Infinite Unknown

“We do not tell you what we are doing, but you have to pay for it.”

What would you do to someone that breaks into your house and is stealing your money?(I know, it isn’t really ‘your’ money anyway, but that is another story.)

That is exactly what the Fed is doing. The Fed is also stealing the value of your money. Inflation is a ‘hidden tax’.

You don’t have to study economics to understand what these banksters are doing, although it was helpful for me.

Hyperinflation is coming. The government and the Fed are bankrupting the US.

Remember just a few months ago when they told you that ‘the economy is sound’?

Listen to Ron Paul, Peter Schiff and Jim Rogers and prepare yourself for the worst.

This article is a must read.
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Vehicles are parked outside the U.S. Federal Reserve building in Washington, Dec. 4, 2008. Photographer: Brendan Smialowski/Bloomberg News

Dec. 12 (Bloomberg) — The Federal Reserve refused a request by Bloomberg News to disclose the recipients of more than $2 trillion of emergency loans from U.S. taxpayers and the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

Bloomberg filed suit Nov. 7 under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act requesting details about the terms of 11 Fed lending programs, most created during the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

The Fed responded Dec. 8, saying it’s allowed to withhold internal memos as well as information about trade secrets and commercial information. The institution confirmed that a records search found 231 pages of documents pertaining to some of the requests.

“If they told us what they held, we would know the potential losses that the government may take and that’s what they don’t want us to know,” said Carlos Mendez, a senior managing director at New York-based ICP Capital LLC, which oversees $22 billion in assets.

Continue reading »

Tags: Banks, Ben Bernanke, Citigroup, Congress, Economy, Fed, Federal Reserve, Financial Crisis, Freedom of Information Act, Government, Henry Paulson, JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers, Politics, Recession, Stock Market, Taxpayers, Treasury, U.S., Wall Street

Nov. 10 (Bloomberg) — The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in September they would comply with congressional demands for transparency in a $700 billion bailout of the banking system. Two months later, as the Fed lends far more than that in separate rescue programs that didn’t require approval by Congress, Americans have no idea where their money is going or what securities the banks are pledging in return.

“The collateral is not being adequately disclosed, and that’s a big problem,” said Dan Fuss, vice chairman of Boston- based Loomis Sayles & Co., where he co-manages $17 billion in bonds. “In a liquid market, this wouldn’t matter, but we’re not. The market is very nervous and very thin.”

Bloomberg News has requested details of the Fed lending under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and filed a federal lawsuit Nov. 7 seeking to force disclosure.

Continue reading »

Tags: AIG, Bailout, Banks, Ben Bernanke, Citigroup, Economy, Fed, Federal Reserve, Freedom of Information Act, Henry Paulson, JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers, Politics, Taxpayers, Treasury, U.S.

The CIA can hide statements made by the terror suspects that the spy agency has tortured in its secret prisons, a federal judge has ruled.

Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of the Washington D.C. Circuit Court declined to review torture allegations from men held in the CIA’s prisons-because it could put the nation at risk of grave danger if allowed to be made public.

The American Civil Liberties Union said it filed in March, a Freedom of Information Act request for the documents from the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which decide if prisoners at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, qualify as “enemy combatants.”

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Tags: ACLU, Bush administration, CIA, Civil liberties, Freedom of Information Act, Government, Guantánamo, Interrogation, Iraq, Politics, Terrorism, Terrorists, Torture, U.S.

War really is getting more like a video game, as hardware and software from the gaming industry is increasingly being adopted for military use. The latest sign of this appeared at the Farnborough air show this week, where arms-maker Raytheon showed off its new Universal Control System for robotic aicraft. It’s based on the same technology that drives Halo and Splinter Cell:

“Gaming companies have spent millions to develop user-friendly graphic interfaces, so why not put them to work on UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles]?” says Mark Bigham, business development director for Raytheon’s tactical intelligence systems. “The video-game industry always will outspend the military on improving human-computer interaction.”

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Tags: DARPA, Drones, Freedom of Information Act, Government, Military, New Scientist, nuclear bombs, Raytheon, Technology, U.S., UAVs

After CIA Director Michael Hayden publicly admitted that the CIA has, in fact, waterboarded detainees, the agency could no longer cling to its last excuses for covering up the use of the very word “waterboarding” in CIA records. As a result, yesterday we obtained several heavily redacted documents in response to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by the ACLU and other organizations seeking documents related to the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody overseas.

While the documents do, in fact, reveal the word “waterboarding” or some variation, they leave pretty much everything else to the imagination. The pages that haven’t been completely withheld (many of them contain the words “Denied in Full” instead of any actual content) have the clandestine blacked-out look that’s become a sort of trademark of this administration. This is my favorite:

One of the documents is a heavily redacted version of a report (PDF) by the CIA Office of the Inspector General (OIG) on its review of the CIA’s interrogation and detention program. The report includes information about an as-yet-undisclosed Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel opinion from August 2002. Interestingly, this opinion appears to be the same OLC memo authorizing specific interrogations methods for use by the CIA that is being withheld by the CIA as a classified document in the ACLU’s FOIA litigation — but the OIG report refers to this document as “unclassified.”

The CIA continues to withhold many more documents that should not be secret. The incomplete response to the ACLU’s demand for records reflects a complete disregard for the right of the American public to know when and how often the government has employed illegal interrogation methods. Continue reading »

Tags: ACLU, CIA, Detainee, Freedom of Information Act, Government, Libert, Michael Hayden, Torture, U.S.

The Bank of England has imposed a permanent news blackout on its £50bn-plus plan to ease the credit crunch.

Requests under the Freedom of Information Act are to be denied. Details will be kept secret even after 30 years - the period after which all but the most sensitive state documents are released.

Any Bank of England employee leaking the names of institutions involved will face court action for breach of contract.

Even a figure for the overall amount advanced will not be published until October. Meanwhile the Bank is expected to issue at least £50bn of Treasury bills to banks in exchange for their mortgages - entirely in secret. Continue reading »

Tags: Bailout, Bank of England, Barclays, Financial Crisis, Freedom of Information Act, HBoS, Lloyds TSB, Mortgages

Documents suggest CIA stonewalled Congress

The Central Intelligence Agency has acknowledged having 7,000 pages of documents pertaining to President George W. Bush’s secret rendition and detention programs, according to three international human rights groups.

Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the International Human Rights Clinic at NYU School of Law made the claim following a summary judgment motion by the agency this week to avoid a lawsuit that seeks to force the nation’s top spy outfit to make the documents public under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

“Among other assertions, the CIA claimed that it did not have to release the documents because many consist of correspondence with the White House or top Bush administration officials, or because they are between parties seeking legal advice on the programs, including guidance on the legality of certain interrogation procedures,” the groups wrote in a release. “The CIA confirmed that it requested-and received-legal advice from attorneys at the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel concerning these procedures.”

“For the first time, the CIA has acknowledged that extensive records exist relating to its use of enforced disappearances and secret prisons,” Curt Goering, AIUSA senior deputy executive director, said in a statement. “Given what we already know about documents written by Bush administration officials trying to justify torture and other human rights crimes, one does not need a fertile imagination to conclude that the real reason for refusing to disclose these documents has more to do with avoiding disclosure of criminal activity than national security.”

RAW STORY was the first news outlet to identify the exact location of one of the sites in the CIA’s secret prison network, which was revealed first by the Washington Post. Raw Story identified a prison in northeastern Poland, Stare Kiejkuty, that was used as a transit point for terror suspects.

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Tags: Amnesty International, Bush administration, CIA, Department of Justice, Freedom of Information Act, George Bush, George Tenet, Human Rights, Poland

VANCOUVER — The country’s only armed transit police have been tasering passengers who try to avoid paying fares.

According to documents provided in response to a Freedom of Information request, police patrolling public transit in the Metro Vancouver area have used tasers 10 times in the past 18 months, including five occasions when victims had been accosted for riding free.

In one incident, a non-paying passenger was tasered after he held onto a railing on the SkyTrain platform and refused to let go.

“After several warnings to the subject to stop resisting arrest and the subject failing to comply with the officers’ commands, the taser was deployed and the subject was taken into control,” said the report provided by TransLink, the region’s transit authority.

A member of the Greater Vancouver Transit Authority Police Service watches a Skytrain leave a station in Vancouver in this file photo. (Richard Lam/The Canadian Press)

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An internal review of the incident concluded that the action taken by transit police officers complied with the force’s policy and was within guidelines “set out in the National Use of Force Model,” the report said.

On another occasion, a passenger was tasered when he fled from police who found him without a payment receipt during a “fare blitz.” This time, however, the passenger got away because, as recounted in the report, “the Taser was ineffective due to the subject’s clothing and [he] escaped the custody of the officers.”

Politicians and civil-liberties activists alike decried the use of tasers on individuals who were attempting merely to avoid paying a fine for not buying a ticket to ride.

“I think it’s absolutely uncalled for, absolutely reprehensible, and the police should not be doing that,” federal Liberal public safety critic Ujjal Dosanjh said in Ottawa yesterday.

On the face of it, the use of tasers by transit police here is far outside guidelines that say they should be used only if someone is suicidal, violent or about to injure himself or someone else, Mr. Dosanjh said. Continue reading »

Tags: Civil liberties, fares, Freedom of Information Act, Ottawa, passengers, patrolling, Police, public transit, SkyTrain, stun guns, Taser, The Canadian Press, transit riders, TransLink, Ujjal Dosanjh, VANCOUVER

(CNSNews.com) - Government scientists are studying the feasibility of sending nearly microscopic particles of specially made glass into the Earth’s upper atmosphere to try to dampen the effects of “global warming.” The idea, while “interesting,” said one leading global warming skeptic, is “not practical” and, if done on a large scale, could depress the ozone layer and cause other problems.

Details from documents Cybercast News Service obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, S.C., are developing computer models of what might happen if a huge amount of particulate matter is shot into the stratosphere.

The particles, consisting of a very fine and special form of glass - “porous-walled glass microspheres” - would be able to absorb a certain amount of carbon dioxide, and would reflect sunlight away from the Earth. Continue reading »

Tags: Climate Change, CO2, Cybercast News Service, DOE, Freedom of Information Act, Glass Particles, Global Warming, Solar Radiation, stratosphere, U.S. Department of Energy's

Department of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff has dropped the bomb.

At a speech to hundreds of security professionals Wednesday, Chertoff declared that the federal government has created a cyber security “Manhattan Project,” referencing the 1941-1946 project led by the Army Corps of Engineers to develop American’s first atomic bomb.

According to Wired’s Ryan Singel, Chertoff gave few details of what the government actually plans to do.

He cites a little-noticed presidential order: “In January, President Bush signed a presidential order expanding the role of DHS and the NSA in government computer security,” Singel writes. “Its contents are classified, but the U.S. Director of National Intelligence has said he wants the NSA to monitor America’s internet traffic and Google searches for signs of cyber attack.”

The National Security Agency was the key player in President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program, which was revealed by the New York Times in 2005.

Sound familiar? Yesterday, documents acquired by the Electronic Frontier Foundation under the Freedom of Information act showed the FBI has engaged in a massive cyber surveillance project that targets terror suspects emails, telephone calls and instant messages — and is able to get some information without a court order.

Last week, the ACLU revealed documents showing that the Pentagon was using the FBI to spy on Americans. The military is using the FBI to skirt legal restrictions on domestic surveillance to obtain private records of Americans’ Internet service providers, financial institutions and telephone companies, according to Pentagon documents. Continue reading »

Tags: ACLU, Condoleezza Rice, Cyber Attack, DHS, emails, FBI, Freedom of Information Act, Google, Google searches, Homeland Security, instant messages, internet traffic, Manhattan Project, Michael Chertoff, National Security Agency, NSA, project, Surveillance, suspects, telephone calls, warrantless wiretapping program