January 18 is a week from today.

This is the day when Goldman Sachs officially announces how much loot it’s going to divide between it’s fellow gangmembers.  

It’s expected to be in the 20 BILLION dollar range.   20 BILLION dollars.    The spoils of crime, divided up in the hideout.  

Will Americans just sit back and let this happen?

Will be there any kind of protest there?  

If not, why not?

It’s one of the most disturbing videos I’ve ever seen.   A member of the ruling family of the UAE tortured a man he didn’t much care for, beating him with a board bristling with nails, driving a car over him, and all kinds of nasty, nasty business, displaying a sadism rarely seen in public.   A top-ranking police chief was right there the whole time, letting it happen, in fact enabling it, as they drove out in the desert to do this.

I’m pretty sure I wrote about it here when it went public.   Oh yeah, here it is:   Obama wants to give nukes to the crooks in the UAE.    Sorta flew under the radar, didn’t it?    How many people know anything about our nuclear deal with the UAE?    Yeah, nukes for a psychotic ruling family of a country that can’t even keep its books straight.   Nice.

The videotape of the torture slowed the deal down, but apparently it went through, because, well, corruption wins every time, right?   Gotta go where the money is was, and the money ain’t here any more.

Anyway, here’s a new article on the outcome of this crime:

UAE sheikh acquitted in taped beating

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (CNN) — A United Arab Emirates sheikh was acquitted Sunday of charges connected to the videotaped beating and torture of an Afghan grain dealer.

Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al-Nahyan, a member of the emirates’ ruling family, was charged with rape, endangering life and causing bodily harm in connection with the nearly three-hour long tape shot in 2004 in the desert outside Abu Dhabi, one of the United Arab Emirates in the Persian Gulf region.

However, the court acquitted Issa on Sunday, ruling he had diminished responsibility for his actions because of the effects of medication his defense attorney claimed he was given. Issa had a “lack of criminal responsibility,” the court found, defense attorney Habib al-Mulla told CNN.

“The judiciary system acquitted Issa based on the evidence presented by the defense that the sheikh was under the influence of drugs given to him,” al-Mulla said. “That deprived him from his poise and caused him to carry out acts that were out of consciousness and that were photographed with the intention for later extortion.”

The tape surfaced last year as a piece of evidence in a federal civil suit filed in Houston, Texas, against the sheikh by his former business partner, Bassam Nabulsi. It caused outrage among human rights groups and in the United States, where senior U.S. officials familiar with the case said the tape delayed the ratification of a civil nuclear deal between the UAE and the United States.

On the tape, Issa is seen along with a private security officer stuffing sand in the man’s mouth.  As the grain dealer pleads and whimpers, he is beaten with a nailed board, burned in the genitals with a cigarette lighter, shocked with a cattle prod and led to believe he would be shot. Salt is poured into his wounds.

In the end, the victim can muster up only weak moans as an SUV is repeatedly driven over him.

So he gets off with the “twinkie defense”.  

I’m sure the videotape cowed anyone who might be considering convicting this guy that it would probably be a pretty bad idea.   I mean, I’m amazed it went this far.   What a joke.   “Yeah, let’s waste everybody’s time and money to put on a little pony show demonstrating that we have this thing called “justice” in the UAE.   I mean, for everybody BUT the ruling family.”

Sure.   Like I said, it’s good to be King.  

And these are our “friends”.   We do nuclear deals with these guys.   We move American businesses to this country (like Halliburton! as American as baseball!)   If the United States was on Facebook, the UAE and this monster would have been one of the first to get “friended”.   So would the guys who torture people for us in Uzbekistan.   BFF’s!  

And on the 18th, Goldman Sachs is handing out 20 BILLION dollars in bonuses (we used to call it “embezzlement”) to its partners in crime.    And nothing will be done.    There won’t even be a protest, apparently, because everybody will have their eyes diverted to, if not Harry Reid’s “scandal”, something new.

I wish I was King.  

If I was King, there would be serious hell to pay.   For some people.   Those who skate.   Those who torture.   Those who murder, and those who steal retirement funds.   They would skate no more.  

And if anyone thinks “oh, this stuff only happens in other countries,” I’ll remind you that Dick Cheney shot a man in the face.    And the man later apologized to Dick Cheney.     Just in case you’d forgotten.

I’ve made it clear that I believe the Democratic Party is in deliberate cahoots with the Republican party to keep a “balance of power” between the two parties.

This is all part of the “Kabuki Theatre” of what passes for modern day “electoral” politics in the United States.

The Democrats, if they really cared about anything other than the status quo, would be pissing on the grave of the Republican party right now.   Instead, they are intent on reviving the Republicans.   They are literally going out of their way to revive the Republican Party.  

Here’s one perfect exmple.    Harry Reid in Nevada.   He’s about to get his ass kicked by the Republicans.

More than half of Nevadans are unhappy with Sen. Harry Reid, according to a new poll commissioned by the Las Vegas Review-Journal. It’s the worst “unfavorable” rating he’s received in the newspaper’s surveys for this year’s election, and it comes amid quiet speculation — or perhaps wishful thinking by his opponents — that it’s time for the Nevada Democrat to retire rather than lose re-election.

In response, Reid told the Review-Journal Friday he wouldn’t consider stepping aside as did Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, whose announcement this week prompted rumors that the Senate majority leader might think about ending his political career now that he’s the most vulnerable incumbent.

“I am absolutely running for re-election,” said Reid, 70, in a statement. “These are difficult times for Nevada and as the majority leader of the Senate I have been able to take action to address those challenges. But I know there is more work to do to turn our state’s economy around and create jobs and I am committed to seeing it through.”

Most independent political analysts firmly discounted the idea that Reid would quit the race, despite poll after poll showing him in a losing battle with potential Republican opponents, who surveys suggest would beat him if the election were held today.

One elephant in the room the article never mentions:

Where is the Democratic challenger?  

If Harry Reid is a loser, which we all know he is, why isn’t there a Democrat primarying him?  

There isn’t one.   Nada.

They are handing that Senate seat to the Republicans.  

Why?

Because that’s their job.  To make sure they don’t get too much power.

Becuase if they get too much power, they won’t have any excuses.   If they get too much power, they can no longer come up with all their fake reasons for not working for the American people.

It’s part of their corrupt game.  

And it’s bullshit.   Las Vegas is a huge union town.  All they need is a seriously pro-union candidate from the Dem party to challenge this LOSER.   But will they do it?

Of course not.  

I have always hated Darrell Issa.  I live in California and Darrell Issa is largely the reason that we now have Arnold “will my term ever end?” Schwarzenegger in the governor’s hot tub.   He’s also, quite simply, a scumbag.

But remiscent of the Bush years, when I found myself agreeing more with Pat “I’m also a scumbag” Buchanan, than I did with most “mainstream” Democrats like, well, almost all of them, I now want to pat Scumbag Issa on the back.

Why?

Because he’s come out with this:

Geithner’s Fed tried to keep sweet deal for banks a secret

The controversy surrounding Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s role in the 2008 Wall Street bailouts was ramped up Thursday with the revelation of emails that show the New York Federal Reserve — then run by Geithner — pressured insurance giant AIG to withhold information about payments the company made to its creditors.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) obtained emails between AIG employees showing that the company had planned to disclose in its filings to the SEC that it had paid 100 cents on the dollar to creditors like Goldman Sachs and other banks, but “the New York Fed crossed out the reference,” Bloomberg News reports.

AIG has received $183 billion in taxpayer relief. The news that the New York Fed attempted to keep from the public how that money was spent will likely increase political opposition to Geithner’s appointment as Treasury Secretary.

The Bloomberg.com article is here.

Jan. 7 (Bloomberg) — The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then led by Timothy Geithner, told American International Group Inc. to withhold details from the public about the bailed-out insurer’s payments to banks during the depths of the financial crisis, e-mails between the company and its regulator show.

AIG said in a draft of a regulatory filing that the insurer paid banks, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA, 100 cents on the dollar for credit-default swaps they bought from the firm. The New York Fed crossed out the reference, according to the e-mails, and AIG excluded the language when the filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008. The e-mails were obtained by Representative Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The New York Fed took over negotiations between AIG and the banks in November 2008 as losses on the swaps, which were contracts tied to subprime home loans, threatened to swamp the insurer weeks after its taxpayer-funded rescue. The regulator decided that Goldman Sachs and more than a dozen banks would be fully repaid for $62.1 billion of the swaps, prompting lawmakers to call the AIG rescue a “backdoor bailout” of financial firms.

“It appears that the New York Fed deliberately pressured AIG to restrict and delay the disclosure of important information,” said Issa, a California Republican. Taxpayers “deserve full and complete disclosure under our nation’s securities laws, not the withholding of politically inconvenient information.”

Will this become a mainstream story?   Well, you’d think so, wouldn’t you?  After all, it paints a “Democrat” in a negative light, and it’s being pushed by a Republican.

But we’re talking about Banksters here, and they don’t play by the rules.   They run the place.  

All these people need to be in jail.  

I guess now that it’s the dead of winter, the time when people can really get sick, the “Swine Flu” panic is a thing of the past.

We have many more things to panic about now, right?   I mean, we’ve got the official CNN 24/7 “terrorgasm”, we’ve got coffers to bill at Big Corporations who can Supply Things To Us That Will Keep Us Safe.

And considering that there was a case of a suicide bomber somewhere (Afghanistan?) hiding the bomb up his rectum, Colbert’s suggestion that all Muslim men have a colonoscopy before boarding an aircraft doesn’t seem like something that would be far-fetched in today’s world.

But that’s not what this is about.  This is about — gosh, I almost forgot it myself, how distracting today’s panics are! — “Swine Flu”, you know that thing that was supposed to kill all of us, that thing we were all geared up to be SCARED SCARED SCARED about — and more importantly that thing that was designed to open all our wallets.

You’ll never see this on our 24-hour news terror programs, but for some reason the European Parliament has decided to investigate this scam:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/i…

The Council of Europe member states will launch an inquiry in January 2010 on the influence of the pharmaceutical companies on the global swine flu campaign, focusing especially on extent of the pharma’s industry’s influence on WHO. The Health Committee of the EU Parliament has unanimously passed a resolution calling for the inquiry. The step is a long-overdue move to public transparency of a “Golden Triangle” of drug corruption between WHO, the pharma industry and academic scientists that has permanently damaged the lives of millions and even caused death.

The parliament motion was introduced by Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, former SPD Member of the German Bundestag and now chairman of the Health Committee of PACE (Parliamentary Assembly of the Council  of Europe). Wodarg is a medical doctor and epidemiologist, a specialist in lung disease and environmental medicine, who considers the current “pandemic” Swine Flu campaign of the WHO to be “one of the greatest medicine scandals of the Century.”[1]

The text of the resolution just passed by a sufficient number in the Council of Europe Parliament says among other things, “In order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies influenced scientists and official agencies, responsible for public health standards to alarm governments worldwide and make them squander tight health resources for inefficient vaccine strategies and needlessly expose millions of healthy people to the risk of an unknown amount of side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines. The “bird-flu”-campaign (2005/06) combined with the “swine-flu”-campaign seem to have caused a great deal of damage not only to some vaccinated patients and to public health-budgets, but to the credibility and accountability of important international health-agencies.”[2]

The Parliamentary inquiry will look into the issue of „falsified pandemic” that was declared by WHO in June 2009 on the advice of its group of academic experts, SAGE, many of whose members have been documented to have intense financial ties to the same pharmaceutical giants such as GlaxoSmithKline, Roche, Novartis, who benefit from the production of drugs and untested H1N1 vaccines. They will investigate the influence of the pharma industry in creation of a worldwide campaign against the so-called H5N1 “Avian Flu”  and H1N1 Swine Flu. The inquiry will be given “urgent” priority in the general assembly of the parliament.

In his official statement to the Committee, Wodarg criticized the influence of the pharma industry on scientists and officials of WHO, stating that it has led to the situation where “unnecessarily millions of healthy people are exposed to the risk of poorly tested vaccines,” and that, for a flu strain that is “vastly less harmful” than all previous flu epidemics.

There you have it, in plain English.    

What everybody knew, who was paying attention.  Of course NOW they decide to do this, NOW, after the pharmaceutical companies have sold all the vaccines they could, I mean, if you haven’t gotten a vaccine by now, you’re probably not gonna get one, right?

This reeks of the “I am shocked, shocked, that gambling is going on here” line from Casablanca (and forgive me if i’m not quoting it correctly).

I mean, the EU sure wouldn’t want to actually infringe on a corporation’s god-given natural rights to scam the public into making money?    But to keep a little legitimacy in the public eye, they’ll sure pretend to investigate it afterwards, probably to slap a few fines on the perps so they can share the wealth, you know?

I was saying it back when they fear was being ramped up to fever pitch (excuse the pun) over this bogus flu.   That the WHO must have been corrupted.   Because it was, well, just obvious as fuck (pardon the language)..  

The world is completely corrupt.  You can’t believe anything any more.

But the public keeps getting punked.    It seems every year the public is ever-more-easy to punk.

Why is that?

Back on October 2nd, I wrote a piece here titled “Lockerbie Bomber” case getting fishier and fishier”.

And not long prior to that I wrote a piece titled “Angry about the “Lockerbie bomber” getting released?”.

In both these essays were quite a few links to other information regarding the wholly bogus nature of the “official” Lockerbie story.

Well, 20 years after the fact, and many years after all of this information was publicly known, the BBC decides to finally report the following:

BBC probe casts doubt on Lockerbie evidence

LONDON – A BBC investigation has cast doubt on key evidence in the case against the Libyan convicted of blowing up a US jet over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988, the broadcaster said Wednesday.

A tiny fragment of the timer allegedly used to blow up Pan Am flight 103 — crucial in linking Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi to the bomb — was not properly tested and was also unlikely to have survived the explosion, it said.

Megrahi was jailed in 2001 for the attack which left 270 people dead, but was controversially released from his Scottish prison in August 2009 because he was suffering from terminal cancer and only had months to live.

Investigators believe the plane bomb was contained in a Toshiba radio cassette player inside a brown suitcase with various items of clothing, and was triggered by a digital timer that was later linked to Libya.

But according to the BBC’s Newsnight programme, the fragment of the timer — found embedded in a charred piece of clothing three weeks after the bombing — was never tested to confirm if it had actually been in a blast.

Even now, they pull back, far back, from the truth of this story.  It’s not just that this was “never tested”.  

This key piece of evidence was reportedly planted by the CIA.  

A fragment of circuit board alleged to have been part of the bomb’s timing mechanism is the sole item of physical evidence linking the two Libyans to the December 1988 bombing. But Tam Dalyell, Labour MP for Linlithgow, declared: “I have come to suspect that the timing device in question was not that of Pan Am 103 but a different timing device that the CIA had picked up from the Libyans … I have been driven to the conclusion that the device was a CIA plant.”

Mr Dalyell, a long-standing critic of US and British government insistence that Libya was behind the attack, said an analysis of the fragment had shown it had been exposed to a temperature of 4,000deg C. But a Swiss police specialist had cast doubt on this, saying the explosion would have lasted only a fraction of a second in outside air temperatures of about minus 40C.

Accusing the Crown Office, the Scottish prosecuting authority, of failing to follow up the right leads, Mr Dalyell said – to strident denials from Lord James Douglas-Hamilton, the Scottish Office minister – that it had allowed itself for six years “to be suborned by political pressure into failing to carry out its duty”.

He said this was a “wicked” dereliction of duty that brought shame on Britain.

That’s from 1995.   Thanks, BBC, for being on the ball here!

There’s also this:

Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter in the tragedy, describes the ruling of Megrahi as the most disgraceful miscarriages of justice in history, blaming both the Scottish legal system and US intelligence.

“The Americans played their role in the investigation and influenced the prosecution,” Swire told the Scotsman Newspaper.

Top level UK diplomats tend to agree with him, such Oliver Miles, a former British ambassador to Libya.

“No court is likely get to the truth, now that various intelligence agencies have had the opportunity to corrupt the evidence,” Miles told the BBC.

The spectacular decision of the SCCRC is certain to give a second life to the dozen of alternative theories of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. Nearly two decades later, the case is back to square one.

Back to square one

Let us give Lord Sutherland, Lord Coulsfield and Lord Maclean some credit. After hearing 230 witnesses and studying 621 exhibits during 84 days of evidence, spread over eight months, the three judges of the Lockerbie trial almost got correctly the date of the worst act of terror in the UK.

In the first line of the first paragraph of the most expensive verdict in history they wrote: “At 1903 hours on 22 December 1988 Pan Am flight 103 fell out of the sky.” As a matter of fact, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded on December 21st 1988.

Michael Scharf is an international law expert at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. Scharf joined the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser for Law Enforcement and Intelligence in April 1989. He was also responsible for drawing up the UN Security Council resolutions that imposed sanctions on Libya in 1992.

“It was a trial where everybody agreed ahead of time that they were just going to focus on these two guys, and they were the fall guys,” Sharf wrote.

“The CIA and the FBI kept the State Department in the dark. It worked for them for us to be fully committed to the theory that Libya was responsible. I helped the counter-terrorism bureau draft documents that described why we thought Libya was responsible, but these were not based on seeing a lot of evidence, but rather on representations from the CIA and FBI and the Department of Justice about what the case would prove and did prove.”

I wish I were making this up.

http://www.rte.ie/news/2010/01…

Explosive reached Ireland after failed test

A quantity of explosive, found in a flat on Dorset Street in Dublin this morning, was brought into the country following a failed security operation in Slovakia.

The explosive was one of eight pieces of contraband planted by the authorities in the luggage of unsuspecting passengers at Bratislava Airport in Slovakia last weekend as part of a test of security procedures.

Seven were detected by airport security, but the eighth – 90g of research development explosive or RDX – was put in the luggage of a Slovakian electrician who lives and works in Dublin.

h/t to Cryptogon.

Here’s the choice bit.   How would you like to be this guy?

The 49-year-old unwittingly brought the material to Dublin when he returned from Christmas holidays.

Nice.

With “authorities” like these, who needs terrorists?