Julian Asange: Kill Me and I Reveal What Arab Leaders Work With CIA

This guy seems to hold all the chips huh? This latest threat from him probably will ruffle alot of feathers in Arab governments across the world because alot of their power is predicated on their supposed dislike for the US. It would be insane to find out that some of these guys are really covert operatives for the CIA like Osama Bill Laden and Sadam Hussein were later proved to be. This gets more interesting as it goes on. More below:

via Business Insider

Julian Assange has set the ultimate dead man’s switch: Arrest or kill him and thousands of files will be automatically released, including documents that out CIA-backed Arabs.

This is Deeper Than Rap: Freeway Ricky Ross to be Released from Prison on 5/4

via Allhiphop

Just as superstar rapper Rick Ross is celebrating the release of his new album Deeper Than Rap, the real Rick Ross will be celebrating his release from prison next week.

AllHipHop.com has confirmed that “Freeway” Ricky Ross, the drug king pin who was at the center of a CIA cocaine-dealing scandal, will officially be released from prison on Monday (May 4).

Ross oversaw an Los Angeles based multi-state drug operation in the early 1980’s, which earned upwards of $2 million dollars per day at its height.

In 1996, he was sentenced to life in prison, after he attempted to purchase over 100 kilos of cocaine from an undercover federal agent.

Ross’ sentence was later reduced through appeals and after a series of explosive articles by the late Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Gary Webb.

Webb wrote a series titled “Dark Alliance” for the San Jose Mercury News, which exposed the C.I.A.’s role in importing cocaine into black communities to fund Contra rebels fighting in Nicaragua, as part of the Iran-Contra scandal.

Americans fascinated by pirate story

via The Insider

NEW YORK (AP) — We’re going through a crippling recession. The CIA is under fire over its interrogation techniques. And U.S. policy toward Cuba may be about to change. But the most-followed news story of late? A tale of pirates on the high seas.

Some who study pop culture suspect that’s at least partly a reflection of America’s longtime fascination with scurvy buccaneers and swashbuckling cutthroats.

“Pirates! It’s not as good as aliens, but close,” says Marty Kaplan, professor at the Norman Lear Center of the University of Southern California, which studies the impact of entertainment on society.

“Captain Hook, Treasure Island, the Disney ride, Blackbeard,” Kaplan muses. “If we thought of them or talked about them as punks, thugs, thieves or kidnappers, they wouldn’t stir our blood or promise a good yarn.”

Asked which story they followed more closely last week than any other, 34 percent of Americans surveyed named the Somali pirate saga, in which sea captain Richard Phillips was rescued by U.S. Navy snipers after five days held hostage in a lifeboat. The economy came in second at 27 percent, according to the Pew Research Center for People & The Press.

In fact, only two stories this year have surpassed the economy in any week: The inauguration of Barack Obama, and the dramatic ditching of that US Airways jet in the Hudson River by its cool-headed pilot, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger.

What’s the reason behind the pirate fascination? The poll didn’t ask, but the story clearly shares a crucial element with the US Airways saga: what’s been perceived as quick-thinking heroism from men thrown into unexpected and treacherous circumstances.

Interrogation Memos Detail Harsh Tactics by the C.I.A., Obama Vows Not to Prosecute

via NY Times

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department on Thursday made public detailed memos describing brutal interrogation techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency, as President Obama sought to reassure the agency that the C.I.A. operatives involved would not be prosecuted.

In dozens of pages of dispassionate legal prose, the methods approved by the Bush administration for extracting information from senior operatives of Al Qaeda are spelled out in careful detail — like keeping detainees awake for up to 11 straight days, placing them in a dark, cramped box or putting insects into the box to exploit their fears.

The interrogation methods were authorized beginning in 2002, and some were used as late as 2005 in the C.I.A.’s secret overseas prisons. The techniques were among the Bush administration’s most closely guarded secrets, and the documents released Thursday afternoon were the most comprehensive public accounting to date of the program.

Some senior Obama administration officials, including Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., have labeled one of the 14 approved techniques, waterboarding, illegal torture. The United States prosecuted some Japanese interrogators at war crimes trials after World War II for waterboarding and other methods detailed in the memos.

The release of the documents came after a bitter debate that divided the Obama administration, with the C.I.A. opposing the Justice Department’s proposal to air the details of the agency’s long-secret program. Fueling the urgency of the discussion was Thursday’s court deadline in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, which had sued the government for the release of the Justice Department memos.

Filling the Skies with Robot Assassins: The Drone Wars Have Begun

 

via AlterNet

In 1984, Skynet, the supercomputer that rules a future Earth, sent a cyborg assassin, a “terminator,” back to our time. His job was to liquidate the woman who would give birth to John Connor, the leader of the underground human resistance of Skynet’s time. You with me so far? That, of course, was the plot of the first Terminator movie and for the multi-millions who saw it, the images of future machine war — of hunter-killer drones flying above a wasted landscape — are unforgettable.

Since then, as Hollywood’s special effects took off, there were two sequels during which the original terminator somehow morphed into a friendlier figure on screen, and even more miraculously, off-screen, into the humanoid governor of California. Now, the fourth film in the series, Terminator Salvation, is about to descend on us. It will hit our multiplexes this May.

Oh, sorry, I don’t mean hit hit. I mean, arrive in.

Meanwhile, hunter-killer drones haven’t waited for Hollywood. As you sit in that movie theater in May, actual unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), pilotless surveillance and assassination drones armed with Hellfire missiles, will be patrolling our expanding global battlefields, hunting down human beings. And in the Pentagon and the labs of defense contractors, UAV supporters are already talking about and working on next-generation machines. Post-2020, according to these dreamers, drones will be able to fly and fight, discern enemies andincinerate them without human decision-making. They’re even wondering about just how to program human ethics, maybe even American ethics, into them.

Okay, it may never happen, but it should still make you blink that out there in America are people eager to bring the fifth iteration ofTerminator not to local multiplexes, but to the skies of our perfectly real world — and that the Pentagon is already funding them to do so.

Global Economic Crisis Poses Top Threat to U.S., Spy Chief Warns

via NY Times

WASHINGTON — The new director of national intelligence told Congress on Thursday that global economic turmoil and the instability it could ignite had outpaced terrorism as the most urgent threat facing the United States.

The assessment underscored concern inside America’s intelligence agencies not only about the fallout from the economic crisis around the globe, but also about long-term harm to America’s reputation. The crisis that began in American markets has already “increased questioning of U.S. stewardship of the global economy,” the intelligence chief, Dennis C. Blair, said in prepared testimony.

Mr. Blair’s comments were particularly striking because they were delivered as part of a threat assessment to Congress that has customarily focused on issues like terrorism and nuclear proliferation. Mr. Blair singled out the economic downturn as “the primary near-term security concern” for the country, and he warned that if it continued to spread and deepen, it would contribute to unrest and imperil some governments.

“The longer it takes for the recovery to begin, the greater the likelihood of serious damage to U.S. strategic interests,” he said.

Mr. Blair also used his testimony to deliver a withering critique of the Afghan government’s inability to halt the spread of the Taliban, and he said corruption in Kabul and throughout the country had bolstered support for the Taliban and warlords.

The stark assessment of the security picture in Afghanistan laid bare the obstacles facing the Obama administration as it aims to direct more American troops and attention toward quelling the violence in the country.

Mr. Blair delivered his assessment to the Senate Intelligence Committee, in what was the new administration’s first public recitation of the national security challenges facing the United States.

Obama’s Legal Team Copies Bush’s ‘State Secrets’ Trick to Cover Up Torture and Renditions

via AlterNet

On Monday in San Francisco, attorneys representing the Obama administration did what many of the president’s supporters would have considered unthinkable on election day: they arrived in a federal courtroom and defended one of the most controversial practices of the Bush administration.

“Eric Holder’s Justice Department stood up in court today and said that it would continue the Bush policy of invoking state secrets to hide the reprehensible history of torture, rendition and the most grievous human rights violations committed by the American government,” Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union said in an impassioned statement. “This is not change. This is definitely more of the same.”

The case was Mohamed et al. v. Jeppesen Dataplan, a lawsuit originally brought in 2007 by the ACLU on behalf of five victims of extraordinary rendition, the notorious CIA program in which terror suspects are kidnapped, thrown on a plane and flown to another country to be tortured and interrogated.

Jeppesen Dataplan, a subsidiary of Boeing, is said to have provided the logistical support for the rendition of all five plaintiffs, among them, Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian national who, in July 2002, was taken from Pakistan to Morocco, where for 18 months he was imprisoned and brutally tortured, including being cut with razorblades on his testicles. Mohamed was later sent to Guantanamo Bay, where he supposedly awaits imminent plans for his release. He has never stood trial.

Under Bush, the ACLU’s lawsuit was thrown out multiple times on “state secrets” grounds — a bogus excuse according to human rights lawyers who have long argued that the real goal was to keep evidence of the sort of torture endured by Mohamed away from a courtroom.

Cheney Admits Central Role in Torture For the First Time

These dudes are really enjoying their exit strategy, giving Americans the proverbial ‘middle-finger’ on their way out because they know damn well nothing will be done to bring them to justice. Now what?

via LA Times

Reporting from Washington — Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that he was directly involved in approving severe interrogation methods used by the CIA, and that the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should remain open indefinitely.

Cheney’s remarks on Guantanamo appear to put him at odds with President Bush, who has expressed a desire to close the prison, although the decision is expected to be left to the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama.

[Op-Ed] Is Obama George Bush the Third?

via Washington Post

In electing Barack Obama, the country traded the foreign policy of the second President Bush for the foreign policy of the first President Bush.

That is the meaning of Obama’s apparent decision to keep Robert Gates on as defense secretary and also to select Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.

With strong ties to the military and a carefully cultivated image of tough-mindedness, Clinton will protect the incoming president’s back from those on the right ready to pounce at any sign of what they see as weakness.

As for Gates, Obama has found the ideal figure to help him organize his planned withdrawal from Iraq, and to bless it.

What’s most striking about Obama’s approach to foreign policy is that he is less an idealist than a realist who would advance American interests by diplomacy, by working to improve the country’s image abroad, and by using military force prudently and cautiously.

CIA Chief: Bin Laden Alive, Worried About ‘Own Security’

via ABC News

Osama bin Laden is alive and “putting a lot of energy into his own security,” the director of the CIA, General Michael Hayden, said today.

He also claimed, without providing details, that the US intelligence community had disrupted an attack “that would have rivaled the destruction of 9/11.” A senior intelligence official said Hayden was referring to the 2006 liquid bomb on airliners plot that was foiled in London.

“American and its friends have taken the fight to the enemy,” Gen. Hayden said in a broad roundup of efforts to fight al Qaeda.

“Al Qaeda has suffered serious setbacks, but it is a determined, adaptive enemy unlike any our nation has ever faced,” he said.

Without directly referring to the CIA’s offensive blitz of unmanned missile attacks in the tribal areas of Pakistan, the CIA boss said the US had successfully isolated the al Qaeda leader bin Laden, referring to him in the present tense.

Secret Service want more Dough For Obama, McCain Protection…

Everybody wants a piece the action. Are you really surprised the CIA is asking for some more money when record money is being raised in this historic campaign.

via Breitbart

WASHINGTON (AP) – The Secret Service has asked for an extra $9.5 million to cover unexpected costs of protecting the presidential candidates during what has turned into an historic year for the agency’s campaign security job.

Among other things, the extra money would be used for the added costs for the candidates’ international travel and a late-in-the-game decision by Barack Obama to accept the Democratic nomination at Denver’s Invesco Field at Mile High—an open-air, 76,000-seat stadium—instead of the 20,000-seat Pepsi Center, which is the site of the party’s national convention.

During the 2008 campaign, the agency has protected candidates on about 1,500 trips; and each trip has included three to eight stops. To secure the candidates on these trips, the Secret Service has used about 2,200 magnetometers to screen about 1.5 million people.

The crowds have also been larger than expected. For instance, on May 18, in Portland, Ore., an Obama event was expected to draw 20,000. But instead, 75,000 showed, the Secret Service said. And Thursday, in Berlin, Germany, Obama drew a crowd of about 200,000, according to local law enforcement.

Full story here...

The Dark Side: A Look Into the US Sponsored War on America

As someone who has been ringing the alarm on the need for fellow Americans to pay attention to the war being fought against their liberties right here on American soil, I am impressed by the forward thinking readers that have visited this blog and spoken with conviction about their suspicions of the current administration. So in the spirit of teaching the masses that they are under siege by a criminal regime, let me suggest this book that is on its way to print: The Dark Side by New Yorker journalist Jane Meyer. Here’s what you’ll find in between the sheets of this explosive look into the government sponsored theft of American rights, liberties and freedoms:

So hot is the speculation that war-crimes trials will eventually follow in foreign or international courts that Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, has publicly advised Mr. Feith, Mr. Addington and Alberto Gonzales, among others, to “never travel outside the U.S., except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel.” But while we wait for the wheels of justice to grind slowly, there are immediate fears to tend. Ms. Mayer’s book helps cement the case that America’s use of torture has betrayed not just American values but our national security, right to the present day.

Red Cross Says Bush May Be Guilty of War Crimes

via NY Times

WASHINGTON — Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book on counterterrorism efforts since 2001.

The book says that the International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were “categorically” torture, which is illegal under both American and international law.

Mechanical Bats used as Spy Planes

Source: Engadget 

We here at Street Knowledge Media, aim to keep you guys informed about everything. And  in previous posts we blogged about  “cyborg moths” being used in  modern warfare. Now we got some new pics of an all mechanical bat being developed to be used in reconnaissance missions. Wow all the stuff we saw in movies and cartoons growing up is finally here

CIA Plane Crashes!!(Filled With 4 TONS of Coke)

It seems our friends(yeah right) at the CIA have a bit  of a mess on their hands. It seems one of their planes crashed and was revealed to have 3 Tons of hard white (cocaine) contained within its compartments. Full conspiracy theory at The Yupp Lounge.  And in further news coming out of Guantanamo Bay the ACLU is celebrating the sixth year that prisoner’s have been detained on the island and designated as “detainees” by voicing renewed calls to shut down the prison because of questionable tactics that have been taking place there.  CLICK HERE for full details.