal
July 28, 2009

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Even by New Jersey standards, Thursday’s roundup of three mayors, five rabbis and 36 others on charges of money laundering and public corruption was big. But what put this FBI dragnet head and shoulders above the rest are the charges of trafficking in human body parts.

According to a federal criminal complaint filed in district court in New Jersey, Levy Izhak Rosenbaum of Brooklyn conspired to broker the sale of a human kidney for a transplant. The cost was $160,000 to the recipient of the transplant, of which the donor got $10,000. According to the complaint, Mr. Rosenbaum said he had brokered such sales many times over the past 10 years.

“That it could happen in this country is so shocking,” said Dr. Bernadine Healy, former head of the Red Cross.

No, it isn’t. When I needed a kidney several years ago and had no donor in sight, I would have considered doing business with someone like Mr. Rosenbaum. The current law—the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984—gave me little choice. I would be a felon if I compensated a donor who was willing to spare me years of life-draining dialysis and premature death.

Read entire article

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/about-that-new-jersey-organ-scandal/

MSNBC’s Matthews: Truthers, Birthers Are Insane

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, July 28, 2009

During a discussion of the Obama birth certificate controversy, MSNBC host Chris Matthews and his guests implied that anyone who questions the official 9/11 story, thinks the Bilderberg group are exercising power to create a world government, people who are worried about gun control and immigration, or even people who are merely skeptical of government, are psychologically insane.

Responding to Matthews’ implication that people who had questions about Obama’s birthplace were “full mooners” and insane, MSNBC political analyst Howard Fineman included “people who are worried about the government taking up the guns, people who deny the federal government has a right to tax your income, people who are worried about being overrun at the borders,” in the same category and said they were merely looking for a reason to find a conspiracy behind Obama.

Matthews then brought up a psychological test which featured the question, “Is somebody chasing you right now?,” implying that anyone who doubts what the government tells them would answer in the affirmative, before asking, “Are we talking psychological problems here with people or what?”

Politico writer Ken Vogel then characterized people who question 9/11 and people who think Bilderberg are working towards a world government as a group that Republicans need to “watch out for” if they want to avoid being marginalized.

Matthews then said he was “in love” with Vogel because he had reminded him of “all the androgynous zones of insanity,” before cracking a lame joke about George W. Bush detonating the twin towers with a plunger.

Vogel then responded by including Ron Paul and supporters in the mix, noting that they embrace an “innate distrust of federal government,” again in the same context that to do so is a display of insanity.

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Essentially, Matthews and his guests are implying that anyone who doubts the government’s official 9/11 story, anyone who believes the Bilderberg group have influence or power, anyone concerned about gun control and open borders, and anyone who is just generally skeptical or doesn’t trust government, is on the fringes of society, is potentially psychologically insane and may need treatment.

This is of course manifestly absurd – if embracing any one of those concerns deems one to be psychologically unstable and on the “fringes” then the majority of the American people would be classified as psychologically insane.

Indeed, only yesterday Rep. Collin Peterson, a Democrat, told Politico, “Twenty-five percent of my people believe the Pentagon and Rumsfeld were responsible for taking the twin towers down.”

In addition, a 2006 Zogby poll revealed that “less than half of the American public trusts the official 9/11 story or believes the attacks were adequately investigated.”

Does more than half of the population of America constitute a “fringe” element? It seems that Matthews, Vogel and Fineman aren’t as “mainstream” as they apparently thought they were – they are in fact the minority.

In reality, it is Matthews and his fellow establishment peanut gallery talking heads that need psychological help, embracing as they do some bizarre cult-like faith that government is angelic and can be completely trusted without skepticism.

As we have seen before in history, the designation of political opinions deemed to be antagonistic towards or even merely skeptical of the state is a hallmark of tyranny.

As Kurt Nimmo wrote last week in a story about a German man who was sent to a psychiatric institute for protesting Obama;

In the former Soviet Union, psikhushkas — mental hospitals — were used by the state as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally. The Soviet state began using mental hospitals to punish dissidents in 1939 under Stalin. The Psychiatric Prison Hospital in the city of Kazan was transferred to NKVD (the secret police organization for the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) control and in 1969 Yuri Andropov, the head of KGB, submitted to the Central Committee of Communist Party of the Soviet Union a plan for creating a network of psikhushkas.

According to official Soviet psychiatry and the Moscow Serbsky Institute at the time, “ideas about a struggle for truth and justice are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure.” Treatment for this special political schizophrenia included various forms of restraint, electric shocks, electromagnetic torture, radiation torture, lumbar punctures, various drugs — such as narcotics, tranquilizers, and insulin — and beatings. Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History, indicates that at least 365 sane people were treated for “politically defined madness,” although she surmises there were many more.

It now appears that the corporate media are taking their cue from the Stalinist dictatorship of the Soviet Union, and in alliance with government guidelines which characterize people with similar political beliefs as dangerous extremists and potential terrorists, are denouncing people who are skeptical of government as thought criminals who should be dismissed as mentally ill cranks.

Watch the MSNBC clip below.

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/msnbcs-matthews-truthers-birthers-are-insane/

NGO Suggests Elderly Should Be the First to Go in a Pandemic

ALISON CAMPSIE
The Herald
July 27, 2009

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Elderly people with swine flu should be treated as the lowest priority for antiviral drugs in a bid to preserve stocks for the younger population, according to new research.

The controversial view was published yesterday by an Italian scientist who claimed that distributing drugs such as Tamiflu to those over 65 has little effect on the spread of the infection or on mortality rates.

Age Concern said last night that older people were at high risk of complications if infected with swine flu and should receive antiviral treatment.

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However, halting the prescription of the drugs for the over 65s could be the most effective way to save lives and prevent illness, the report by Stefano Merler, of the Bruno Kessler Foundation, an Italian research organisation found.

The research was carried out to establish the most effective way to distribute antivirals after it emerged that Italy has only enough Tamiflu to prescribe 12% of the population, around half of the supply recommended by the World Health Organisation.

Scotland has enough of the drug to cover 50% of the population, it was confirmed last night.

Read entire article

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/ngo-suggests-elderly-should-be-the-first-to-go-in-a-pandemic/

New York Proposes Mandatory Vaccinations for Health Care Workers

Barbara Benson
Crain’s New York Business
July 27, 2009

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t
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The state Department of Health is proposing mandatory flu vaccines for all health care workers in the state. The new rule would apply not just to staff, but to anyone who potentially comes into direct contact with patients. That includes contract workers, students and volunteers.

The proposal, which is still in draft form, would apply to everyone working in hospitals, diagnostic and treatment centers, certified home health agencies, long-term home health care programs, AIDS home care programs, licensed home care services agencies, and hospices. A separate rule is pending in the Legislature that applies to nursing home workers.

The state health department’s move is an acknowledgment that voluntary flu vaccination efforts don’t work. But it wasn’t clear if the regulation would be implemented before any vaccination for the H1N1 flu virus is manufactured.

Read entire article

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/new-york-proposes-mandatory-vaccinations-for-health-care-workers/

Obama Press Sec. Exasperated Over “Birther” Issue

Infowars
July 27, 2009

The New York Times claims the Obama birth certificate issue is “a rumor that has been widely discredited,” and yet the state of Hawaii, where Obama was allegedly born, refuses to release the primary birth certificate document, instead offering this image, declared to be a Photoshop fake.

It is an obvious fake for the following reasons: 1) the document does not have a raised, embossed seal 2) it is not signed (take a look at your birth certificate and see if it has the signature of a physician or hospital officials) 3) there are no creases from folding in the scanned version above 4) the certificate number is redacted 5) the document claims to be a “certification of birth,” not a “certificate of birth,” and 6) the date supposedly bleeding through the back of the document says 2007, not 2008, when it was allegedly released.

The Annenberg Political Factsheet claims to have examined the original document and says it is legitimate (see Born in the U.S.A., The truth about Obama’s birth certificate). “Recently FactCheck representatives got a chance to spend some time with the birth certificate, and we can attest to the fact that it is real and three-dimensional and resides at the Obama headquarters in Chicago. We can assure readers that the certificate does bear a raised seal, and that it’s stamped on the back by Hawaii state registrar Alvin T. Onaka.”

Annenberg is a less than credible source considering Obama was chairman of the Annenberg Challenge in Chicago. One of his cohorts in that position was none other than the terrorist Bill Ayers.

Instead of releasing the original document, the Obama administration trots out White House press secretary Robert Gibbs to make sarcastic comments about those crazy birthers. Gibbs’ comments reveal the Obama administration and his supporters are sincerely worried about the issue.

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/obama-press-sec-exasperated-over-birther-issue/

Big Brother Is Watching Your Blackberry

CHRISTIAN STOCKER
ABC News
July 27, 2009

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Don’t look now, but no matter where you go, you’re connected. We — or most of us, at least — have opened our front doors to large corporations, hardware manufacturers, software firms and search engines. We have allowed them to rifle through our jacket pockets and handbags. And now they can do as they wish with us, or do the bidding of the powers-that-be — in the form of a totalitarian government, for example.

Don’t believe it? Well, consider a recent incident involving the Internet bookseller Amazon and two works by — ironically enough — George Orwell. Amazon had been selling the titles, “1984″ and “Animal Farm,” to owners of its Kindle reader, the special e-book device the bookseller developed. However, it turned out that the publishers of the Orwell books didn’t own the electronic rights to the works. And so, to the surprise of buyers, Amazon erased the two books — which had been paid for and delivered — from the electronic reader. Amazon’s readers had unwittingly purchased pirate copies, it turned out.

Read entire article

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/big-brother-is-watching-your-blackberry/

Ron Paul comments on Federal Reserve while in Grand Rapids

Amy Fox
WZZM 13
July 27, 2009

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t
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Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke took part in a town hall style forum Sunday in Kansas City, Missouri.

Bernanke defended the fed’s actions in bailing out financial institutions. He said he had to “hold his nose” over some of last fall’s bailouts. But he didn’t want to be the fed chairman when the second great depression occurred. The town hall will air on PBS this week.

Texas Congressman and former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul is sponsoring a bill to audit the Federal Reserve. He visited West Michigan over the weekend and spoke exclusively with WZZM 13 News. Paul says his candidacy brought out the energy of people who want stricter government economic policies.

Read entire article

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/ron-paul-comments-on-federal-reserve-while-in-grand-rapids/

GOP headache: The birther issue

LISA LERER & DANIEL LIBIT
Politico
July 27, 2009

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t
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When lawmakers return home for recess in August, they can expect to hear tough questions from constituents on the economy, health care and government spending.

But Republicans are preparing for something else: the birthers.

As GOP Rep. Mike Castle learned the hard way back home in Delaware this month, there’s no easy way to deal with the small but vocal crowd of right-wing activists who refuse to believe that President Barack Obama was born in the United States.

At a town hall meeting in Georgetown, a woman demanded to know why Castle and his colleagues were “ignoring” questions about Obama’s birth certificate — questions that have been put to rest repeatedly by state officials in Hawaii, where the birth certificate and all other credible evidence show that Obama was born in Honolulu on Aug. 4, 1961.

Read entire article

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/gop-headache-the-birther-issue/