Category Archives: Psyops

US Navy Kills Indian Fisherman Near Dubai

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Update:

To make my original post a bit clearer, you’d have to understand what is called “convergence” by some people. I call it the “commie-capitalist” kiss up.

What this amounts to is this. The elites try to subvert a country by soft and by hard power. The soft power angle is worked by human rights groups intentionally misrepresenting or exaggerating valid social concerns in a way that provokes rioting, secession, terrorism or civil war.

This then gives an excuse for intervention by the hard power arm of the empire (NATO police action, arms sales, legal actions, war financing).

In the case of India, you have a concerted ideological war on Hinduism played out in the looting of temples through communist-dominated/Christian friendly state governments.

Then you have the human rights focus on the plight of Dalits (socially the lowest caste). Their legitimate grievances are amplified and manipulated by Western interests to fracture the social fabric and enable legal action against state and federal governments which ultimately accrue to the benefit of Church-sponsored  NGOs and the Western powers themselves. Thus, in increasingly globalized Tamil Nadu,  Tamil secessionism is encouraged. Rumors of CIA/ Mossad involvement in the area should also not be discounted.

Then you have the communists in the West making common cause in the media with the communists in China (on the one hand)… and on the other, conflating the just demands of the Palestinians in the Middle East with revanchist Caliphate claims in India. This also incites secession among Muslim dominant states.

As someone who believes Asia has always been the main focus of the global elites since the end of WWII, the convenient Muslim terrorism narrative provides cover for both the expansion of Western hard and soft power in Asia, as well as a feint behind which covert operations against alleged allied of the US, like India, are conducted. In that sense, India is less an ally as it is a host incubating a parasite  that will eventually kill it.

Simultaneously, the globalist elites pressure the government through psychological war and cyber-war.  This explains the increase in negative portraits of India, the recurrent attacks on the political leadership for not giving into the demands of multinationals. For example, Arcelor-Mittal CEO  Lakshmi Mittal has  demanded that the Indian economy grow at the rate of 10 percent. The expulsion of Rajat Gupta (connected to Manmohan’s opening of the economy) displays the fist behind Mittal’s request.

Mittal has recently joined the board of Goldman Sachs (2011), and like the bank,  works with Rothschild interests, which were behind the opening of the Indian economy in the 1990s.

ORIGINAL POST

The Statesman reports on American naval fire on an Indian boat off the coast of Dubai.

Although so far it seems to be only an accident,it wouldn’t be far-fetched to wonder if it wasn’t a shot  in the low-grade psy war on India, about which I blogged here (Chinese cybera attacks on Indian naval HQ in Vizag) and here (Time’s derogatory cover of Manmohan Singh) and here (the criminal prosecution of Rajat Gupta, the man who opened up the Indian economy, most likely  by connivance between the government and the banking elites)  and  here (Rajiv Malhotra’s thesis of a US strategy of “breaking India” via  postmodern transnationalism, US intelligence and human rights activism all converging in NGO’s like Wikileaks that act as the soft power arm of  empire).

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — An Indian fisherman aboard a boat shot at by the U.S. Navy off Dubai’s coast has told officials the crew received no warning before being fired upon, India’s ambassador to the United Arab Emirates said Tuesday. The account differs from that provided by the Navy, which said it resorted to lethal force Monday only after issuing a series of warnings. One Indian was killed in the incident, and three of his countrymen were seriously wounded. The shooting underscored how quickly naval encounters can escalate in the increasingly tense waters of the Gulf.”

Note that this isn’t the first naval accident recently. In February 2012  an Italian cargo ship fired on an Indian trawler off the coast of Kochi in South India, killing two Indians. The equivalent of this would be Barack Obama’s face appearing in The Indian Express with the word ‘loser’ under it; Carly Fiorina arrested and convicted on weak evidence in India, while Indian CEOs guilty of multicrore fraud played witness for the prosecution; Indian and Iranian war ships shooting and killing American fishermen and officers off the coast of Florida and Scotland; and a pallid Indian hacktivist with an arrest record haranguing America on its internal affairs from the pages of a Chinese paper.

War On India: Naval Command Info Hacked By Chinese IP’s

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The Indian Express reports on July 1, 2012:

“Hackers have broken into sensitive naval computer systems in and around Visakhapatnam, the headquarters of the Eastern Naval Command, and planted bugs that relayed confidential data to IP addresses in China.

The Eastern Naval Command plans operations and deployments in the South China Sea — the theatre of recent muscle-flexing by Beijing — and beyond. India’s first nuclear missile submarine, INS Arihant, is currently undergoing trials at the Command.

The extent of the loss is still being ascertained, and officials said it was “premature at this stage” to comment on the sensitivity of the compromised data. But the Navy has completed a Board of Inquiry (BoI) which is believed to have indicted at least six mid-level officers for procedural lapses that led to the security breach.

The naval computers were found infected with a virus that secretly collected and transmitted confidential files and documents to Chinese IP addresses. Strict disciplinary action against the indicted officers is imminent.

Responding to a questionnaire sent by The Sunday Express on whether highly classified data had been sent to IP addresses in China due to the bug, the Navy said: “An inquiry has been convened and findings of the report are awaited. It needs to be mentioned that there is a constant threat in the cyber domain from inimical hackers worldwide.”

Sources, however, confirmed that classified data had been leaked, and the breach had possibly occurred because of the use of pen drives that are prohibited in naval offices. The virus was found hidden in the pen drives that were being used to transfer data from standalone computers to other systems, said a person familiar with the investigation.”

PsyWar: COINTELPRO Infiltration Of Dissidents

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From the War at Home Archive:

“False Media Stories: COINTELPRO documents expose frequent collusion between news media personnel and the FBI to publish false and distorted material at the Bureau’s behest. The FBI routinely leaked derogatory information to its collaborators in the news media. It also created newspaper and magazine articles and television “documentaries” which the media knowingly or unknowingly carried as their own. Copies were sent anonymously or under bogus letterhead to activists’ financial backers, employers, business associates, families, neighbors, church officials, school administrators, landlords, and whomever else might cause them trouble.

One FBI media fabrication claimed that Jean Seberg, a white film star active in anti-racist causes, was pregnant by a prominent Black leader. The Bureau leaked the story anonymously to columnist Joyce Haber and also had it passed to her by a “friendly” source in the Los Angeles Times editorial staff. The item appeared without attribution in Haber’s nationally syndicated column of May 19, 1970. Seberg’s husband has sued the FBI as responsible for her resulting stillbirth, nervous breakdown, and suicide.

Bogus Leaflets, Pamphlets, and Other Publications: COINTELPRO documents show that the FBI routinely put out phony leaflets, posters, pamphlets, newspapers, and other publications in the name of movement groups. The purpose was to discredit the groups and turn them against one another.

FBI cartoon leaflets were used to divide and disrupt the main national anti-war coalition of the late 1960s. Similar fliers were circulated in 1968 and 1969 in the name of the Black Panthers and the United Slaves (US), a rival Black nationalist group based in Southern California. The phony Panther/US leaflets, together with other covert operations, were credited with subverting a fragile truce between the two groups and igniting an explosion of internecine violence that left four Panthers dead, many more wounded, and a once-flourishing regional Black movement decimated.

Another major COINTELPRO operation involved a children’s coloring book which the Black Panther Party had rejected as anti-white and gratuitously violent. The FBI revised the coloring book to make it even more offensive. Its field offices then distributed thousands of copies anonymously or under phony organizational letterheads. Many backers of the Party’s program of free breakfasts for children withdrew their support after the FBI conned them into believing that the bogus coloring book was being used in the program.

Forged Correspondence: Former employees have confirmed that the FBI has the capacity to produce state-of-the-art forgery. This capacity was used under COINTELPRO to create snitch jackets and bogus communications that exacerbated differences among activists and disrupted their work.

One such forgery intimidated civil rights worker Muhammed Kenyatta (Donald Jackson), causing him to abandon promising projects in Jackson, Mississippi. Kenyatta had foundation grants to form Black economic cooperatives and open a “Black and Proud School” for dropouts. He was also a student organizer at nearby Tougaloo College. In the winter of 1969, after an extended campaign of FBI and police harassment, Kenyatta received a letter, purportedly from the Tougaloo College Defense Committee, which “directed” that he cease his political activities immediately. If he did not “heed our diplomatic and well-thought-out warning,” the committee would consider taking measures “which would have a more direct effect and which would not be as cordial as this note.” Kenyatta and his wife left. Only years later did they learn it was not Tougaloo students, but FBI covert operators who had driven them out.

Later in 1969, FBI agents fabricated a letter to the mainly white organizers of a proposed Washington, D.C. anti-war rally demanding that they pay the local Black community a $20,000 “security bond.” This attempted extortion was composed in the name of the local Black United Front (BUF) and signed with the forged signature of its leader. FBI informers inside the BUF then tried to get the group to back such a demand, and Bureau contacts in the media made sure the story received wide publicity.

The Senate Intelligence Committee uncovered a series of FBI letters sent to top Panther leaders throughout 1970 in the name of Connie Mathews, an intermediary between the Black Panther Party’s national office and Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, in exile in Algeria. These exquisite forgeries were prepared on pilfered stationery in Panther vernacular expertly simulated by the FBI’s Washington, D.C. laboratory. Each was forwarded to an FBI Legal Attache at a U.S. Embassy in a foreign country that Mathews was due to travel through and then posted at just the right time “in such a manner that it cannot be traced to the Bureau.” The FBI enhanced the eerie authenticity of these fabrications by lacing them with esoteric personal tidbits culled from electronic surveillance of Panther homes and offices. Combined with other forgeries, anonymous letters and phone calls, and the covert intervention of FBI and police infiltrators, the Mathews correspondence succeeded in inflaming intra-party mistrust and rivalry until it erupted into the bitter public split that shattered the organization in the winter of 1971.

Anonymous Letters and Telephone Calls: During the 1960s, activists received a steady flow of anonymous letters and phone calls which turn out to have been from the FBI. Some were unsigned, while others bore bogus names or purported to come from unidentified activists in phony or actual organizations.

Many of these bogus communications promoted racial divisions and fears, often by exploiting and exacerbating tensions between Jewish and Black activists. One such FBI-concocted letter went to SDS members who had joined Black students protesting New York University’s discharge of a Black teacher in 1969. The supposed author, an unnamed “SDS member,” urged whites to break ranks and abandon the Black students because of alleged anti-Semitic slurs by the fired teacher and his supporters.

Other anonymous letters and phone calls falsely accused movement leaders of collaboration with the authorities, corruption, or sexual affairs with other activists’ mates. The letter on the next page was used to provoke “a lasting distrust” between a Black civil rights leader and his wife. Its FBI authors hoped that his “concern over what to do about it” would “detract from his time spent in the plots and plans of his organization.” As in the Seberg incident, inter-racial sex was a persistent theme. The husband of one white woman active in civil rights and anti-war work filed for divorce soon after receiving the FBI-authored letter reproduced on page 50.

Still other anonymous FBI communications were designed to intimidate dissidents, disrupt coalitions, and provoke violence. Calls to Stokely Carmichael’s mother warning of a fictitious Black Panther murder plot drove him to leave the country in September 1968. Similar anonymous FBI telephone threats to SNCC leader James Forman were instrumental in thwarting efforts to bring the two groups together.

The Chicago FBI made effective use of anonymous letters to sabotage the Panthers efforts to build alliances with previously apolitical Black street gangs. The most extensive of these operations involved the Black P. Stone Nation, or “Blackstone Rangers,” a powerful confederation of several thousand local Black youth. Early in 1969, as FBI and police infiltrators in the Rangers spread rumors of an impending Panther attack, the Bureau sent Ranger chief Jeff Fort an incendiary note signed “a black brother you don’t know.” Fort’s supposed friend warned that “The brothers that run the Panthers blame you for blocking their thing and there’s supposed to be a hit out for you.” Another FBI-concocted anonymous “black man” then informed Chicago Panther leader Fred Hampton of a Ranger plot “to get you out of the way.” These fabrications squelched promising talks between the two groups and enabled Chicago Panther security chief William O’Neal, an FBI-paid provocateur, to instigate a series of armed confrontations from which the Panthers barely managed to escape without serious casualties.

Pressure Through Employers, Landlords, and Others: FBI records reveal repeated maneuvers to generate pressure on dissidents from their parents, children, spouses, landlords, employers, college administrators, church superiors, welfare agencies, credit bureaus, and the like. Anonymous letters and telephone calls were often used to this end. Confidential official communications were effective in bringing to bear the Bureau’s immense power and authority.

Agents’ reports indicate that such FBI intervention denied Martin Luther King, Jr., and other 1960s activists any number of foundation grants and public speaking engagements. It also deprived alternative newspapers of their printers, suppliers, and distributors and cost them crucial advertising revenues when major record companies were persuaded to take their business elsewhere. Similar government manipulation may underlie steps recently taken by some insurance companies to cancel policies held by churches giving sanctuary to refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala.

Tampering With Mail and Telephone Service: The FBI and CIA routinely used mail covers (the recording of names and addresses) and electronic surveillance in order to spy on 1960s movements. The CIA alone admitted to photographing the outside of 2.7 million pieces of first-class mail during the 1960s and to opening almost 215,000. Government agencies also tampered with mail, altering, delaying, or “disappearing” it. Activists were quick to blame one another, and infiltrators easily exploited the situation to exacerbate their tensions.

Dissidents’ telephone communications often were similarly obstructed. The SDS Regional Office in Washington, D.C., for instance, mysteriously lost its phone service the week preceding virtually every national anti-war demonstration in the late 1960s.

Disinformation to Prevent or Disrupt Movement Meetings and Activities: A favorite COINTELPRO tactic uncovered by Senate investigators was to advertise a non-existent political event, or to misinform people of the time and place of an actual one. They reported a variety of disruptive FBI “dirty tricks” designed to cast blame on the organizers of movement events.”

Comment

Some of my experiences of internet harassment over the past five years sound a lot like this stuff. But in my case, I’m pretty sure that the people involved were private individuals, who maybe used some of their government connections or authority. At some point, one ex-CIA official [ a guy who had a history of out-of-control behavior and had had run-ins with the law] was actually writing nasty stuff on this blog, and may have been behind a few other things.

But the rest was private. Which suggests that between corporations (correction: criminal corporations) and  government (correction: unconstitutional governments), there’s not much to choose.

Anyway, this kind of history of government infiltration of activist groups  should make people very wary about their communications. The email in your inbox can be forged and your own name could be tacked onto things you never wrote.  With all the powers at their disposal, if the government decided to frame someone, they would be able to get or create all kinds of incriminating stuff.

That’s why I don’t buy the Gupta verdict at all. With five years of investigation by two different outfits, with thousands of wire-taps, they only got him talking to Raj once? And even then, there was nothing illegal in that conversation….

Ron Paul Implosion: End The Fed To Technology Revolution…

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The Pauls have lost all credibility with me.

Read their latest missive, blogged at EPJ

And reported here at Forbes: “Ron Paul Takes Up Internet Freedom with New Technology Revolution.”

They’ve abandoned the financial battle.

I guess the financial coup of 2008, completed in 2010, is now sealed and cordoned off from prosecution. Last month, as if to confirm that, the White Queen (the City)  took down the Black Knight (Gupta) that had infiltrated the highest ranks of her court, while the White Bishop (Lloyd Doing-God’s Work Blankfein) was witness for the prosecution.

“End the Fed,” which  Rand Paul converted to” Audit the Fed,” is over.

The Pauls have now skipped forward to their new, new project –  the  “Technology Revolution.”

I  never thought that much of “End the Fed,” because, as I’ve blogged previously, the elites can manufacture money from other places besides the Fed, like the BIS and the reconstituted IMF.

But, apparently,  End the Fed doesn’t even work as a popular slogan any more.

So, what do I think about the new campaign?

I think it will be about as effective as their “End the Fed” campaign, which is to say, not effective at all.

See my comment at The Daily Bell in 2010:

Posted by Lila Rajiva on 11/23/10 11:55 AM
Daily Bell: “But by pursuing his strategy, he has made his opponents look like fools and perhaps altered the course of history.”

Lila: Let’s hope. Personally, I agree with Doug Casey on this:
“As a lone voice, his father was a breath of fresh, more principled air, but he didn’t change anything at all that I can see”

(Doug Casey on Presidents, LRC)

But it will be a great platform for the Pauls to sell books, promote ideas and launch political careers for their family members.

I only hope it won’t be done on the backs of idealistic young people. There were many who put change they could hardly spare in a tough economy into the Paul’s war chest.

The new campaign, which dubs itself  “The Internet Versus The Machine” is obviously a rebranding campaign to move young people away from what Forbes calls “the archaic” (they mean arcane) issues of finance.

Instead, the Pauls will focus on the hip world of the net.

Forbes:

“Young people have been a driving force in the Paul campaign, and the focus on internet freedom should only bolster that support.”

I’m going to call foul on that.

Their new “campaign” is in support of the Technology Revolution on the Internet?

Last I looked the tech revolution has been around for a while, getting on quite well without the Pauls.

One part of  the new project is going to be defending big business from attempts by consumers to scrutinize their data collection.

I kid you not. Here is Buzzfeed on the subject.

“The Pauls also take a stand for the growing industry known (and widely criticized) as “big data.”

“They deride the notion that “private sector data collection practices must be scrutinized and tightly regulated in the name of ‘protecting consumers,’ at the same time as government’s warrantless surveillance and collection of private citizens’ Internet data has dramatically increased.”

So does this mean that Ron Paul is going to be fighting to prevent European governments or NGOs  like EFF or Asian governments from scrutinizing Google’s data collection practices?

Remember that I just blogged that Google’s CEO Larry Page should be arrested for privacy violations and espionage against foreign governments?

I was being satirical about US surveillance of foreign CEO’s and money-managers.

For instance, in the Galleon -Gupta cases, the government used wire-taps whose authorization was obtained pre-textually in violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights.

I don’t recall that the Pauls said a word about that, although the Galleon insider case has dominated the financial media for a couple of years now, and is directly tied via Rajaratnam’s funding of Tamil charities to  issues like terrorist money-laundering  with which Paul adviser Bruce Fein – once employed by an alleged front group for the Tamil Tigers –  is intimately connected.

A recent Washington Post article described how the military is outsourcing surveillance in Africa to private contractors (with little accountability, significant cost over-runs, and little to show for the expense).

Densely populated China and India are both locked in battles with the West for access to resources and agricultural lands.  Indian and Chinese companies compete with American and European countries on the African continent.  China and India have also complained about American corporate espionage.  American companies in turn complain about IP theft from the Indians and Chinese.  Meanwhile the US government itself is involved in IP theft through its pervasive global surveillance.  Where does data collection for corporations end and espionage for the state begin, anyway? Where does the government end and the private sector begin, when private companies are outsourced arms of the government and the government is the enforcement arm of the companies?

Ron Paul is not oblivious to the complexities of all this. He is far too shrewd.

Rajat Gupta’s conviction shows evidence in my opinion of being a  set up by the government, with some arm-twisting from Goldman Sachs. Likely it was an important blow in the  covert psy war against India, an ostensible US ally, about which I blogged here (“Coconut Imperialism”and here, “Educating the Gentoos In India”)

The obvious response from foreign governments (such as India) would be to treat American CEO’s the same way and wire-tap them.

So, is it just coincidental that the Pauls suddenly abandon their financial campaign (which never involved a word against Goldman Sachs), and suddenly rush to head off any animosity toward Google?

On their silence on G Sachs, here is a comment I made (one among many) below the same Daily Bell article:

Posted by Lila Rajiva on 11/23/10 11:40 AM

@Pisano.

Why would it distract him?
How hard is it to say, unequivocally, “Goldman Sachs and several other banks, are involved in corrupt actions and should be investigated and prosecuted.”

There. Back to “business.”

He certainly had no problem drawing a hard line over relatively trivial things like a monument to Rosa Parks. If he was really afraid of distraction, why would he make a fuss over something like that, and then on something crucial, suddenly go silent?

Why doesn’t he state clearly – “9-11 needs to be investigated. There is credible evidence that there was some kind of conspiracy involving intelligence agencies, US and foreign.”

I like Ron Paul and want to believe the best of him.

But this excuse doesn’t hold water for two seconds.”

This looks like more material to add to the mounting evidence (see  here) that Paul fronts for financial interests.

Perhaps he cannot avoid doing it, as I’ve said.

But there’s no need to be suckered into what could well be a counter-attack against foreign governments who defend themselves against espionage by Google/Facebook/Hotmail/Skype/TOR and the rest of the government-corporate spy sector, by couching the issue as a defense of the private sector.

That explanation also takes care of Paul’s pandering to the left.

The financial world (which controls the media) is left-leaning, in contrast to non-financial businesses.  Paul’s recent moves make quite a bit of sense when understood that way.  He acts to co-opt the brand of libertarianism appropriately called the Marxism of the right by deploying what seem to be ideologically inflexible positions in the service of  larger imperial goals.

So, I have to ask. Will the two Pauls now be collecting money from young people to defend multi-billion dollar multinationals like Google from scrutiny by the governments on which they spy?

I mean, if you phrased that in the appropriately anti-state way, there will be enough libertarian lemmings who’ll rush to defend Google, I’m sure.

This theory might explain why the financial media, usually so vocal in defense of insider-trading, when it’s done by Michael Milken or Ivan Boesky, is suddenly so quiet  about South Asian insider-trading not a tenth as bad.

Does it also explain why large parts of the alternative press  have had nothing but praise for Julian Assange, another front for western financial interests? And why the Pauls have promoted Assange?

Talk about Trojan horses.

Big corporations cannot be analyzed separately from government.

When the state outsources its spying to corporations, for someone to argue that the state should not limit corporate surveillance because it’s engaged in surveillance itself is confused, at best, and downright misleading, at worst.

Especially when it comes from seasoned politicians like the Pauls.

Parts of the government are scrutinizing the private sector. Often they’re right to.

Other parts of government are much worse than the private sector when it comes to privacy violation.

Those parts of the government are often most incestuously allied with corporations. This is the corporate-state or intel-industrial complex that produces programs like Echelon.

So it’s quite bizarre for the Pauls to claim that Microsoft (or Google or Apple) are pure private-sector entities, when they gain market share directly because of concrete government actions on their behalf and because of endemic and pervasive state-created judicial/legal/financial corruption.

One more thing.  Microsoft wasn’t prescient at all about the net, as the Pauls claim in their new manifesto.

It was way behind. Gates himself admitted it.

There is, finally, another reason why the Pauls may have turned their attention to protecting Big Data,

It looks like Big Data is bankrolling him.

Here’s Reason’s Brian Doherty, making the point:

“With Peter Thiel, founder of the controversial “big data” company Panantir, having made a $2.6 million investment in the (somewhat feckless in the end) superPAC “Endorse Liberty” during campaign season, perhaps the Paul machine sees this as a cause that can energize both grassroots and big money.”

And that’s all  I want to say now about this turn of events until I learn a bit more what is really going on.

But, if you were waiting to see Ron Paul libertarianism implode, it happened this week.

Blogging Skirmishes, Donkeys, and Chomsky’s Taxes..

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Some weird things have been happening to my blog….minor, but worth recounting.

First. A week or two ago, my blog was suspended because of a huge amount of spam that got sent my way.  That happened just after my first posts questioning the Gupta trial verdict. Not to worry, I told myself, can happen to any blog. Of course, in five years, it’s never before happened to my blog….

Second.  A video that I had posted on my blog was deleted….I didn’t delete it. Then that video shows up posted on a friend’s blog. The exact same thing happened last year, with another video that I didn’t delete either, which someone deleted from my blog.

OK. Petty harassment.

Third.  I opened my admin panel and found someone else added as a user. I didn’t add the person’s email.  So I deleted it. Next day, another user was added. I deleted it again.

Fourth,  I make a habit of searching my name to check blog comments or follow ups.  When I click the tab BLOGS on the side of the search, the top link these days  is to Veterans Today, where an error notice pops up saying an article apparently written by me has been taken down.  I’ve not written anything for VT since February 2011 and only wrote a few pieces for them, anyway. I asked them whether there was anything with my name on it on their site these days, they said no. So this is a google cache that someone is sending to the top of blog comments, for some reason.

Fifth. My blog posts show up in searches of Rajat Gupta, usually in the first two pages, sometimes quite high up.  In the last few days when I clicked on them, I found they were all set to private. I haven’t set any of those posts to private.

It’s possible that when updating the entire blog might have gone to private a few times, but why would individual posts change to private without my doing anything?

The posts that changed to private were all controversial ones:

One about Chomsky being for taxes for other people, but not for himself.

One about gold holdings by different countries, showing that India and China have much less than the developed countries and suggesting neo-colonial motives in manipulation of gold and currencies.

One about Goldman knowing all about Galleon and Gupta being a patsy ( a recent one)

Since I blogged, they’ve all been changed back. But I took screen shots,  so it’s not imagination or paranoia.

And a few other things.

I noticed at least one mainstream paper in India responding almost point for point to concerns about the trial I’d raised in my blog.

And then there was the Tahrir Square video on Gurcharan Das’s blog, which, as I said, was on the home page when I blogged it, and then the next day was hidden.

The internet, friends, is not an unalloyed force for good.

No more than TV was.  It is not instant liberation, as naive people like to say it is.

Heartwarming to say things like that. Not terribly true.

Something is good only in proportion to the motives with which it used.

The many well-intended people who use the internet do  make it a force for good.

Unfortunately, the net is also teeming with intelligence operatives, criminals, sting-operations, fakes, frauds,  and  police-state busybodies, who do not ever let really spontaneous interchange take place. They must have a thumb on the scales and rig the deal. They must manage the outcome so it goes in their favor….

Or supports their agenda.

Part of which is to lull people into a false sense of power and security on the net, so they put all their information out there. This is do-it-yourself surveillance. 24/7 and updated by the second.

Radical transparency is the carrot.  The internet kill-switch is the stick.

Either way, the donkey moves forward.

And when one donkey moves forward, so do all the others.

The net appeals to the herd in us.

Internet herds are no less herds because they are electronic. Think about the electronic trading that stampedes the market this way and that.

The internet may liberate us.

Equally, it may enslave us.

Right now it’s 50-50.

These days  I’d say  all bets are off.

Rajat Gupta: Harassed After Objecting To Rakoff Rulings

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I’ve copy-pasted the following posts from the blog of Benula Bensam, the 24 year old Indian-born American and law student, who sent Judge Rakoff letters discussing the basis for his rulings on the evidence in the Gupta case. Rakoff reprimanded her and told her to stop.  When Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein showed up in court to testify for the prosecution, she was asked to leave and her cell phone was confiscated by federal marshalls. Apparently, she was also photographed by the marshalls.  Rakoff says he didn’t know about the intimidation by the court officers.

She stopped blogging and took down her old posts, but the three letters she sent to Rakoff still remain up. Here they are:

[I can’t use the insert links function on my blog, so I am forced to just copy-paste the material without editing]

 

  1.                 Although the daily posts of the Gupta trial have been discontinued and old posts removed, I will be silently steadfast against the U.S. Marshalls’ tactics of intimidation by continuing to attend the hearings.
     
                    To have an open debate about the three letters addressed to Judge Rakoff which precipitated the involvement of the U.S. Marshalls, I have posted them here. The first was delivered typed but the last two were transcribed to hand print because of problems with my home printer so there may have been slight changes made to choice of words in the process of that transcription. 
     
    June 7, 2012

    Note on timestamp:
    The timestamp on this site was incorrect when these posts were published.
    Note on press coverage:
    There were varying degrees of accuracy in the reporting of the statements I made to the press. There were favorable articles of me in reputable papers that did not accurately state or quote what I said. There were rather critical articles from less reputable papers that nevertheless accurately stated what I said.
    June 9, 2012

    Posted 3 weeks ago by
     
  2. To: Judge Rakoff
    Date: June 4, 2012
    Re: Expectation of a benefit
     
     
     
     
                In Friday’s finding that the expectation of some monetary return for supplying insider information is sufficient to meet the “benefit” element of an insider trading crime, I wondered if it was relevant only for the conspiracy to commit the crime or for the actual crime as well. Perhaps the disparate results of two similarly situated Defendants where one profited from the insider information and the other did not for extraneous reasons such as other market forces or trader skill, would influence such a decision.
     
     
     
    Sincerely,
     
    Benula Bensam
    Posted 3 weeks ago by
     
  3. To: Judge Rakoff
    Date: May 29, 2012
    Re: Co-conspirator theory
     
     
    Phone calls from the McKinsey office and a call from Switzerland were used to find a conspiracy of insider trading but the evidence may only have established the identity of the caller to be Gupta (out of all other possible tippers to which Rajaratnam had access) without establishing an intent. Rather, intent was assumed in this admissibility hearing. The fact that Gupta may have been close friends with Rajaratnam does not allow for a direct line of reasoning between identity and intent (although the Defense’s central argument is that the two did not have a close relationship) or where the contents of the conversations are unknown (perhaps the FBI did not have many “pertinent” calls between Gupta and Rajaratnam not because they did not frequently speak but because their conversations were personal and benign; the tape played regarding Goldman’s consideration of an AIG option may only show Gupta’s mistaken belief that strategies not pursued or rejected are confidential no longer). Unlike the sinking of a ship off the coast of the European continent to collect insurance payoffs (DeGeorge case- prior criminal acts used to prove identity alone; analogous to the Swiss call to augment the admissibility of the McKinsey call), the act can not be directly linked to the consciousness of wrongdoing.
                                                                                                                                                                                      
     
     
    Sincerely,
     
    Benula Bensam
    Posted 3 weeks ago by
     
  4. To: Judge Rakoff
    Date: May 24, 2012
    Re: William W. George and “Confidential” information
     
    Although you admitted it was a bad example, an analogy was made to narcotics crimes where some third person may testify to their understanding of “sugar” in order to prove that a defendant would also have known of the cocaine. While the meaning of “sugar” to those in the narcotics trade has a definite meaning because it refers to some physical, tangible object, the meaning of “confidential” information does not have any definite form. So, there may be an understanding of what “confidential” means to people at Goldman Sachs but this meaning may or may not be the same as the meaning of the word in the criminal statute defining insider information. One may assume that Goldman’s Code on confidentiality may be more stringent than the statute and thus any violation of Goldman’s Code would be a violation of the statute, but this assumption can not be automatically made and perhaps should be left for the jury to determine. Another problem is that even the understanding of what “confidential” information means in the context of Goldman’s Code may be varied amongst those at Goldman Sachs. There was for example, no printed disclaimer at the beginning of the Goldman Sachs Board meeting in Russia that all is “confidential” (and even if there were such a disclaimer, it would only present a rebuttable assumption of confidentiality).
     
     Perhaps the best solution would be to allow the prosecution to ask William W. George,
     1. Did he speak about the any part of the communications made in the Board meeting with anyone who   
         was not at the meeting?
    2. If not, did he feel that he was at liberty to do so if he wished?
     3. Did he hear at anytime any others present at that Board meeting discuss the information presented
        at that meeting with anyone not in attendance? (This last question may be modified to
        avoid hearsay problems).
     
     This would allow the jury to decide whether or not to draw the inference that if another member of the Goldman Sachs Board felt the information related to have been confidential, Gupta would also have taken this view (Is there a possibility that the witness may plead the 5th?).
     
    The words ‘“confidential” information’ should NOT be categorized as industry jargon; it is not precise enough (as “sugar” or “FINS” or “tape” or even “LOL”) to constitute industry jargon.  This is especially important where in the context of this case, “confidential” is a legal term, a term in common use, and a term in a company’s Corporate documents.
     
    Sincerely,
     
    Benula Bensam
    Posted 3 weeks ago by
     
  5. I was sent out of the courtroom today by U.S. Marshalls. They refused to return my cell phone and took a picture of me using their camera phone over my objections.

    Should I protest outside of the Courthouse? Tomorrow?

    Posted 4 weeks

Rajat Gupta: Did Goldman Frame Gupta To Save Its Skin?

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We know that Rajat Gupta was a big Obama supporter.

We know that Goldman Sachs switched its loyalties to Mitt Romney earlier this year, mainly out of animosity to Dodd-Frank, which they claim is crushing the banks.

As early as last year  ThirdPoint LLC, said to be part of a Michael Milken-related market racketeering network, attacked Obama.

[Third Point is a leading hedge-fund that’s  credibly alleged to have colluded with Goldman Sachs in collusive raids on rivals. Documents accidentally released in a lawsuit against Goldman Sachs by Patrick Byrne of Overstock now show that Goldman did in fact pass on non-public information of its clients to select hedge-funds .

ThirdPoint has since cut stakes in Goldman Sachs in March this year, probably sensing that the firm is due for a huge beating.]

GS’s troubles are ongoing.

In March 2012, Greg Smith, a senior manager, trashed the firm, specifically Lloyd Blankfein and Gary Cohn, for corrupting the culture…..as if that were possible.

Two other Goldman executives are under investigation for tipping caught on wire-taps, Henry King and David Loeb.

[This is the evidence that Judge Jed Rakoff wouldn’t let the jury hear. It was the core of the defense’s argument that, not Gupta, but the other proven tipsters at Goldman has passed on the Buffett tip. The jury, confused by hearsay that was wrongly included of Gupta talking about non-public non-material information to Galleon, hung the Galleon case on him and convicted on this insubstantial evidence.]

Last year,  after the SEC first began administrative proceedings against Rajat Gupta (March 2011) we heard that Lloyd Blankfein had hired a big-shot DC criminal attorney (August 23, 2011).

Then, in Feb 2012,  sources close to Goldman reported to the NY Post that the nine month long investigation would likely not lead to criminal charges.

Why not?

How did they become so sure that Blankfein wouldn’t be facing charges?

Did they fix the deal around that time?

Only a month later, March 2012, the defense reluctantly began sending particulars of its charges to Gupta.

Yet it had been investigating Big Raj for a decade, and had been on the Galleon case since 2007.

What took so long? Was there any pressure from Goldman?

Was the fix in by then, and is that why Goldman insiders were so sure that Blankfein would be off the hook?

After all. Gupta is a RETIRED director at Goldman, and his main professional association is with McKinsey, not with Goldman.

He had nothing to do with the trading culture of Goldman that was the source of its problems.

He just sat on a board, which probably met a few times a year. The public, angry at Goldman, wouldn’t know that they’d been fed Gupta, to protect the core of Goldman itself.

Did Blankfein figure out that throwing overboard a South Asian patsy, albeit a powerful one, one associated with the loss of jobs to Americans, would save his skin in the media, dominated, rightly, by anger over the financial crisis?  Did it help that Gupta was also an Obama donor?

That Blankfein had an eye on PR at this time is clear because around the same time that he  made some other interesting moves, as I noted earlier.

1. He announced his support for Romney (January 2012)

2. He told the press that Goldman was in the clear (February 2012)

(This was around the time the defense was asking for particulars of the charges to be sent)

3. Bharara starts sharing Brady material (Feb 2012)

In March 2012, a month later, Bharara was finally forced to disclose what specifically he had on Rajat Gupta.

4. Blankfein was hired as a public spokesman for gay marriage by Human Rights Campaign  (February, 2012).

The timing of all these events is surely extremely suggestive…

Blankfein’s attorney, Reid Weingarten, represented WorldCom CEO, Bernie Ebbers, who was convicted in 2005 of fraudulent accounting, in the largest such scandal in US history until the Bernie Madoff ponzi.

Charles Gasparino at The New York Post:

“Goldman Sachs will not support Obama,” the firm’s CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, muttered at a recent dinner.

It was a meeting with the CEO of Blackrock, Larry Fink, himself another of Wall Street’s top Obama boosters back in 2008. But “Larry is looking for someone to support this time,” a friend of Fink told me.

Blankfein has apparently found his pick. According to people who know him, Blankfein’s bet is that Romney will win the Republican nomination fairly early, putting him in a decent position to win the presidency — and in office does his best to water down some of the more insane aspects of the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law.

Some caveats: Romney barely won the Iowa caucuses and still faces much conservative skepticism about his various flirtations with big government as Massachusetts governor. Goldman still has many committed Democrats, and Wall Street support can be fickle. Blankfein might well reverse his bet if Obama takes a commanding lead in the polls.

But with the polls fairly even, the firm so far seems to be betting big that the GOP base will conclude that Romney has the best chance of winning over independents and beating the president in November. That would allow a reversal of Obama’s most leftist policies — including financial reform, which threatens to strangle Goldman and all the big banks while doing little to address the core problems that led to the 2008 collapse.

What makes Goldman’s move to the right so striking is just how far to the left it was in 2008. The Goldman community gave more than a $1 million to the 2008 Obama campaign, bested only by donors tied to the ultraliberal University of California. But the latest contribution records (through the end of September) show that Goldman-linked givers barely crack the top 20 of Obama donors, with a little more than $50,000 toward his 2012 re-election effort.

By contrast, Goldman-linked donors are Romney’s leading source of corporate campaign cash, spending $367,200 on his 2012 effort so far. That’s nearly $127,000 more than the firm put up for 2008 GOP nominee John McCain.

Not that Goldman has suddenly become a hotbed of Tea Party conservatism. Its beef with Obama is focused almost entirely on Dodd-Frank’s impact on its bottom line.”

Rajat Gupta: Establishment Trying To Spin Jury’s Unholy Haste

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Ha ha. The establishment is trying to put out some good spin to cover up for the haste with which this obviously rotten case was tried and resolved.  Good try, but people are shocked with good reason, they can see the fix is in, and all the slanted articles aren’t going to hide the stink rising from this steaming pile of dung that just got offloaded in Manhattan.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal, spinning like top:

“During the four-week trial of former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. director Rajat Gupta, juror David Klein often glanced in different directions than his fellow jurors.

“When they were intently focused on a witness on the stand, Mr. Klein would be eyeing Mr. Gupta,” said defense trial consultant Julie Blackman.

Mr. Klein, 53 years old, initially voted to acquit Mr. Gupta on all counts, the only holdout among the 12 jurors in the insider-trading case, according to jurors.

In an interview, Mr. Klein said he wanted to approach the case methodically. “The case was based entirely on circumstantial evidence that warranted more scrutiny,” he said. “I didn’t think it was something we should rush into.”

Another False-Flag

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“We’re done folks. CNBC is reporting that there are now clients running out of the markets entirely because they do not believe their customer funds are safe. That’s the end of it. The belief that there are more MF Globals has now taken hold. The thieves have pushed it too far and now we’ve got the start of a global liquidity run, and with good reason”

—  Karl Denninger at The Market Ticker

[Gerald Celente, noted financial analyst and publisher of The Trends Journal, said recently that he’d lost six figures in the collapse of MF Global, which owned his commodity futures brokerage file and filed for bankruptcy on October 31, 2011. MF Global was headed by corrupt ex-Goldmanite Jon Corzine, who has resigned from MF and  is now being sued by investors.

Celente then called for a run on the banks on a show with talk radio host, Alex Jones, an anti-NWO activist:

“When I say take your money out of the banks and put it under the mattress, this is not advice,” Celente says. “Personally, I buy gold coins from reputable companies. I take my money out of investment funds and I buy gold and silver. You need the three g’s — gold, guns and a get-away plan.”

Celente has called for “direct democracy” recently,  a demand that I think is in tune with what the financial elites want. That’s what made me think the MF collapse was being used as a false-flag of some kind.

It was, maybe, intended to provoke a run and Denninger is amplifying it.

I recall that Max Keiser (a former derivatives trader and leftist who has now set himself up as a critic of derivatives) tried to provoke a bank run on JP Morgan, by telling people to go buy silver in December 2010.

Keiser disengages himself from Al Gore these days, but he still believes in anthropogenic global warming and the need for something to be done about it.

He seems to want chaos and confrontation on the streets, according to those who follow him closely. He is in favor of a carbon exchange, which, as a trader, he probably knows would be very lucrative for insiders.

On the forums of PrisonPlanet, one observer notes that Keiser claimed that if silver went to $47, JP Morgan would collapse.  Well, silver went to $49 this year, and JP Morgan is still around.

I have no idea what Celente’s role is in all that, but it’s all mighty suspicious to me.

He has, for instance, said that he is “all for this Occupy Wall Street”.

No ifs, no buts. No reservations. No questions.

It’s all good, for Mr. Celente. It’s all democracy, even thought it’s apparently paid for by billionaire George Soros, to whom the CIA has essentially outsourced its functions.

I didn’t comment on the story before, not knowing what happened exactly, but now I’m beginning to think it was intended to provoke a run and maximum panic. Apparently, it’s had that effect.

Celente and others are also promoting “direct democracy”, which, like “full transparency”, is something the elites want, whatever its inherent merits. Those merits aren’t the point. The elites will use whatever tool they can.

The point is direct democracy in which the social media is manipulated anonymously by intelligence agencies, corporations, governments, and media shills, is  tyranny by another name.

Here is what I wrote about Celente last month.

Gerald Celente Stabs anti-NWO Folks Front, Back, and Center, October 14, 2011:

I do not  say that direct referendums necessarily lack merit. They might work, were we living in small city states…. and were the internet discontinuous, fragmented, and highly private…. and were most people rational, well-educated, self-critical and self-reliant.

But we aren’t, it isn’t, and they aren’t.

So Direct Internet Democracy will not be anarchism, right or left, and it won’t be Christian liberty. Nor will it be federalism or decentralization.

It will be the direct control of the masses through electronic networks, propaganda, surveillance, and co-option of alternative mouthpieces of all stripes, across the board.

Direct Electronic Democracy = Tyranny

I call it Direct Electronic Action for Tyrants and Demagogues

Which equals DEATH. The death of true liberty.

The ISI And 9-11

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Abid Ullah Jan, Pakistan Tribune, July 14, 2006

“With CIA backing and massive amounts of U.S. military aid, the ISI developed [since the early 1980s] into a parallel structure wielding enormous power over all aspects of government… The ISI had a staff composed of military and intelligence officers, bureaucrats, undercover agents and informers estimated at 150,000.6

The ISI actively collaborates with the CIA. It continues to perform the role of a ‘go-between’ in numerous intelligence operations on behalf of the CIA. The ISI had, and still has, access to considerable funding from the CIA. According to Selig Harrison, a leading American expert on South Asia with access to CIA officials, distribution of these funds has been left to the discretion of the ISI itself with whom “The CIA still has close links.” Harrison spoke to an audience of security experts in London at a conference on “Terrorism and regional security: Managing the challenges of Asia” in the last week of February, just before the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddha statues of Bamiyan. As a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 1974 to 1996, he had been in close contact with the CIA.7

The ISI directly supported and financed a number of operations and organizations without realizing the seeds of destruction it was sowing for Pakistan. Mossad (the Israeli government’s intelligence agency) also became involved in these operations, in order to have access to the structure and operations of the ISI and Pakistan’s military. These are the lesser well-known facts.

The growing body of evidence suggests that the ISI was actively involved in part of Operation 9/11, where it was required to use its intelligence assets to frame Osama bin Laden for the planned 9/11 attacks. An elaborate operation was undertaken to develop evidence, linking Arabs to the 9/11 attacks, to pave the way for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. A transfer of funds to the lead hijacker on the orders of the ISI chief is just one piece of the bigger picture. The FBI had this information—they knew exactly who was transferring funds to whom. Less than two weeks later, Agence France Presse (AFP) confirmed the FBI’s findings. According to the AFP report, the money used to finance the 9/11 attacks had allegedly been “wired to WTC hijacker Mohammed Atta from Pakistan, by Ahmad Umar Sheikh, at the instance of [ISI Chief] General Mahmood [Ahmad].”8 Dennis Lormel, director of the FBI’s Financial Crimes Unit, has confirmed that Saeed Sheikh transferred $100,000 to Mohammed Atta at the behest of General Mahmood Ahmed, head of the ISI, before the New York attacks.9 According to the AFP (quoting the intelligence source): “The evidence we have supplied to the U.S. is of a much wider range and depth than just one piece of paper linking a rogue general to some misplaced act of terrorism.”10

The questions remain: What did the U.S. government do with the information provided by the FBI and other sources with regard to the ISI’s involvement in 9/11? Why has there been no meaningful action and investigation? Why are U.S. officials not telling the truth? In a May 16, 2002 press conference on the role of General Mahmood Ahmad, a journalist asked Condoleezza Rice about her awareness of “the reports at the time that the ISI chief was in Washington on September 11th, and on September 10th $100,000 was wired from Pakistan to these groups.” She was also asked why General Mahmood was in the United States, and about his meeting with Condoleezza Rice. She replied: “I have not seen that report, and he was certainly not meeting with me.”11

Michel Chossudovsky concludes in his June 20, 2005 report, published by the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) that the ISI and CIA have developed close relationships, and that Condoleezza Rice was covering up the ISI Chief’s involvement in 9/11″