On the Wednesday November 30 edition of the Alex Jones Show, Alex talks with retired Pakistani Army three-star general Hamid Gul about the situation in Pakistan following NATO airstrikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers. Pakistan has also issued a demand that the U.S. stop running drone strikes out of the Shamsi airbase located in the Balochistan province. Gul served as the Director General of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
30 November 2011
Call it a case of bad timing.
The State Department wants to hire “local guards” to protect its diplomats in Pakistan. Yes, now. Right after a U.S. military mission gone wrong killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, delivering another battering to an already fragile alliance.
The State Department recently announced it’s seeking local Pakistani guards to keep its diplomats safe at the embassy in Islamabad and consulates in Karachi, Lahore, and Peshawar. Those guards will need to “deter potential terrorist attacks,” according to a contract pre-solicitation, by “restricting entry of unauthorized personnel, operation of walk-through metal detectors, and hand-held detectors.”
Give the State Department points for good intentions. The department relies on contractors, not U.S. troops, to protect its diplomats in dangerous places. Only U.S. contractors aren’t exactly the most popular people in Pakistan, after CIA contractor Ray Davis caused an international incident by killing two Pakistanis in Lahore who he said tried to rob him. Hiring Pakistanis instead looks like a goodwill gesture, even if it was born out of necessity.
But.
It’s disturbingly too easy to imagine Pakistani guards working with terror groups to give dangerous people access to a U.S. official or facility, both alluring targets. Pakistani troops whom the U.S. has funded and equipped for a decade, at a minimum, look the other way when insurgents fire rockets at U.S. troops across the border in Afghanistan. Hired Pakistani guards could just as easily ignore the trill of a hand-held metal detector. Or strap themselves with explosives.
What kind of background checks will those guards go through? It’ll be “conducted by the Contractor in accordance with Pakistan law,” the pre-solicitation announces. State’s trust-but-don’t-verify record doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Security contractors who’ve passed background checks have ended up holding frat-style parties on the job, engaging in extracurricular sex trafficking, snorting coke…. The list goes on and on.
State’s in a bind here. Hiring U.S. contractors to protect its diplomats carries risks. But so does hiring Pakistani guards. It’s almost like outsourcing security responsibilities is an inherently flawed concept.
According to the pre-solicitation, State doesn’t have much time to resolve the dilemma. It’ll formally issue the Pakistan contract on Thursday. If that’s not enough time, it had better hope against hope for a sudden burst of pro-Americanism in Pakistan.
By: Eric Sprott and David Baker
Meanwhile, despite the needless volatility triggered by the paper market, the physical market for silver has never been stronger.
If the September sell-off proved anything, it’s the simple fact that PHYSICAL buyers of silver are not frightened by volatility. They view dips as buying opportunities, and they buy in size.
During the month of September, the US Mint reported the second highest sales of physical silver coins in its history, with the majority of sales made in the last two weeks of the month.4
Reports from India in early October indicated that physical silver demand had created short-term supply issues for physical delivery due to problems with airline capacity.5 In China, which reportedly imported 264.69 tons (7.7 million oz) of silver in September alone, the volume of silver forward contracts on the Shanghai Gold Exchange was more than six times higher than the same period in 2010.6,7
It was clear to anyone following the silver market that the physical demand for the metal actually increased during the paper price decline. And why shouldn’t it? Have you been following Europe lately? Do the politicians and bureaucrats there give you confidence? Gold and silver are the most rational financial assets to own in this type of environment because they are no one’s liability. They are perfectly designed to protect us during these periods of extreme financial turmoil. And wouldn’t you know it, despite the volatility, gold and silver have continued to do their job in 2011. As we write this, in Canadian dollars, gold is up 23.4% on the year and silver’s up 6.8%. Meanwhile, the S&P/TSX is down -12.3%, the S&P 500 is down -5.1% and the DJIA is up a mere +0.26%.8
So here’s the question: we think we understand the value and great potential in silver today, and we know that the buyers who bought in late September most definitely understand it,… but do silver mining companies appreciate how exciting the prospects for silver are? Do the companies that actually mine the metal out of the ground understand the demand fundamentals driving the price of their underlying product? Perhaps even more importantly, do the miners understand the significant influence they could potentially have on that demand equation if they embraced their product as a currency?
According to the CPM Group, the total silver supply in 2011, including mine supply and secondary supply (scrap, recycling, etc.), will total 1.03 billion ounces.9 Of that, mine supply is expected to represent approximately 767 million ounces.10 Multiplied against the current spot price of US$31/oz, we’re talking about a total silver supply of roughly US$32 billion in value today. To put this number in perspective, it’s less than the cost of JP Morgan’s WaMu mortgage write downs in 2008.11
According to the Silver Institute, 777.4 million ounces of silver were used up in industrial applications, photography, jewelry and silverware in 2010.12 If we assume, given a weaker global economy, that this number drops to a flat 700 million ounces in 2011, it implies a surplus of roughly 300 million ounces of silver available for investment demand this year.
At today’s silver spot price – we’re talking about roughly US$9 billion in value. This is where the miners can make an impact. If the largest pure play silver producers simply adopted the practice of holding 25% of their 2011 cash reserves in physical silver, they would account for almost 10% of that US$9 billion. If this practice we’re applied to the expected 2012 free cash flow of the same companies, the proportion of investable silver taken out of circulation could potentially be enormous.
Expressed another way, consider that the majority of silver miners today can mine silver for less than US$15 per ounce in operating costs. At US$30 silver, most companies will earn a pre-tax profit of at least US$15 per ounce this year.
If we broadly assume an average tax rate of 33%, we’re looking at roughly US$10 of after-tax profit per ounce across the industry. If GFMS’s mining supply forecast proves accurate, it will mean that silver mine production will account for roughly 74% of the total silver supply this year.
If silver miners were therefore to reinvest 25% of their 2011 earnings back into physical silver, they could potentially account for 21% of the approximate 300 million ounces (~$9 billion) available for investment in 2011. If they were to reinvest all their earnings back into silver, it would shrink available 2011 investment supply by 82%. This is a purely hypothetical exercise of course, but can you imagine the impact this practice would have on silver prices?
Silver miners need to acknowledge that investors buy their shares because they believe the price of silver is going higher. We certainly do, and we are extremely active in the silver equity space. We would never buy these stocks if we didn’t. Nothing would please us more than to see these companies begin to hold a portion of their cash reserves in the very metal they produce. Silver is just another form of currency today, after all, and a superior one at that.
To take this idea further, instead of selling all their silver for cash and depositing that cash in a levered bank, silver miners should seriously consider storing a portion of their reserves in physical silver OUTSIDE OF THE BANKING SYSTEM. Why take on all the risks of the bank when you can hold hard cash through the very metal that you mine? Given the current environment, we see much greater risk holding cash in a bank than we do in holding precious metals. And it serves to remember that thanks to 0% interest rates, banks don’t pay their customers to take on those risks today.
None of this should seem far-fetched. One of the key reasons investors have purchased physical gold and silver is to store some of their wealth outside of a financial system that looks increasingly broken.
The European banking system is a living model of that breakdown. Recent reports have revealed that more than €80-billion was pulled out of Italian banks in August and September alone.
In Greece, depositors have taken almost €50-billion out their banks since the beginning of 2010.13 Greek banks are now completely reliant on ECB funding to stay afloat. The situation has deteriorated to the point where over two thirds of the roughly 500 billion euros that banks have borrowed from the ECB are now being deposited back at the central bank.14 Why? Because they don’t trust other banks to stay afloat long enough to get their money back.
), government intervention (
), severe economic uncertainty (
) and vulnerable banking institutions (
For more information about Sprott Asset Management’s investment insights and award-winning investment capabilities, please visit www.sprott.com.
The extraordinary KWN audio interview with Eric Sprott where he discussed this letter to silver producers in advance and much more is available now and you can listen to it by CLICKING HERE.
READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE:
30 November 2011
Developing…
UPDATE 1: The Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve, and the Swiss National Bank have just announced coordinated actions to enhance their capacity to provide liquidity support to the global financial system.
UPDATE 2: According to the Fed, the purpose of the actions is to ease strains in financial markets and “thereby mitigate the effects of such strains on the supply of credit to households and businesses and so help foster economic activity.”
UPDATE 3: These central banks have agreed to lower the pricing on the existing temporary U.S. dollar liquidity swap arrangements by 50 basis points so that the new rate will be the U.S. dollar overnight index swap (OIS) rate plus 50 basis points. This pricing will be applied to all operations conducted from December 5, 2011. The authorization of these swap arrangements has been extended to February 1, 2013. In addition, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, and the Swiss National Bank will continue to offer three-month tenders until further notice.
As a contingency measure, these central banks have also agreed to establish temporary bilateral liquidity swap arrangements so that liquidity can be provided in each jurisdiction in any of their currencies should market conditions so warrant. At present, there is no need to offer liquidity in non-domestic currencies other than the U.S. dollar, but the central banks judge it prudent to make the necessary arrangements so that liquidity support operations could be put into place quickly should the need arise, the Federal Reserve said. These swap lines are authorized through February 1, 2013.
BOTTOM LINE: Major global inflation is on its way.
European finance ministers were warned on Tuesday night that Italy‘s liquidity crisis could leave the eurozone’s third biggest economy insolvent with devastating impact on the fate of the single currency and its big core economies, Germany and France.
Eurozone finance ministers met in Brussels in their latest attempt to plot a path out of the EU’s worst crisis. With Mario Monti, the new Italian prime minister and finance minister, reporting to the session on his austerity package aimed at saving Italy and shoring up the euro, a confidential report from the European commission and the European Central Bank said Monti would need to do more than already promised.
The report, obtained by the Guardian, said Monti had to go further in his promises to combat rampant tax evasion in Italy, which is estimated to amount to 20% of gross domestic product.
“The sovereign debt crisis has now moved from the periphery to Italy and other core euro area countries. Pressure on Italian sovereign bond yields is particularly acute, reflecting investors’ mounting concerns with the sustainability of Italy’s large public debt” – almost €2tn, (£1.7tn) – the report said.
“The risks of a full-blown sovereign liquidity crisis can increase rapidly in the absence of a determined policy response … Persistently high interest rates increase the risk of a self-fulfilling ‘run’ from Italy’s sovereign debt. A liquidity crisis could then turn into a solvency crisis, whose repercussions for other large euro area countries would be very acute given their exposure to the Italian economy.”
Italy on Tuesday easily raised €7.5bn on the bond markets, but at exorbitant rates above the 7% sustainability threshold.
The European finance ministers were expected to agree to release €8bn in bailout funds to Greece, the latest tranche, after months of haggling over whether Athens had done enough to warrant the receipt and the fall of the Papandreou government.
Klaus Regling, head of the European financial stability facility, the main bailout fund, was expected to disappoint the 17 governments by telling them there was little chance of leveraging the €250bn pot of money into a trillion-plus war chest by drawing in Asian investors and sovereign wealth funds.
The leveraging plan was drawn up by eurozone leaders at a summit a month ago. “It doesn’t look like it will be [multiplied] 4-5 times,” said a Brussels diplomat. “More like 2.5 times. That’s probably not enough to restore confidence in Italy or Spain.”
Tuesday night’s meeting came ahead of another crucial summit of EU leaders next week at which Germany and France, while still at odds over central details, will launch a drive for a eurozone “fiscal union”, with governments required to forfeit national powers over fiscal, budget, tax and spending policies to a eurozone body. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, is the biggest obstacle to any prompt and radical action aimed at stabilising the bond markets and ring-fencing the euro. Others, led by France, want the European Central Bank to be given interventionist powers to defend the currency, print money, and act as lender of last resort as well as the pooling of eurozone debt through the issue of common euro bonds.
Merkel is fiercely opposed to both options, insisting instead on reopening the EU’s Lisbon Treaty to entrench new disciplines and intrusive powers of scrutiny over eurozone national budgets. Rather than focus on solving the immediate crisis, Merkel’s priority is to create a durable new system eliminating the chances of a recurrence. Launching eurobonds and empowering the ECB to intervene, said Wolfgang Schäuble, German finance minister, would mean “no European country would retain its triple-A rating”.
“The Germans want treaty change without eurobonds. The others want eurobonds without treaty change,” said the diplomat. “In the end the Germans are in control of this.”
COLONEL SIXX: FIRST IT WAS PAKISTAN AND NOW RUSSIA.
NOT GOOD. THE U.S.TROOPS COULD VERY WELL BE STRANDED!
Russia has threatened to block NATO’s supply routes to Afghanistan, should the Western military alliance continue to disregard Moscow’s concerns about the US-led defense shield for Europe, a report says.
Russian Ambassador to NATO Dmitri Rogozin warned that Moscow will review its cooperation with the Western military alliance on Afghanistan if the NATO fails to address Russia’s objections, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
Earlier on Thursday, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned that direct actions will be taken if his country’s concerns are not addressed.
Medvedev envisioned possible missile attacks on Poland, Romania, Spain, and Turkey as a means to disable the counter-missile batteries, if the United States fails to acknowledge the concerns of the Russian defense officials.
He also warned that the country will deploy nuclear weapons to European borders in response to the move.
Russia’s threats to suspend the NATO supply lines to Afghanistan coincides with a similar punitive measure taken by Pakistan on Saturday in retaliation to the US-led alliance’s recent airstrikes on Pakistani military forces, which killed 24 soldiers.
NATO started using safer routes in Russia to deliver its supplies to its forces since Washington and Moscow reset diplomatic relations in 2009.
The Russian government has long opposed the NATO’s disputed plan of deploying an anti-missile shield in Europe, arguing that the would-be system in its “backyard” is not to secure Washington’s European allies, but is effectively aimed at Russia.
NATO claims that the anti-missile shield is planned to thwart possible attacks from ‘rogue’ states, and it will go ahead with the plan despite Russia’s concerns.
“If the European summit could reach a deal on December 9, its next scheduled meeting, the eurozone will survive. If not, it risks a violent collapse,” writes Wolfgang Munchau of the Financial Times (www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/d9a299a8-17…). Two years ago, such language would have been spat upon as “doom and gloom fear mongering.” Today it is the mathematical reality across the European Union.
The Polish foreign minister said today that what Europe faces is “a crisis of apocalyptic proportions” (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d29da7fc-…) and urged what is essentially more useless debt bailout tactics to try to delay mathematical reality a little while longer.
I now believe that when the dust settles after the coming debt implosion wreaks economic havoc across the globe, more than a few banksters and money-changers will find themselves indicted, imprisoned, or possibly just hanging from a tall tree at the end of a short rope. That’s how angry the public is going to get when the full realization of the unprecedented theft and criminality of the global banking elite hits them, I fear.
The EU’s present economic system may not survive the next few weeks. Even if some creative, shifty accounting can be ginned up to keep EU nations solvent, it will only be done so as a temporary delay in the inevitable financial collision that now approaches. Before long, even the denialists and mainstream news minions will have to admit that these global banksters have destroyed the economies of entire nations in much the same way that the Federal Reserve has all but destroyed America’s economic future. The dishonest, debt-mounting schemes which have been pursued by the derivatives-infected global banking industry are nothing less than campaigns of financial terrorism waged against the working people of our planet — people who shall, of course, foot the bill for the inevitable damage and destruction that will result.
The criminality of the banksters now seems emboldened by a sense of lawless arrogance:
A large brokerage firm known as MF Global recently collapsed and simply stole the assets of all its customers (http://www.infowars.com/gerald-cele…). Meanwhile, Britain is drawing up emergency plans for the collapse of the Eurozone (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art…). And we now learn that secret Federal Reserve loans pumped $13 billion of profits into the hands of banks which were on the verge of systemic failure (www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/d9a299a8-17…).
The banksters are stealing everything from the working class, and governments are going along with the theft, riding shotgun on what is without question the greatest swindle in history. This is what happens when you give up your national sovereignty or turn over control of your money supply to a private, non-government corporation such as the Federal Reserve. This is what happens when you deregulate financial institutions and let the Goldman Sachs controllers influence Congress to get the (corrupt) legislation they want. What we’re dealing with here is runaway criminality …not capitalism.
… and it’s all about to blow up right in the faces of those who have tried to cover it up for the past several years.
Now, in case you’re thinking about taking to the streets and protesting all this when the financial implosion steals whatever might be remaining of your hard-won savings, think again: The U.S. Senate is moving to enact a law that would allow military troops to march on U.S. soil and arrest American citizens with no due process, no trial, no legal representation and no protection under the Bill of Rights. Americans could be thrown in secret military prisons, interrogated, tortured and held indefinitely without ever being charged with a crime!
It’s all part of the new “National Defense Authorization Act” (S.1867) which features a section called the “worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial” provision.
“The power is so broad that even U.S. citizens could be swept up by the military and the military could be used far from any battlefield, even within the United States itself,” says the ACLU (http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-s…).
Sen. Lindsey Graham even explained in plain language that the bill is being written to detain American citizens anywhere in America! His words on the Senate floor: “…1031, the statement of authority to detain, does apply to American citizens and it designates the world as the battlefield, including the homeland.”
In other words, the total military police state tyranny will soon be overt and official. So let’s dispense with the silly talk that we live in a “free” nation. Enough of the childish accusations that people like Alex Jones are only spouting “conspiracy theories” about the police state. When the U.S. Senate fronts a bill that, in plain language, authorizes the use of the military to conduct secret arrests of American citizens on any “battlefield,” including the “battlefield” right outside your front door, the tyranny is no longer a theory, folks — it’s an historical fact! It’s time we all woke up to the nightmare reality and did something about it for a change.
This legislation, not surprisingly, was drafted by the globalist traitors Senators Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.). Sen. McCain, himself a prisoner of war in Vietnam, apparently believes not enough Americans have yet experienced what it’s like to be held under a tyrannical regime with no legal rights. So now he’s making sure the U.S. government acts almost as if it were the North Vietnamese, or North Korea for that matter. Heck, even in North Korea, the police don’t feel your genitals at checkpoints. That’s uniquely a USA form of “sexually perverse tyranny.”
If passed into law, this act would allow the U.S. military to arrest and imprison American citizens for merely being suspected of so-called “terrorist-related activities.”
“This means Americans could be declared domestic terrorists and thrown in a military brig with no recourse whatsoever,” writes Paul Joseph Watson of InfoWars.com. “Given that the Department of Homeland Security has characterized behavior such as buying gold, owning guns, using a watch or binoculars, donating to charity, using the telephone or email to find information, using cash, and all manner of mundane behaviors as potential indicators of domestic terrorism, such a provision would be wide open to abuse.” (http://www.infowars.com/senate-move…)
It is no coincidence, of course, that the invocation of unconstitutional military powers (and TSA-led highway checkpoints) is happening at precisely the moment in history when the global banking system is on the verge of a systemic collapse. The ramping up of FEMA camps, the armed raids on raw milk farms, the “trickle-down tyranny” now infecting the very fabric of our nation (http://www.naturalnews.com/034221_t…)… these are not chance events. They are all part of an engineered oppression of liberties being thrust upon the American people in anticipation of large-scale social unrest (riots) which will almost certainly follow the financial implosion that’s now at our doorstep.
People, it seems, are not happy when everything they’ve worked for is stolen from them. Gee, I wonder why? As Gerald Celente says, when the people have lost everything, and they have nothing more to lose, they lose it!
For the record, I do not condone rioting in the streets, which is why I work diligently to teach people about all this reality before it happens so they are not surprised and shocked by it. Rioters, by definition, are those acting out of emotional anger, and that comes from being surprised by a sudden escalation that was unexpected. People like myself (and hopefully you) who see all this coming won’t be surprised at all, and we share in the realization that violent rioting achieves nothing other than a whole lot of spilled blood — and that blood should be avoided, if at all possible, I believe.
Nevertheless, only a small percentage of people alive today are willing to awaken to reality. Most will subsist in a state of self delusion and irrational denial, all the way to the very day that they lose everything to the global banking elite.
That day of rage is unfortunately coming in America. I’ve been warning people about this for years, and it now seems closer than ever before.
The gullible sheeple, of course, still chuckle and grunt at the idea that the value of their precious dollars could somehow evaporate virtually overnight. They do not grasp the mathematics of leveraged debt, and they have no real awareness of how global fractional reserve banking really works. These “ignorant masses” will lose everything. And being shocked by the sudden change in their fortunes, they will riot in the streets, at which point they will be rounded up and railroaded into FEMA camps. That’s when the incinerators will be fired up, says Max Keiser (http://www.maxkeiser.com), and the next horrific holocaust will commence under a police state system of eliminating the “useless eaters.”
If that happens, the U.S. government will of course hand-pick the incinerator administrators from the top ranks of the TSA. After all, someone who is willing to openly violate an innocent person’s Fourth Amendment rights and sexually molest air passengers is only one step away from gleefully operating the Zyklon-B gas emitters in the shower chamber full of “terrorist resistance fighters” (i.e. innocent protesters). As the Milgram experiments have long proven, a whopping 70 percent of the population will actively murder innocents if directed to do so by a person in an apparent position of authority (http://www.naturalnews.com/025141.html).
(No tyrannical police state has ever suffered from a lack of willing, power-hungry volunteers who love to wear a uniform and crush the skulls of innocents, by the way. Even today, TSA jobs are strongly sought after by those unqualified to do anything other than act as police state bullies…)
Oh, is this all too much for you? Let’s tone it down, then, and imagine governments never commit acts of evil against the People. Let’s play la-la-land pretend time for a moment and imagine that the U.S. government in particular will always respect your civil rights, your human rights and the Bill of Rights — because, we’ll imagine, the government operates from a philosophical foundation of ethical behavior. (Yes, see if you can swallow that thought for a minute and actually keep it down…)
Ah, but hold on. They’re already violating the Bill of Rights with unreasonable roadside searches and checkpoints. The government has already openly admitted to running inhumane, grotesque human medical experiments that used innocent human beings as guinea pigs to enhance the profits of the drug companies (http://www.naturalnews.com/034221_t…). The FBI has already been caught actually masterminding the “terrorist” campaigns across America that it then takes credit for halting! (http://www.naturalnews.com/033751_F…). And the ATF admittedly operates a criminal gun-running operation that has put tens of thousands of guns into the hands of Mexican drug gangs (http://www.naturalnews.com/032934_A…).
None of this computes with the bizarre belief that the government is protective of life, compassionate toward the People or even capable of operating within the bounds of limited government under which it was originally created by the People.
And yet, there is one industry the government absolutely loves: The banking industry. Trillions of dollars in magical new money have been created and handed out to the wealthiest criminal banksters in the USA and around the world. These are the golden elite of the world’s wealthiest criminals. They’re so rich and so deeply invested in obscene criminality that when they bet the wrong way and stand to lose a few trillion dollars, the central banks of the world leap to attention and crank up the printing presses to bail them out! (… leaving you and I to foot the bill through the loss of value in the currency we foolishly hold by depositing our money in many of those same banks!)
No government of the world, you see, will bail out its own citizens. But they will gladly bail out the wealthy, elite banksters who, more than anyone, deserve to be publicly prosecuted for committing the most heinous white-collar crimes our world has ever seen.
So don’t expect for one minute that YOU are going to bailed out, or have your rights protected, or valued in any way whatsoever by the global governments or the banksters that pull their strings. You and I are fodder to the globalists. We are already soylent green on the menu. Our cash is already in the process of being stolen, we just haven’t fully added it up yet.
Our rights have already been dismissed and trampled, and now the thuggish grunt-minded minions of the TSA are merely trying to drive that point home in the minds of Americans by groping, molesting and in some cases sodomizing innocent Americans. What Sandusky did to little boys over the last fifteen years at Penn State, the TSA — a bastion of pedophilia and psychopathic criminals — is doing every single day across the airports of America.
Prison is not nearly appropriate enough for the crimes these government psychopaths are committing right now under the guise of “protecting us from terrorism.” These uniform-wearing monsters deserve a special place in Hell that’s reserved for the serial rapists, the mass murderers, the pharmaceutical drug reps and evil genius bioweapons scientists. I predict there will be no reconciliation against these tyrants who now believe they are above the law (and above the “little people” like you and me). When the masses are finally awakened to the full extent of the tyranny that has already been unleashed upon them, I pity those who took part in this system of great, unforgiveable evil — a system that may yet give Nazi Germany a run for its money in the degree of evil being unleashed upon our world.
The clock is ticking on both counts: The financial implosion and the total tyrannical crackdown against liberty and freedom. They are strongly correlated events, as the former forces the hand of Big Government to roll out the latter.
Those who are caught sandwiched between these historical trends will find themselves either broke, imprisoned or incinerated (or maybe all three in a row). Only those who have the presence of mind to recognize the reality around them will have any chance at surviving all this and then taking part in the restoration of civil liberties and fundamental freedoms in the next society.
It’s going to be an interesting ride. May God have mercy on the souls of those who have unleashed the destruction we are about to witness, because I do not believe the once-awakened sheeple of the world will have any mercy at all. They’re the ones, after all, that will be surprised by everything that is about to unfold.
Thomas Jefferson famously wrote the following commentary about rebellion:
“God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty… And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
It is my great desire that we can find a way to refresh the tree of liberty without the blood of patriots and tyrants. Peaceful revolution — and the rational restoration of liberty is always preferable to bloodshed. And yet, as JFK famously said on this very point, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/034270_debt_crisis_police_state_tyranny.html#ixzz1f6qF1fdk
In what is usually the punctuation at the end of such an incident, the White House today issued its statement on the Friday night US attack that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, insisting that killing them was a “tragedy.”
But as much as they’d like to make this just another in a long line of forgotten incidents, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani said today that the government is going to react harshly to the attack, and that it marked the end of “business as usual” with the United States.
Saying that the government had “no option” but to respect the will on the public, at a time when massive anti-US protests are breaking out in several major cities, Gilani warned that the government was “re-evaluating” its relationship with the US.
The near term impact is the closure of the border to NATO supply trucks, as well as a demand that the US leave the Shamsi Air Base. In the long-run the split could have many more ramifications, particularly with the massive US-led occupation of Afghanistan still going so poorly.
TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — Jose Guerena Ortiz was sleeping after an exhausting 12-hour night shift at a copper mine. His wife, Vanessa, had begun breakfast. Their 4-year-old son, Joel, asked to watch cartoons.
An ordinary morning was unfolding in the middle-class Tucson neighborhood — until an armored vehicle pulled into the family’s driveway and men wearing heavy body armor and helmets climbed out, weapons ready.
They were a sheriff’s department SWAT team who had come to execute a search warrant. But Vanessa Guerena insisted she had no idea, when she heard a “boom” and saw a dark-suited man pass by a window, that it was police outside her home. She shook her husband awake and told him someone was firing a gun outside.
A U.S. Marine veteran of the Iraq war, he was only trying to defend his family, she said, when he grabbed his own gun — an AR-15 assault rifle.
What happened next was captured on video after a member of the SWAT team activated a helmet-mounted camera.
The officers — four of whom carried .40-caliber handguns while another had an AR-15 — moved to the door, briefly sounding a siren, then shouting “Police!” in English and Spanish. With a thrust of a battering ram, they broke the door open. Eight seconds passed before they opened fire into the house.
And 10 seconds later, Guerena lay dying in a hallway 20-feet from the front door. The SWAT team fired 71 rounds, riddling his body 22 times, while his wife and child cowered in a closet.
“Hurry up, he’s bleeding,” Vanessa Guerena pleaded with a 911 operator. “I don’t know why they shoot him. They open the door and shoot him. Please get me an ambulance.”
When she emerged from the home minutes later, officers hustled her to a police van, even as she cried that her husband was unresponsive and bleeding, and that her young son was still inside. She begged them to get Joel out of the house before he saw his father in a puddle of blood on the floor.
But soon afterward, the boy appeared in the front doorway in Spider-Man pajamas, crying.
The Pima County Sheriff’s Department said its SWAT team was at the home because Guerena was suspected of being involved in a drug-trafficking organization and that the shooting happened because he arrived at the door brandishing a gun. The county prosecutor’s office says the shooting was justified.
But six months after the May 5 police gunfire shattered a peaceful morning and a family’s life, investigators have made no arrests in the case that led to the raid. Outraged friends, co-workers and fellow Marines have called the shooting an injustice and demanded further investigation. A family lawyer has filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the sheriff’s office. And amid the outcry in online forums and social media outlets, the sheriff’s 54-second video, which found its way to YouTube, has drawn more than 275,000 views.
The many questions swirling around the incident all boil down to one, repeated by Vanessa Guerena, as quoted in the 1,000-page police report on the case:
“Why, why, why was he killed?”
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Outside the family’s stucco home, a giant framed photo of Guerena in his Marine uniform sat placed in the front bay window, American flags waved in the yard and signs condemning his death were taped to the garage door.
The 27-year-old Guerena had completed two tours in Iraq, and a former superior there was among those who couldn’t make sense of his death.
Leo Verdugo said Guerena stood out among other Marines for his maturity and sense of responsibility. Verdugo, who retired as a master sergeant last year after 25 years in the Marines, placed Guerena in charge of an important helicopter refueling mission in the remote west desert of Iraq.
“He had a lot of integrity and he was a man of his word,” Verdugo said.
Verdugo, who also lives in Tucson, said Guerena came to him for advice in 2006 about whether to retire from the Marines and apply to the Border Patrol.
When Verdugo ran into Guerena and his wife at a Motor Vehicle Department office about a month before Guerena was killed, Verdugo said that Guerena told him that the Border Patrol had turned him down because of problems with his vision and that he had instead taken a mining job.
Those who worked with Guerena at ASARCO’S Mission Mine said the man they knew would never be a part of drug smuggling.
“I don’t care what the cops say. I don’t believe for one moment Jose was involved in anything illegal,” said Sharon Hargrave, a co-worker, adding through tears: “They were judge, jury and executioner, and there was no excuse.”
Guerena worked as a “helper” at two crushers in the mine, shoveling piles of rocks that fall from conveyor belts and wheel-barrowing heavy debris. “No one in their right mind” would choose this work, which paid about $41,000 a year, if they were bringing in drug smuggling money, Hargrave said.
“He was a hell of a worker,” she said. “He’s got good judgment and I could trust him.”
She said Guerena talked constantly about his wife and two sons, Joel and Jose Jr., 5, who’d gone to school the morning of the shooting. “I know he was definitely in love with his wife and in love with his kids,” she said.
Kevin Stephens, a chief steward at Mission mine and head of the miners’ union there, said bluntly: “Personally, I think he was murdered, and that is the feeling that is out here.”
But the sheriff’s office said just because Guerena was a Marine and worked at a mine doesn’t mean he couldn’t be involved in drug trafficking.
“We know from our experiences that good people turn their lives around and do bad things, and this guy was bad irrespective of his honorable discharge as a Marine,” said sheriff’s chief of investigations Rick Kastigar.
He said Guerena was suspected of involvement in a drug operation that specialized in ripping off other smugglers. One tip held that Guerena was “the muscle” of the organization, or in Kastigar’s words, “the individual that was directed to exact revenge.”
An affidavit supporting the search warrant that precipitated the raid describes the department’s suspicions about Guerena in a drug investigation that appeared more focused on his brother, and his brother’s father-in-law. Guerena’s brother does not have a listed number and other family members have ignored written requests from the AP for comment.
Sheriff’s Capt. Chris Nanos, who heads the criminal investigations division and oversaw the Guerena case, said that high-powered rifles and bulletproof vests that were found in Guerena’s home after the shooting back up investigators’ belief that Guerena was involved in drug trafficking. A shotgun found in the home was reported stolen in Tucson in 2008.
In the affidavit, sheriff’s Detective Alex Tisch laid out the case against Guerena’s family. It details two instances of drug seizures, one in April 2009 in which Jose Guerena was found in a home with other people who had just dropped off 1,000 pounds of marijuana at a separate residence, and another in October 2009 in which a man who had met with Guerena’s brother was found with drugs and weapons.
Neither Guerena nor his brother was charged.
The affidavit also cites two traffic stops of Jose Guerena.
The first was on Jan. 28, 2009, when an officer pulled Guerena and two other men over north of Tucson. The officer seized a gun from Guerena, a marijuana pipe from Guerena’s cousin and marijuana hidden in canisters of lemonade and hot cocoa that were under the feet of Guerena’s friend.
The officer arrested Guerena on charges of weapons misconduct, marijuana possession and possession of drug paraphernalia. But prosecutors filed no charges against him.
The other stop came Sept. 15, 2009, when the sheriff’s office pulled over a truck leaving the home of Guerena’s brother. Jose Guerena was in the passenger seat and another man was driving. Officers searched the truck and found commercial-sized rolls of plastic wrap that they say are commonly used to package marijuana. No arrests were made.
Tisch wrote in the affidavit that the past arrests of Guerena and members of his family, combined with observations during months of surveillance led detectives to believe that the family was operating a mid-level drug-trafficking organization in the Tucson area.
The investigation is ongoing, the sheriff’s office says.
___
After the SWAT video circulated, people who didn’t know Guerena traveled from as far as California to march in protest of his shooting, and an Alaska woman began an online petition calling for a federal investigation of the SWAT team. Hundreds of people across the country have written on several Facebook pages dedicated to Guerena with messages that include, “He fought for our country, now we must fight for him.”
The Guereno family’s lawyer, Christopher Scileppi, filed a lawsuit on their behalf seeking damages from the sheriff’s office, the officers involved in the shooting and other officials. The lawsuit didn’t specify how much money the family was seeking, but a notice of claim filed Aug. 9 put the amount at $20 million.
“During this investigation, extremely little evidence, if any, was found to raise even a suspicion that Jose Guerena was involved in any possible drug trafficking ring,” the notice says.
Scileppi said the fact that Guerena had been fired at 71 times and hit 22 times was “grotesque,” and “almost a caricature of an overly excited group of poorly trained law enforcement agents.”
Kastigar sharply disputed that, calling the Pima County SWAT team one of the best of its kind in the nation. “We’re not a bunch of country bumpkins in southern Arizona with big bellies and cowboy hats,” he said.
The shooting was justified, he said, because Guerena pointed his AR-15 at the SWAT officers and said, “I’ve got something for you,” before they opened fire.
The five SWAT team members who shot Guerena believed that he had fired his weapon first, he said. Subsequent investigation revealed that the gun’s safety was on and hadn’t been fired. Ultimately, that is not an issue, Kastigar said.
“What reasonable person comes to the front door and points a rifle at people?” he said. “It takes several milliseconds to flip the switch from safety to fire and take out a couple of SWAT officers. I’m firmly of the opinion that he was attempting to shoot at us.”
The officers laid down “suppressive” fire because one had tripped and fallen and the others thought he’d been shot.
“You point a gun at police, you’re going to get shot,” Kastigar said.
The five officers who shot Guerena declined to speak to the AP through Mike Storie, a police union lawyer who represents them and defends their actions.
“Anytime that they are faced with a serious, imminent and deadly threat, they are entitled and justified to use deadly force,” he said. “And when Guerena came around the corner and lifted an AR-15 and pointed it at them, that provided the justification.”
An independent expert, Chuck Drago, a former longtime SWAT officer for Fort Lauderdale, Fla., police who now does consulting on use of force and other law enforcement issues, said that the shooting itself appeared justified.
“It’s a horrible, horrible tragedy, but if they walked in the door and somebody came at them with an assault rifle, that would be a justifiable response,” said Drago. “It doesn’t matter whether he’s innocent or not.”
But after examining elements of the search affidavit, Drago questioned whether the sheriff’s office truly had probable cause.
“When you back up and look at why they’re there in the first place and whether the search warrant was proper, my mind starts struggling,” Drago said. “There are a lot of things that don’t make a lot of sense.”
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