Subject: News Roundup - Jan 9th
News Roundup - Jan 9th
NY’s fallen heroes: More than 100
retired 9/11 cops and firefighters busted for swindling $24million in
disability benefits with fake
illnesses and made-up psychological trauma arising from terror attack
Lawyers coached fraudsters on how they should talk about leaving the TV on all
day and constantly napping, having trouble grooming themselves
By Meghan Keneally
PUBLISHED: 7 January 2014
Mail online
More
than 100 first responders who claimed to have psychiatric conditions
and medical disorders because of their work at Ground Zero are being
arrested today for disability fraud.
The arrests come
after the
Manhattan District Attorney's office spent more than two years
investigating the claims made by some NYPD officers and firemen who
were part of the September 11 response and clean up efforts.
The officers submitted forms saying that they had varying disorders like
PTSD, anxiety or depression- claims which were discovered to have been falsified.
Responding to horror: More than a hundred first
responders
who helped at Ground Zero following the 2001 terrorist attack are being
arrested over disability fraud after making false claims of PTSD and
depression
ABC 7 reports that many of the retired officers that had said that they were being
treated for stress retained their gun licences, which is not allowed if
the holder has such a condition.
Another tip off was that in order to receive the benefits, the individuals had
to be fully retired and while the majority of them had retired from the
New York police and fire departments, many had taken up a second job.
Investigators used photos on Facebook as evidence that the men have taken up jobs
ranging from martial arts instructors to helicopter pilots.
Some photos directly contradicted specific parts of the disorders that the responding
New York police, firefighters charged in disability fraud
The individuals' claims- whether they be
depression
or assertions that they felt unable to spend time with family and
friends in social settings- have not been revealed- but the
District Attorney's office released a set of photos that depict some of
the men in question having a great time on jet skis or marlin fishing as examples of their fraudulent claims......
.....'The retired members of the NYPD indicted in this case have disgraced all first responders who perished during
the search and rescue efforts on September 11, 2001, and those who
subsequently died from 9/11 related illness, by exploiting their
involvements that tragic day for personal gain,' Bratton said in the
statement.
( Was the 12 year/3 term Bloomberg administration hiding this all the while? ...Vin)
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2535352/NYPD-officers-firefighters-arrested-9-11-disability-fraud-crackdown.html#ixzz2pqRwiJ8T
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Quit Throwing 9/11 In Our Faces(some nasty language)
by Alex Marthews
on January 7, 2014
Digital Fourth
This letter makes me sick at heart. The very people who were supposed to
defend our country, who even now parade onto talk shows and give interviews about
the NSA scandal like people of authority, stand revealed as corrupt and
depraved.
+
They failed to prevent 9/11. Perhaps even then the volume of data was so
great that they simply didn’t notice, or were unable to integrate,
the information they had. But they should have been able to learn from
their failure, and instead, they covered it up, and their cover-ups and
their lies have cost many thousands more lives. Michael Hayden, Dick
Cheney, Robert Mueller, and all the people who have made it so easy for
the NSA to lie to us for so long, shame on all of you.
Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
The NSA had collected critical information (relating to calls made by AA-77
hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar from the US to Yemen) that could have
thwarted 9/11, but decided for unknown reasons not to share that
information beyond the NSA. They then covered it up, instead of
admitting it so that we could learn from it and improve what we were
doing.
Before 9/11, the NSA had developed a surveillance program called
THINTHREAD, which would have integrated intelligence findings while
automatically encrypting all US persons’ communications, and which would
have required a court order based on probable cause for their
decryption. Gen. Michael Hayden, the same Hayden whose understanding of
the Fourth Amendment was so poor that he insisted that it doesn’t contain the
words “probable cause,” scotched THINTHREAD in favor of unencrypted bulk
surveillance of Americans (STELLARWIND),
and a boondoggle called TRAILBLAZER that previewed our occupation of
Iraq by failing massively while massively enriching Hayden’s contractor
friends.
Now, thanks to their addiction to mass collection, the NSA has admitted that it
is indeed drowning in data it cannot process. Its apologists scurry round
spreading fear about
reforms that would actually make their work more restrained and
effective, and in a last, desperate throw of the dice, they are invoking the
shadow of 9/11 – the same 9/11 that their bulk surveillance failed to thwart
last time around. These days, the only terrorist attacks they seem capable of
thwarting are the ones they gin up in advance, but no matter: making the NSA
conform to the Constitution will not KEEP US SAFE.
You know that on this blog I tend not to use the swears. This time, I do use the swears:
I am fucking pissed off. What a fuckup. What a gargantuan, despicable, offensive fuckup.
These clowns gleefully threw the Constitution on the fire, and gave
us NOTHING in return. We’re not safer. We’re certainly not richer. We
have lost so much, so that a few people could become extremely rich and
powerful, and our corrupt system is now incapable of holding them
personally to account. Yet still they yammer on, clamoring for more
funding for an NSA that doesn’t work, a TSA that doesn’t work, an FBI
that chases imaginary plots instead of focusing on locking up actual
criminals. They have played on our fears to make us exchange realistic
risk assessment for a meaningless, nightmarish pantomime where we, the
American people and indeed the people of the whole world, have to accept the loss
of every freedom we hold dear in order to “do whatever it
takes” to “catch the bad guys.”.....
.....“The victims of 9/11 would have wanted us to do whatever it takes.”
No, they fucking wouldn’t. Do you think we’re all scared six-year-olds
hiding underneath our stairwells, waiting for Big Daddy NSA to tell us
that everything’s OK and we can come out now?
Fuck that. You like us just where we are, cowering every time you say Boo, and you
have no incentive to stop us until we tell you the game is over.
You’re the six-year-olds here, standing there with the Constitution
on a skewer over an open flame and hollering, “9/11 MADE ME DO IT.”
Just quit it. We’re sick of it. We’re not going to freak out any more over a few
seventh-century-loving lunatics. We have seen the real
danger to our way of life, and it’s you, and people like you. Your juju
has lost its mojo, so quit throwing 9/11 in our faces, and pretending
like your juju is ever going to come back.
http://warrantless.org/2014/01/no-more-911/
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Spying on Congress
By Andrew P. Napolitano
January 9, 2014
Lew Rockwell .com
Happy New Year. Just when you thought the NSA spying scandal couldn’t get any worse, it has.
Last
week, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., wrote to Gen. Keith Alexander,
director of the National Security Administration (NSA), and asked
plainly
whether the NSA has been or is now spying on members of Congress or
other public officials. The senator’s letter was no doubt prompted
by the revelations of Edward Snowden to the effect that the federal
government’s
lust for personal private data about all Americans and many foreigners
knows no bounds, and its respect for the constitutionally
protected and statutorily enforced right to privacy is nonexistent.
The senator’s benign and neutral letter came on the heels of a
suggestion by his colleague Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., to the effect that
Alexander’s
boss, Gen. James Clapper, director of national intelligence, perjured
himself before a Senate subcommittee when he testified that
the NSA is not gathering massive amounts of data from tens or hundreds
of millions of Americans. Alexander himself is also on the hook for
having
testified in a highly misleading manner to a House committee when he
was asked whether the NSA has the ability to read emails and listen
to phone calls and he stated: “No, we don’t have that authority.”
Thus far, Paul is the only member of Congress possessed of the
personal courage to call out Clapper by arguing that working for the
government is no defense to lying under oath. The gravity of Paul’s
charges
was enhanced by revelations subsequent to the Clapper testimony to the
effect that Clapper was told in advance of his testimony what questions
would be put to him and then declined an offer afterward to correct any
misstatements. In a new low
for members of Congress, the NSA’s own advocate in the House, Long
Island’s Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., attacked Paul for attacking Clapper
for lying under oath. The King argument is: Anything goes when it comes
to national security — even lying under oath, even violating everyone’s
constitutional rights, even destroying the freedom you have sworn to
protect.
All of this is background to the timing of Sanders’ letter. That
Clapper perjured himself before, and Alexander misled, Congress is
nothing new. And the punishments for lying to Congress and for
misleading Congress are identical: five years per lie or per misleading
statement. Hence, the silence from the NSA to Sanders.
Well, it wasn’t exactly silence, but rather a refusal to answer a
simple question. The NSA did reply to Sanders by stating — in an absurd
oxymoron — that members of Congress receive the same constitutional
protections as other Americans: that is to say, none from the NSA......
.....Basically, the NSA can tell a FISA judge that two thugs in area code
212 are chatting with five jerks in area code 312, and they are all
texting six malcontents in area code 310. It knows who they are and
where
they are, but instead of going to New York and Chicago and Los Angeles
and following them and investigating them, instead of asking for a
search warrant to spy on
just them, the NSA wants a warrant to spy on everyone in those
area
codes. It is a lot easier for our spies to throw a few switches at a
telecom office than to burn shoe leather. If authorities in New Jersey
had
asked this of me when I was on the bench there, I’d have thrown them
out of my courtroom because the Constitution expressly forbids this.
Just as disturbing as the revelation that the NSA is spying on
members of Congress is the fear of what the NSA does with the
information it collects. In September, The Guardian newspaper reported
that the NSA shares raw, unfiltered information it has gathered with
some foreign nations, including England and Israel. It also reported
that the NSA shares this raw data with its boss: President Obama. Hence, Sanders’ letter.
The lawlessness continues. The president’s NSA spies remain out of
control. They are spying on Congress and the courts; the military and
the press; the CIA and other spies; friends, foes and the Pope. If we
fail to stop this soon, the next generation of Americans will not even
know what privacy is.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/01/andrew-p-napolitano/mark-of-the-beast/
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Back to Iraq? You Bet!
By Daniel McAdams
Jan 8, 2014
Lew Rockwell .com
As usual, the interventionists who run the US foreign policy
establishment are drawing all the wrong conclusions from the news that
the
former “al-Qaeda in Iraq” (now “al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria”) has set up
shop in the notorious Fallujah. Sen. John McCain and his sidekick,
Sen. Lindsey Graham, issued a joint statement over the weekend which unsurprisingly blamed the whole development on
President Obama’s decision to withdraw US forces form Iraq in 2011.
Wrote the Senators:
When President Obama withdrew all U.S. forces from Iraq
in 2011, over the objections of our military leaders and commanders on
the ground, many of us predicted that the vacuum would be filled by
America’s enemies and would emerge as a threat to U.S. national security interests.
There are two things wrong with this analysis. First, the phenomenon
of al-Qaeda in Iraq was created by the invasion that the two Senators
championed. Al-Qaeda was not in Iraq before 2003, as we all know. So if
anyone
is responsible for al-Qaeda in Iraq it is McCain, Graham, and the
coterie of cakewalk neo-conservatives who pushed for the war. Secondly,
as the Moon of Alabama blog so deftly points out, the whole “power
vacuum” argument is a reality vacuum — making no sense:
It was the U.S. attack on Iraq that set off the sectarian war in Iraq and beyond. It was the removal of Saddam Hussein that
changed
the balance between Saudi Sunnism and Iranian Shiaism which then
motivated the Saudis to unleash the Jihadist forces. It was not a
‘power vacuum’ that created the strife that continues today and will
continue in the future. It was the insertion of U.S. forces into the
Middle East that led to overpressure and the current explosions.
McCain and Graham and the neocons want to have it both ways. They
want us to believe that the “liberation” of Iraq produced a successful,
positive result — a brave new society eager to spread its democratic,
tolerant, and multicultural wings. That would justify their decade long
(and more) advocacy of such an attack.
But at the same time they tell us that the US military can never
leave Iraq lest a “power vacuum” be created that would allow “America’s
enemies”
to establish themselves. But was the attack itself not supposed to rid
Iraq of “America’s enemies”? These new enemies seem far worse
than the enemies the initial intervention was supposed to eliminate.
How awkward for them to face the fact that their preferred action
(invasion) produced a result worse than the problem. Their Straussian
answer, of course, is to ignore that glaring fact and just scream for
more intervention!
The real question now, as article after article is written about how
horrific the “fall of Fallujah” is to the US military who participated
in the brutal pacification of that luckless town back in 2004, is to
what degree the US military will be going back to Iraq.
Secretary of State John Kerry is sending what are no-doubt designed
to be mixed signals, wrapped in the enigma of State Dept-speak. He says:.....
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/01/daniel-mcadams/back-to-iraq/
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Has Robert Gates Become One of Us?
Written by Daniel McAdams
Wednesday January 8, 2014
RPI
Is former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates becoming a
non-interventionist? Has he taken the hard road to conversion that
begins with all faith in US power projection and coercive influence and
ends up with frenzied and joyous clicking through the pages of LRC and RPI?
That
is probably being too optimistic -- though our doors are always open.
Nevertheless there is much to fascinate in what we have seen from his
new memoir -- and no, it's not the silly personality conflicts and
"dissing" Obama with which the mainstream media is obsessed.
For example, Secretary Gates writes (emphasis added):
Wars
are a lot easier to get into than out of. Those who ask about exit
strategies or question what will happen if assumptions prove wrong are
rarely welcome at the conference table when the
fire-breathers are demanding that we strike—as they did when advocating
invading
Iraq, intervening in Libya and Syria, or bombing Iran's nuclear sites.
But in recent decades, presidents confronted with tough problems abroad
have too often been too quick to reach for a gun. Our foreign and
national security policy has become too militarized, the use of force
too easy for presidents.
>
>Today,
too many ideologues call for U.S. force as the first option rather than
a last resort. On the left, we hear about the "responsibility to
protect" civilians to
justify military intervention in Libya, Syria, Sudan and elsewhere. On
the right, the failure to strike Syria or Iran is deemed an abdication
of U.S. leadership. And so the rest of the world sees the U.S.
as a militaristic country quick to launch planes, cruise missiles and
drones deep into sovereign countries or ungoverned spaces. There are
limits to what even the strongest and greatest nation on Earth can
do—and not every outrage, act of aggression, oppression or crisis should elicit a U.S. military response.
It is a tried and true phenomenon that Washington insiders who enjoy
power and prestige while in office will upon retirement tell us what
they really thought, and how bad things really were. Often they toss
political
correctness and caution aside like a cheap coat. It is easy to deride
such activity as being self-serving and even self-exculpatory.
However
there is also a reasonable argument, and perhaps it applies to fmr.
Secretary Gates, that the only way to prevent the real crazies from
taking over is to stick within the system and try to thwart the most
dangerous of the other factions.....
....Likewise, Gates's assessment of uber-interventionist Vice President Joe Biden, the
comedic king of verbal blunders. Writes Gates on Biden:
I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.
To the degree that Biden's every impulse, every response to foreign
events
is informed by his sense of American exceptionalism and extraordinarily
biased Middle East views, it is hard to argue with Gates's assessment.
So we should not feel reassured that the Obama Administration's rejoinder comes by way of NSC spokesman Caitlin Hayden:
President Obama relies on [Biden's] good counsel every day
Oh...well perhaps that explains more than she intended.
What is
useful in what we have seen thus far from Gates's book is that beyond
the sloganeering of the Left-humanitarian interventionists and their "US
leadership" counterparts on the Right, there is still some sense of the
limits of US hard -- and perhaps even soft -- power among those who are
actually tasked with carrying out the orders cooked up and served by
the ideologues.
Let's hope Gates continues on his path and
eventually finds himself in our camp, where we seek the real US security
that comes from confidence, commerce, diplomacy, defense, and
non-intervention.
http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2014/january/08/has-robert-gates-become-one-of-us.aspx
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Wow! NY Times says: Abolish the Corporate Income Tax
By LAURENCE J. KOTLIKOFF
JAN. 5, 2014
NewYorkTimes
BOSTON — JOBS don’t grow out of thin air, especially well-paying ones. They
require,
among other things, companies that are willing to operate where you
live. Just ask the Seattle-based District 751 of the machinists’
union, which was worried that Boeing will build its new 777X airliner
someplace far away where it is cheaper to produce. Last month the union
offered
contract concessions, as its president explained, to ensure “the
long-term success” of Boeing in Washington State. And on Friday, Boeing
machinists approved a contract with concessions to keep assembly of the
plane in the area.
In recent decades, American workers have suffered one body blow after
another:
the decline in manufacturing, foreign competition, outsourcing, the
Great Recession and smart machines that replace people everywhere
you look. Amazon and Google are in a horse race to see how many humans
they
can put out of work with self-guided delivery drones and driverless
cars. You wonder who will be left with incomes to buy what these robots
deliver.
What can workers do to mitigate their plight? One useful step would be to lobby to eliminate the corporate income tax.
That might sound like a giveaway to the rich. It’s not. The rich, including
Boeing’s stockholders, can take their companies and run — and not just
from Washington State to, say, North Carolina. To avoid our federal
corporate tax, they can, and often do, move their operations and jobs
abroad.
Apple’s tax return says it all: The company, according to one
calculation, paid only 8.2 percent of its worldwide profits in United
States
corporate income taxes, thanks to piling up most of its profits and
locating far too many of its operations overseas.
I, like many economists, suspect that our corporate income tax is
economically self-defeating — hurting workers, not capitalists, and
collecting precious little revenue to boot......
.....Eliminating the corporate tax and raising income tax rates or lowering the
corporate tax rate and eliminating its loopholes are not the only
options.
Elsewhere, I have proposed eliminating the corporate income tax, but
making shareholders pay income taxes on their companies’ profits as they
accrue. This leaves companies with no tax reason to avoid
operating in the United States but ensures that shareholders, not wage
earners, make up for any revenue losses through higher personal tax
payments.
It’s been a long time since the typical American worker received a raise in
her real pay. In fact, average weekly earnings, exclusive of fringe
benefits but adjusted for inflation, are 10 percent lower today than
they were in 1966. This is America’s nightmare, not its dream. Turning
things around requires getting a lot of things right, starting, I’d
argue, with corporate tax reform.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/06/opinion/abolish-the-corporate-income-tax.html?nl=opinion&emc=edit_ty_20140106&_r=0
"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great
moral crises maintain their neutrality" -Dante Alighieri
They who watch while our elected officials are ravaging our country
should consider that...Vin
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