Drone Civilian Casualties On the Rise Thanks to Private Corporate Operators

Upstate Drone Action activist Ed Kinane claims that private drone operators analyzing intelligence for the US military can lead to more civilian casualties with lesser accountability.

""WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Private drone operators analyzing intelligence for the US military can lead to more civilian casualties with lesser accountability, Upstate Drone Action activist Ed Kinane told Sputnik.

“The likely consequences include trigger-happiness with the ensuing maiming, death and terrorizing of civilians," Kinane said on Friday. “It is unlikely that such operators will be adequately trained in or responsive to international law. They are willing cogs in this rogue nation’s killing machine.”HILDEBRANDT

Kinane comments came the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) issued a report claiming hundreds of private contractors are aiding the US military and Special Operations forces to analyze drone intelligence used to target terrorist groups.

Estimated one in ten people working on drone intelligence are now contractors as the US military seeks to feed an “insatiable demand” for more intelligence, according to the BIJ.

A private contractor equals a mercenary, Kinane argued, i.e “someone in it for the money, someone outside the chain of command, someone subject to little accountability.”

Yet, the analysis the contractors provide have life or death consequences for civilians.""

According to the BIJ statistics, up to 1,000 civilians have been killed by US drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen over the past ten years.

http://sputniknews.com/military/20150801/1025287419.html

Private Police Law Enforcement Outfits Lead by Example with 60% Drop in Local Crimes

""A new trend is sweeping across America, and it's an idea whose time may have come: Private police forces - as in, forces that do not subsist on tax dollars or work on behalf of local, city or county governments.

As reported by the Washington Post, the idea is built on one that is older than our republic. In the days of English common law, "conservators of the peace" were individuals empowered to protect communities and businesses, using established laws and rules.

"The conservator of the peace concept predates modern policing," the paper reported. "It has its origins in English common law, and the first Virginia statute was enacted in 1860 to allow proprietors of 'watering places' to protect their establishments."

In Virginia, especially, Special Conservators of the Peace, or SCOPs as they are called, are becoming increasingly common, though not everyone is a fan of them. The Post noted:

The trend has raised concerns in Virginia and elsewhere, because these armed officers often receive a small fraction of the training and oversight of their municipal counterparts. Arrests of private police officers and incidents involving SCOPs overstepping their authority have also raised concerns.

'61 percent less crime'

As such, and in typical fashion, lawmakers are looking for ways to quash this increasingly popular mode of policing. In Virginia, the state Legislature recently passed a measure that would require boosting the number of training hours SCOPs would have to complete. Also, the bill contains new rules that would regulate their actions. Other states are moving to implement stricter requirements as well.

But as noted by The Sputnik, the trend of overly-authoritarian requirements is bucking the trend of rising success among private police forces. In some places, crime has decreased by substantial double-digit percentages.

The Sputnik cited a town in Texas where crime rates have fallen drastically after private police were employed:

Rather than degenerate into a lawless land where criminals rule the streets, a Texas town that fired its entire police department has seen a 61 percent decrease in crime.

In 2012, Sharpstown, a community of 66,000 located just southwest of Houston, declined to renew its contract with the constable's office, essentially dismissing its cops.

Instead, the Sharpstown Civic Association hired SEAL Security Solutions, a private firm, to patrol their streets.

"Since we've been in there, an independent crime study that they've had done [indicates] we've reduced the crime by 61% in just 20 months," James Alexander, Director of Operations for SEAL, told another web site, Guns.com.""

http://www.naturalnews.com/049340_private_policing_law_enforcement_free_market.html

Mainstream Media Lies for a Better America, One Nation Under Oligarchy

""The corporate mainstream media with its well-paid journalists and increasing concentration of ownership bows to the concerns of advertisers. It tends to be privately owned and its owners have a vested interest in maintaining an economic system based on private ownership and in manufacturing consent for it. Moreover, such outlets these days are increasingly part of major conglomerates, which may include armaments manufacturers, banking or industrial concerns, and will not therefore adopt stances or report on stories that are harmful to the interests of the wider organisation.

The public is thus given access to a world view that is distorted in favour of state-corporate interests. Such interests have succeeded in getting across the message that, for example, the ‘free market’ is the best way to deliver goods and services to people, state provided welfare is bad and ‘individual responsibility’ is good, ‘austerity’ is necessary, privatisation increases efficiency, an endless ‘war on terror’ must be waged on designated enemies, well-being is measured in terms of a never-ending quest for GDP growth, the US and NATO are the ‘world’s policemen’, giant agribusiness must displace peasant farmers to secure food security and gross inequalities and unregulated corporate power are both necessary and legitimate.

Over the past 15 years, numerous ‘alternative’ news websites have sprung up that challenge these assumptions and the belief that ordinary citizens should be passive consumers of a predetermined news agenda. There are now dozens of popular news sites that inform people of issues the mainstream media has deliberately failed to tell people the truth about. There are also many more sites with global reach that exist to scrutinise specific sectors, hold practices to account and counter corporate propaganda (for example, GMWatch, Corporate Europe Observatory, Food & Water Watch, Campaign Against the Arms Trade, etc.).

The existence of ‘alternative’ independent sites has led the European Union to express concerns about the ‘damaging’ effects of people having access to these sources of information. The EU argues that societal consensus is being eroded as people are being ‘led astray’ by dissenting voices on the internet. In the report ‘A free and pluralistic media to sustain European democracy’, the EU feels there is a danger that people are being misguidedly radicalised. It advocates EU funding for ‘responsible’ journalism, getting the EU’s viewpoint across regularly and prominently in the media and placing controls on the net. The EU perceives this to be ‘pluralism’.

What is ‘responsible journalism’?

An article by Annie Day indicates that as a result of its destabilisations, coups, mass bombings and death squads, the US military and the CIA have been responsible for a figure of an estimated ten million deaths since 1945. Yet the corporate media never describes any of this as constituting a form of mass terror. Through the cynical hijacking of the concept of ‘terror’, the US now attempts to justify its ongoing tyranny through a ‘war on terror’, which goes unquestioned on a daily basis by the mainstream media.

Ukraine is the latest example of a US-backed terror campaign, which the corporate media has consistently failed to question. As the world edges ever closer to nuclear war, the mainstream media merely parrots the official lie coming from Washington that the situation is all due to ‘Russian aggression’.

You can also add to that ten million, countless others whose lives have been sacrificed on the altar of corporate profit, which did not rely on the military to bomb peoples and countries into submission but on the IMF, World Bank and WTO. It begs the question how many lives have been cut short across the world because of the inherent structural violence or silent killing of the everyday functioning of predatory capitalism? 

The appropriation of wealth through a system that funnels it from bottom to top via a process of accumulation by dispossession is celebrated by the corporate media as growth, prosperity, and freedom of choice, despite evidence that, from Greece to Spain and beyond, the reality for the majority has been falling wages, increasing poverty, the stripping away of choice and misery.

So where is the ‘responsible journalism’ that the EU calls for?

Does it lie with those journalists in the corporate media whose claim to respectability is their rigid professionalism, their accountability, their objectivity?

If you can call professionalism, accountability and objectivity being in the pay of and not wishing to offend advertising interests, officialdom and powerful corporate interests then they are paragons of absolute responsibility.

Peddling their high salaried deceptions, they have failed and continue to fail the public and genuinely hold power to account. By shining their ‘investigative’ light on ‘parliamentary procedures’, personalities, the rubber stamping of policies and the inane machinations of party politics, they merely serve to maintain and perpetuate the status quo and keep the public in the dark as to the unaccountable self-serving nature of power broking and the unity ofinterests that enable Big Oil, Big Finance, Big Pharma, Big Agra and the rest of them via their secretive think tanks and policy initiatives to keep bleeding us all dry. 

But that’s the role of the media: to help reinforce and reproduce the material conditions of a divisive social system on a daily basis. It’s called having a compliant, toothless media. It’s what the corporate media itself calls part of ‘liberal democracy’. And in this type of ‘liberal democracy’, it is people like Edward Snowden or Julian Assange who expose the wrongdoings of the political-corporate elites that are hounded.

It was George Orwell who said that journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed and everything else is public relations. Orwell was correct. Former CIA boss General Petraeus stated in 2006 that his strategy was to wage a war of perceptions conducted continuously through the news media, while John Pilger observes that the role of respectable journalism in western state crimes – from Iraq to Iran, Afghanistan to Libya - remains taboo. Its role has been to serve as first-choice cheerleader for illegal wars.

Intelligence agencies secure media compliance

There are of course some good journalists working in the corporate mainstream media. But if you think this article mounts to little more than a one-sided attack on the ‘mainstream’ media, you may need to think again.

Many readers will be aware of a recent story about the former editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s largest newspapers, who claimed that he accepted news stories written and given to him by the CIA and published them under his own name. 

This revelation came as a shock to many. But it should not have because  in the UK, for example, the British intelligence agencies along with the CIA has for decades strived to ensure that the mainstream press and TV complied with the interests of the Establishment. In addition to making sure that the British left was subverted, infiltrated and made toothless, the mainstream media was molded by the intelligence agencies to parrot the Establishment’s viewpoints and aims.

How this was achieved is described in the article ‘The Psyops War: British Intelligence and the Covert Propaganda Front and the CIA’s Interference in British Politics.’ ""

http://www.globalresearch.ca/countering-the-lies-of-the-mainstream-media/5441427

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Seeks Mandatory Registry to Track Vaccination Status

""Imagine a world in which the government has free access to your private medical records for the purpose of ensuring your compliance with official vaccination mandates. The United States is on the cusp of such tyranny with an Immunization Information Systems (IIS) program currently being built by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that will make your vaccination status available to health authorities, healthcare providers and "other authorized stakeholders."

The CDC describes the program as a system of "confidential, population-based, computerized databases that record all immunization doses administered by participating providers to persons residing within a given geopolitical area." In other words, it's a vast network of tracking systems that keep tabs on who's getting jabbed in accordance with official guidelines and who's choosing to opt for natural immunity instead.

As explained by The Greater Good documentary writer and director Leslie Manookian, IIS is a vaccine registry system designed to identify and track areas of so-called "undervaccination" for which intervention by government jackboots is necessary to achieve certain vaccination targets -- in this case, that means a 95 percent or higher vaccination rate across the country.

In its infancy, the program was essentially an opt-in system, at least at the individual state level, where parents could choose to have their children's vaccination status voluntarily entered into the system. Over time, it evolved into an opt-out program where parents had to request that their children's vaccination status not be tracked in government databases, and it now appears that the program has expanded even further to be a mandatory tracking system.

"To the casual observer, tracking vaccination status may seem innocuous but this information can be used to bully, pressure, and even coerce people to follow national vaccination guidelines even if those people have educated themselves and chosen a different vaccination schedule or to avoid vaccinations entirely," wrote Manookian back in 2013, long before the current measles vaccine hysteria swept the nation.

"Federal legislation already exists that allows federal health officials to forcibly vaccinate people against their will in the event a flu pandemic is declared. ... This intrusion into our private lives also sets a dangerous precedent to allow further state intrusion into decisions we make for ourselves and our families."

Electronic vaccination status databases will massively expand police state tyranny in US

The language guiding how the CDC's IIS database is to be used is so vague that almost any entity declared to be an "authorized stakeholder" can potentially gain access to you and your children's vaccination records. And if you are found to be non-compliant, you could very quickly become the target of "vaccination squads," which are already being deployed in certain areas to bring more people into compliance with vaccine mandates.""

http://www.naturalnews.com/049236_CDC_police_state_vaccination_status.html

Congress to Overturn? Thousands Call to Reverse FCC Net Neutrality Rules

""The landslide 2014 elections made crystal clear that the American people reject larger, more intrusive government,” the Web form leading to the letters says in part. “But President [Barack] Obama reacted by moving even further left, ignoring the fact the Federal Communications Commission is supposed to be an independent agency, and openly demanding the FCC take the most radical action imaginable: reducing the Internet to a ‘public utility,’ imposing sweeping new taxes and destroying private investment, competition, and innovation while putting bureaucrats firmly in control.”

The American Commitment Web page appears to overstate some information related to the net neutrality debate of the past year. The actual letters sent, in some cases, use more moderate language, but one letter calls the FCC action “reckless,” and another letter calls net neutrality supporters “extremists.”

In November, Obama called on the FCC to pass net neutrality rules that reclassified broadband as a regulated common carrier. He also noted then that the FCC is an independent agency. “Ultimately, this decision is theirs alone,” Obama said then.

And while some opponents of the FCC’s rules fear the regulations will allow new taxes on broadband and limit some private investment in broadband networks, it’s uncertain whether those predictions will come true. Some studies predicting billions of dollars in new broadband taxes tie the FCC’s net neutrality action to a separate proceeding at the agency examining whether broadband providers should pay into its Universal Service Fund. The USF is pool of money that helps subsidize telephone service and now broadband in rural areas.

Net neutrality advocates argue that the rules, prohibiting broadband providers from selectively blocking or throttling Web traffic, will actual spur investment in Web-based services.

Still, American Commitment said it was encouraged by the response of its members. The 3-year-old organization has “never seen such an intense citizen response in opposition to a federal regulatory action,” Phil Kerpen, president of American Commitment, said in a statement. 

Earlier this year, Republican leaders in Congress proposed legislation that would overturn the FCC’s reclassification of broadband as a regulated common carrier while retaining some basic net neutrality protections. With widespread opposition from Democrats, that legislation hasn’t advanced, but American Commitment said it was encouraged this week when Representative G.K. Butterfield, a North Carolina Democrat, called on Congress to craft net neutrality rules.

The petitions are just one effort to overturn the rules. This month, trade group USTelecom and ISP Alamo Broadband filed lawsuits challenging the FCC’s new rules.

While American Commitment rallied opponents of the new regulations, net neutrality supporters haven’t been silent.""

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2904632/thousands-call-on-congress-to-overturn-net-neutrality-rules.html