'What all these billions might have been and still are buying around the world'

From Details of U.S. False Flag Attacks in Iraq Revealed and More by Wayne Madsen:

... WMR has been informed by a strictly anonymous source that many of the "terrorist" attacks in Iraq that have been blamed on "Al Qaeda" and its allies were, in fact, carried out by CIA-supported Sunni cells. US Special Forces teams seconded to the CIA units provided protection to the Sunni cells as they carried out their terror missions.

The CIA and Special Forces teams ensured that the Sunni terrorist cells hit their pre-determined targets. In some cases, when the certain Sunni teams were thought to be unreliable, the CIA and Special Forces overseers would execute the Sunnis. 

In other cases, a remotely-controlled car bomb would prematurely detonate, requiring the CIA-Special Forces units to cleanup the evidence and chalk the terrorist event off as a "suicide bomb." The media would be fed press releases that "confirmed" the bombing as a suicide attack. Our source worked with two different Sunni terrorist cells in Iraq. ...

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Polk neighbors derail LGBT history mural

By Matt Baume, Bay Area Reporter

A proposed mural depicting the LGBT history of Polk Street may never be painted due to objections from neighbors.

The mural is a joint project of the Lower Polk Neighbors and the Mayor's Office of Economic and Workforce Development, intended to instill local pride while beautifying a blank wall on the side of Hemlock Alley.

In fall of 2010, an LPN committee selected two neighborhood artists, Helen Bayly and Aaron Bo Heimlich, and asked them to design a mural depicting the influence of Polk Street's Beat poet community on the LGBT movement.

The artists showed a preliminary mockup at an LPN meeting last month. Half of their design is monochrome and shows historical police harassment, public poetry readings, and protests near Civic Center. The other half depicts a colorful, inclusive contemporary Pride Parade, framed by figures such as Harvey Milk.

Bayly and Heimlich consulted with the GLBT Historical Society, and incorporated actual incidents of police harassment, as well as tributes to social service organizations and their clients.

Reaction from LPN members was decidedly hostile.

"People said, 'That's the Castro, that's not here,'" said LPN Chairman Ron Case.

"The mural itself was really, really crude, very poorly done," said David Villa-Lobos, executive director of Community Leadership Alliance, a neighborhood advocacy group. "Folks felt that a lot of it has more to do with the Castro, and far more to do with Pride and that kind of thing, than it does with the history of Polk Street."

The artists were surprised by the reaction.

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Shy U.S. Intellectual Created Playbook Used in a Revolution

By Sheryl Gay Stolberg, New York Times

Halfway around the world from Tahrir Square in Cairo, an aging American intellectual shuffles about his cluttered brick row house in a working-class neighborhood here. His name is Gene Sharp. Stoop-shouldered and white-haired at 83, he grows orchids, has yet to master the Internet and hardly seems like a dangerous man.

But for the world's despots, his ideas can be fatal.

Few Americans have heard of Mr. Sharp. But for decades, his practical writings on nonviolent revolution — most notably "From Dictatorship to Democracy," a 93-page guide to toppling autocrats, available for
download in 24 languages — have inspired dissidents around the world, including in Burma, Bosnia, Estonia and Zimbabwe, and now Tunisia and Egypt.

When Egypt's April 6 Youth Movement was struggling to recover from a failed effort in 2005, its leaders tossed around "crazy ideas" about bringing down the government, said Ahmed Maher, a leading strategist. They stumbled on Mr. Sharp while examining the Serbian movement Otpor, which he had influenced.

When the nonpartisan International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, which trains democracy activists, slipped into Cairo several years ago to conduct a workshop, among the papers it distributed was Mr. Sharp's "198 Methods of Nonviolent Action," a list of tactics that range from hunger strikes to "protest disrobing" to "disclosing identities of secret agents."

Dalia Ziada, an Egyptian blogger and activist who attended the workshop and later organized similar sessions on her own, said trainees were active in both the Tunisia and Egypt revolts. She said that some
activists translated excerpts of Mr. Sharp's work into Arabic, and that his message of "attacking weaknesses of dictators" stuck with them.

Peter Ackerman, a onetime student of Mr. Sharp who founded the nonviolence center and ran the Cairo workshop, cites his former mentor as proof that "ideas have power."

Mr. Sharp, hard-nosed yet exceedingly shy, is careful not to take credit. He is more thinker than revolutionary, though as a young man he participated in lunch-counter sit-ins and spent nine months in a federal prison in Danbury, Conn., as a conscientious objector during the Korean War. He has had no contact with the Egyptian protesters, he said, although he recently learned that the Muslim Brotherhood had "From Dictatorship to Democracy" posted on its Web site.

While seeing the revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak as a sign of "encouragement," Mr. Sharp said, "The people of Egypt did that — not me."

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The game preserve

By Mohsin Hamid, Dawn

Last summer in Lahore, I had a little party at my house for the final of the football World Cup. It was a pretty relaxed affair, maybe 20 people, cushions on the TV room floor, pizza on the dining room table. Some of my friends brought friends of their own.

One was an American man. He was wearing a light jacket. After he left, my wife told me he was also wearing a gun. Now, I'm open to my friends bringing their friends to my house. But I'm not very accepting of a friend bringing a gun — or, worse, bringing a complete stranger with a gun. Yet that's what happened, and it left me angry and disturbed.

Like everyone else I knew, I'd heard the stories about large numbers of armed Americans in Lahore, staying at such-and-such hotels, for example, or working out at such-and-such gyms. Maybe I became more sensitive to their presence after the incident at my house, but suddenly I began to see them all around town. To be precise, I didn't know if the men I was seeing were armed. But they looked like Americans, and they didn't look like rock guitarists or maths teachers or irrigation specialists or heart surgeons. They looked, to my unschooled eye, like what I'd expect trained killers to look like.

(Of course it was possible that groups of non-violent, hard-faced, physically fit, all-male Swedish and Dutch and Spanish tourist groups with a niche interest not in ancient outdoor monuments but in the interiors of tacky hotels had descended on Lahore, but I thought this unlikely.)

Then, last month, in broad daylight on a main Lahore road, one such man, Raymond Davis, shot dead two Pakistani citizens with his Glock, and a US consular car sent to retrieve him killed another Pakistani citizen while speeding the wrong way down a street. Davis is being held by the Pakistani police, the US government is demanding that he be released and threatening to withhold aid to Pakistan if he is not, and the wife of one of the Pakistani men killed has committed suicide saying lucidly from her deathbed that her reason for doing so is that she does not expect Davis will be punished for his actions.

Meanwhile, the Pakistan government has tied itself up in obfuscatory knots over what should be the straightforward issue of whether Davis has diplomatic immunity, and therefore whether he can be tried in Pakistan.

[ ... ]

Here in the game preserve, money flows to the hunt. Pakistani extremists are funded, armed and trained. And American hunters, whether far away at the remote controls of Predator drones or on the ground in the form of men with the shooting skills of a Raymond Davis, operate under paid immunity. Want a blanket Tribal Area Hellfire missile licence? Well that might set you back the price of 18 new F-16s. An all-Lahore Glock licence to kill? Perhaps double-oh-seven billion in development aid.

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Squatters move into Guy Ritchie's £6million London mansion

Fred Attewill, Metro

At least 12 people have settled into the listed building in Fitzrovia and they now plan to turn it into a school – offering lessons in successful squatting, among other things.
Police were called to the property at the weekend but the group calling itself the Really Free School refused to budge.
It is unknown if they knew it belonged to the Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels director before they moved in.

Yesterday they were inviting the unemployed to join their cinema club and spend the night in the five-storey property.
'We need occupiers for tonight! Will be film showings in the new cinema. Come sleepover in the most rah property in London,' an online post read.
The group has moved from another address in nearby Bloomsbury, where their 'school' curriculum included classes in anarchy, tarot-reading and social media.

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