May 16, 2012

Source: Times of Israel

The United States has completed its planning for a military strike on Iran, the US Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro said in remarks at a closed conference in Tel Aviv that were broadcast on Israel TV on Wednesday night.

“It would be preferable to resolve this diplomatically, and through the use of pressure, than to use military force,” Shapiro said in comments that were reportedly recorded Tuesday and were broadcast Wednesday. “But that does not mean that option isn’t available. Not just available, it’s ready. The necessary planning has been done to ensure that it’s ready.”

Shapiro, the Channel 2 TV report said, was speaking at a closed forum in Tel Aviv and the comments were recorded by a newspaper reporter. The TV reporter added that the envoy had apparently not intended for his remarks to be publicly aired.

The broadcast of the Shapiro comments came a day after Israel TV reported that the Israel Air Force is soon to take part in joint military exercises in the US. The IAF has not trained in the US for several years.

Read More…

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May 16, 2012

Source: Rolling Stone

This past October, at an Occupy encampment in Cleveland, Ohio, “suspicious males with walkie-talkies around their necks” and “scarves or towels around their heads” were heard grumbling at the protesters’ unwillingness to act violently. At meetings a few months later, one of them, a 26-year-old with a black Mohawk known as “Cyco,” explained to his anarchist colleagues how “you can make plastic explosives with bleach,” and the group of five men fantasized about what they might blow up. Cyco suggested a small bridge. One of the others thought they’d have a better chance of not hurting people if they blew up a cargo ship. A third, however, argued for a big bridge – “Gotta slow the traffic that’s going to make them money” – and won. He then led them to a connection who sold them C-4 explosives for $450. Then, the night before the May Day Occupy protests, they allegedly put the plan into motion – and just as the would-be terrorists fiddled with the detonator they hoped would blow to smithereens a scenic bridge in Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley National Park traversed by 13,610 vehicles every day, the FBI swooped in to arrest them.

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May 16, 2012

Source: Washington Post
It’s not the US supplying these weapons… it’s al Qaeda who is supplying the weapons…the only thing is…they are getting them from the CIA. Oh, what a tangled web we weave….

Syrian rebels battling the regime of President Bashar al-Assad have begun receiving significantly more and better weapons in recent weeks, an effort paid for by Persian Gulf nations and coordinated in part by the United States, according to opposition activists and U.S. and foreign officials.

Obama administration officials emphasized that the United States is neither supplying nor funding the lethal material, which includes antitank weaponry. Instead, they said, the administration has expanded contacts with opposition military forces to provide the gulf nations with assessments of rebel credibility and command-and-control infrastructure.

“We are increasing our nonlethal assistance to the Syrian opposition, and we continue to coordinate our efforts with friends and allies in the region and beyond in order to have the biggest impact on what we are collectively doing,” said a senior State Department official, one of several U.S. and foreign government officials who discussed the evolving effort on the condition of anonymity.

The U.S. contacts with the rebel military and the information-sharing with gulf nations mark a shift in Obama administration policy as hopes dim for a political solution to the Syrian crisis. Many officials now consider an expanding military confrontation to be inevitable.

Read full report here

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May 13, 2012

Source: Daily Mail

Britain has become a nation of sleeping pill addicts since the start of the  economic downturn, figures revealed yesterday.

Stress-related insomnia has been blamed for a sharp increase in the number of people prescribed powerful drugs to help them sleep.

The annual cost to the NHS of handing out the pills has risen by a sixth in the past three years to nearly £50million.

But there are fears that strong medication is being given out too readily and patients are becoming hooked.

Many of the most commonly used pills have potentially dangerous side effects including liver problems, headaches and nausea.

Read More…

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May 13, 2012

A leading Islamist candidate in Egypt’s presidential election has branded Israel a “racist state” and said a shared 1979 peace treaty was “a national security threat” that should be revised.

Abdel Moneim Abul Fotouh also denounced Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden’s assassination by US special forces as an act of “state terrorism,” in a late Saturday Egyptian television interview.

Abul Fotouh, a front runner in the May 23-24 election according to polls, had earlier described Israel as an “enemy” in a televised debate with his main contender, former foreign minister and Arab League chief Amr Mussa.

Read More…

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May 13, 2012

Source: Tom Burghardt

Amid recent reports that the bodies of four Mexican journalists were discovered in a canal in the port city of Veracruz, less than a week after another journalist based in that city was found strangled in her home, the U.S. State Department “plans to award a contract to provide a Mexican government security agency with a system that can intercept and analyze information from all types of communications systems,” NextGov reported.

The most glaring and obvious question is: why?

Since President Felipe Calderón declared “war” against some of the region’s murderous drug cartels in 2006, some 50,000 Mexicans have been butchered. Activists, journalists, honest law enforcement officials but also ordinary citizens caught in the crossfire, the vast majority of victims, have been the targets of mafia-controlled death squads, corrupt police and the military.

Underscoring the savage nature of another “just war” funded by U.S. taxpayers, last week The Dallas Morning News reported that “23 people were found dead Friday–nine hanging from a bridge and 14 decapitated–across the Texas border in the city of Nuevo Laredo.”

The arcane and highly-ritualized character of the violence, often accompanied by sardonic touches meant to instill fear amongst people already ground underfoot by crushing poverty and official corruption that would make the Borgias blush, convey an unmistakable message: “We rule here!”

“The latest massacres are part of a continuing battle between the paramilitary group known as the Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel,” the Morning News averred. “The violence appears to be part of a strategy by the Sinaloa cartel to disrupt one of the most lucrative routes for drug smugglers by bringing increased attention from the federal government.”

According to investigators the “two warring cartels are fighting for control of the corridor that leads into Interstate 35, known as one of the most lucrative routes for smugglers.”

But as Laura Carlsen, the director of the Americas Program pointed out last month in CounterPunch, “In a series of ‘Joint Operations’ between Federal Police and Armed Forces, the Mexican government has deployed more than 45,000 troops into various regions of the country in an unprecedented domestic low-intensity conflict.”

The militarization of Mexican society, as in the “Colossus to the North,” has also seen the expansion of a bloated Surveillance State. Carlsen averred that when the Army and Federal Police are “deployed to communities where civilians are defined as suspected enemies, soldiers and officers have responded too often with arbitrary arrests, personal agendas and corruption, extrajudicial executions, the use of torture, and excessive use of force.”

But expanding the surveillance capabilities of secret state agencies as the State Department proposes in its multimillion dollar gift to the Israeli-founded firm, Verint Systems, far from inhibiting violence by drug gangs and the security apparatus, on the contrary, will only rationalize repression as new “targets” are identified and electronic communications are data-mined for “actionable intelligence.”

Indeed, The New York Times reported last summer that “after months of negotiations, the United States established an intelligence post on a northern Mexican military base.”

Although anonymous “American officials” cited by the Times “declined to provide details about the work being done” by a team of spooks drawn from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the CIA and “retired military personnel members from the Pentagon’s Northern Command,” they said that “the compound had been modeled after ‘fusion intelligence centers’ that the United States operates in Iraq and Afghanistan to monitor insurgent groups.”

Such developments are hardly encouraging considering the role played by “fusion centers” here in the heimat. As the ACLU has amply documented, “Americans have been put under surveillance or harassed by the police just for deciding to organize, march, protest, espouse unusual viewpoints, and engage in normal, innocuous behaviors such as writing notes or taking photographs in public.”

In Mexico, the results will be immeasurably worse; with corruption endemic on both sides of the border, who’s to say authorities won’t sell personal data gleaned from these digital sweeps to the highest bidder?

Only this time, the data scrapped from internet search queries, emails, smartphone chatter or text messages grabbed by bent officials won’t result in annoying targeted ads on your browser but in piles of corpses.

Guns In, Drugs Out: Iran/Contra Redux

While Obama administration officials hypocritically washed their hands of responsibility for failing to clamp-down on what journalist Daniel Hopsicker christened The New American Drug Lords, an old boys club of dodgy bankers, shady investment consultants, defense contractors and other glad handers, the violence following drug flows north like a swarm of locusts is fueled in no small part by arms which federal intelligence and law enforcement allowed to “walk” across the border.

Indeed, as Hopsicker pointed out in MadCow Morning News: “Ten years ago Miami Private Detective Gary McDaniel, a 30-year veteran investigator for both Government prosecutors and attorneys for major drug traffickers, educated me on the basics of the drug trade.”

“‘Every successful drug trafficking organization (DTO) needs four things to be successful,’ he said. He ticked each one off on his fingers: ‘Production, distribution, transportation, and–most important of all–protection’.”

To McDaniel’s list we can add a fifth element: intelligence gleaned from the latest advances in communications’ technologies.

If all this sounds familiar, it should.

During the 1980s, as the Reagan administration waged its anticommunist crusade across Central and South America, the CIA forged their now-infamous “Dark Alliance” with far-right terrorists (our “boys,” the Nicaraguan Contras), Argentine, Bolivian and Chilean death-squad generals and the up-and-coming cocaine cartels who had more on their minds than ideological purity.

By the end of that blood-soaked decade, with much encouragement from Washington, including a get-out-of-jail-free card for their dope dealing assets in the form of a Memorandum of Understanding between the CIA and the Justice Department, the region was on its way towards becoming a multibillion dollar growth engine for the well-connected.

Does history repeat? You bet it does!

As Narco News investigative journalist Bill Conroy reported, “A top enforcer for the Sinaloa drug organization and his army of assassins in Juarez, Mexico–responsible for a surge in violence in that city that has led to thousands of deaths in recent years–may well have been supplied hundreds, if not thousands, of weapons through an ill-fated US law-enforcement operation known as Fast and Furious.”

But which agency has the wherewithal to guarantee that weapon flows from the United States fall into the right hands? More than a few analysts believe that Fast and Furious was an “intelligence” gambit overseen by the CIA.

Indeed, Narco News reported: “When it comes to prime intelligence targets, they don’t come much better than the leaders of Mexican drug organizations, who have their tentacles planted deep inside Latin American governments due to the corrupt reach of the drug trade. So it is not unreasonable to suspect that part of the reason that ATF’s Fast and Furious makes no sense in terms of a law enforcement operation is because it wasn’t one at all.” (emphasis added)

“In fact,” Conroy wrote, “it may well have been co-opted and trumped by a covert U.S. intelligence agency operation, such as one run by CIA, that is shielded even from most members of Congress–possibly even the White House, if it was launched under a prior administration and parts of it have since run off the tracks on their own.”

Conroy revealed that enforcer, Jose Antonio Torres Marrufo, who was arrested in February by Mexican authorities, “is now the subject of a 14-count US indictment unsealed in late April in San Antonio, Texas, that also charges the alleged leaders of the Sinaloa organization (Joaquin Guzman Loera, or El Chapo; and Ismael Zambada Garcia, or El Mayo) and 21 other individuals with engaging in drug and firearms trafficking, money laundering and murder in ‘furtherance of a criminal enterprise’.”

According to officials, Marrufo was allegedly responsible for the murders of some 18 patients at a Juárez drug treatment center in 2009. However, the significance of the gangster’s arrest may be overshadowed by the additional disclosure that his close associates, Eduardo and Jesus A. Miramontes Varela “worked for the Sinaloa Cartel when they became informants for the FBI in 2009.”

“Under Fast and Furious,” Conroy wrote, “the nation’s federal gun-law enforcer, ATF, in conjunction with a task force composed of several other federal agencies, including the FBI, allowed nearly 2,000 weapons to be smuggled into Mexico.”

Amongst the firearms allowed to “walk,” according to multiple published reports, were AK-47 assault rifles, Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifles, .38 caliber revolvers and FN Five-seven automatic pistols. Most of the arms purchased with ATF and Justice Department approval went to the Sinaloa or other drug cartels and have since turned up at some 170 crime scenes in Mexico.

While field level investigators objected to the operation and voiced their opposition to higher-ups in ATF, they were smacked-down by senior supervisors David Voth.

Responding to strong objections from his own agents, Voth wrote a threatening email to disgruntled officers in March 2010: “I will be damned if this case is going to suffer due to petty arguing, rumors, or other adolescent behavior. I don’t know what all the issues are but we are all adults, we are all professionals, and we have an exciting opportunity to use the biggest tool in our law enforcement tool box. If you don’t think this is fun you are in the wrong line of work–period!”

Fun? Try telling that to the families of U.S. Border Patrol officer Brian Terry, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jaime Zapata or the families of hundreds of unnamed Mexican victims who turned up dead, murdered with weapons supplied by the U.S. government.

Conroy also informed us that “deadly weapons were allowed to ‘walk’ across the border, where they were put into the clutches of criminal organizations, such as those overseen by alleged Sinaloa enforcer Marrufo, so that US law enforcers could supposedly later trace the trail of those guns to the so-called kingpins of Mexico’s criminal organizations.”

There was just one small catch. “A Feb. 1, 2012, memo drafted by staff for [U.S. Senator Charles] Grassley and [U.S. Rep. Darryl] Issa, thickens the plot, indicating that there were, in fact, two FBI informants involved with purchasing weapons from [Manuel Celis] Acosta, [presumably the "main target" of Fast and Furious] and ATF had no clue that these so-called ‘big fish,’ the high-level targets of Fast and Furious, were, in fact, working for a sister agency.”

According to that Congressional memo:

“During the course of this separate investigation, the FBI designated these two cartel associates as national security assets. [essentially foreign-intelligence agents, or informants]. In exchange for one individual’s guilty plea to a minor count of ‘Alien in Possession of a Firearm,’ both became FBI informants and are now considered to be unindictable. This means that the entire goal of Fast and Furious–to target these two individuals and bring them to justice–was a failure. ATF’s discovery that the primary targets of their investigation were not indictable was ‘a major disappointment’.

Brilliant, right? If one were to fall for “conspiracy theories,” one would almost believe that U.S. secret state agencies, like their Mexican counterparts, were favoring one narcotrafficking gang (the Sinaloa cartel) over their rivals, the equally violent and sinister group Los Zetas or the Juárez cartel founded by self-described “Lord of the Heavens,” Amado Carrillo Fuentes.

In fact, it wasn’t only the ATF-DEA-FBI that allowed guns to “walk” across the border into the hands of state-connected killers. To the list of the clueless, add the Pentagon.

In an earlier, Conroy disclosed, citing State Department cables published by the secrecy-shredding web site WikiLeaks, that grenades used to attack the Televisa TV station and the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey in 2008-2009 “involved military grade explosives made in the USA that somehow found their way to Mexico.” A second cable confirms that “U.S. military munitions sold in the 1990s to a foreign military were subsequently diverted to Mexican narco-traffickers.”

Narco News also reported that the State Department cables confirm “that the U.S. government is very aware that much of the heavy firepower now in the hands of Mexican criminal organizations isn’t linked to mom-and-pop gun stores, but rather the result of blowback from U.S. arms-trading policies (both current and dating back to the Iran/Contra era) that put billions of dollars of deadly munitions into global trade stream annually.”

Indeed, “bellicose government policies, such as the U.S.-sponsored Mérida Initiative, that are premised on further militarizing the effort to impose prohibition on civil society only serve to expand the profit margin on the bloodshed.”

But what if that is precisely the goal of U.S. policy planners and their masters, corrupt American financial institutions like Wachovia Bank or the defense contractors who reap billions from the slaughter?

In that case then, the so-called “War on Drugs” is really a war over who controls the drug flow and the fabulous profits derived from the illicit trade.

Back to the Future

While Colombia continues to be the principle source of processed cocaine entering Europe and the United States, despite some $7.5 billion dispensed to that country’s repressive military and police apparatus under Plan Colombia, wholesale distribution of narcotics entering the U.S. are now controlled by Mexican DTOs.

It is a demonstrable fact that Plan Colombia failed to stop the tsunami of narcotics entering the U.S. and that “success” or “failure” in that enterprise was besides the point. As multiple analysts and investigative journalists across the decades have documented, U.S. intelligence agencies, principally the CIA, have cultivated ties and operational links to DTOs and their ruling class enablers, favoring cartels that advanced U.S. geopolitical goals whilst targeting those perceived as liabilities.

As researchers Oliver Villar and Drew Cottle pointed out in Cocaine, Death Squads and the War on Terror: U.S. Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia: “Among the compradores, short-term arrangements were made on coca production that paved the road for longer-term agreements of all kinds, one of which supported the emergence of the narco-bourgeoisie, whose business operations had remained relatively independent.”

Villar and Cottle averred: “Emerging narco-capitalism permeated Colombia’s financial system, creating financial connections throughout the Colombian economy. The active participation of banks in the cocaine industry greatly strengthened financial connections among the narco-bourgeoisie. The Cali cartel metamorphosed into numerous legitimate business enterprises such as pharmaceutical companies and real estate firms to operate the cocaine trade, whereas the Medellín cartel focused on money-laundering.”

This production and distribution system was highly unstable however, and “created fierce competition among traffickers with connections to the Colombian ruling class,” Villar and Cottle wrote. “The Medellín cartel waged a desperate battle against enterprises that refused to enter into an alliance with them. All manner of underhanded methods, from blackmail to murder, were employed in this battle. The violent liquidation of rival enterprises, many who collaborated with the CIA, provoked retaliation from the United States which declared a war on drugs that targeted Pablo Escobar.”

As with Plan Colombia, under terms of the Mérida Initiative, the U.S. Congress has authorized some $1.6 billion for Mexico and Central American states blown away by the narcotics hurricane. However, much of the funds doled out to Mexican military and police organizations never leave the United States. Instead, as with other “foreign aid” boondoggles these funds flow directly into the coffers of giant U.S. defense firms and will be used to purchase aircraft, surveillance equipment and other hardware produced by the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex.

As in Colombia during the 1990s, a similar consolidation process, accompanied by spectacular levels of violence, is currently wracking Mexican society as drug gangs vie for control over the lucrative distribution market and are said to control 90% of the trafficking routes entering the U.S.

According to some estimates, approximately $49.4 billion annually pour into the accounts of major DTOs, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) reported back in 2007. However, most studies of global drug trafficking fail to analyze the benefits accrued by major U.S. financial institutions–banks, the stock market, hedge funds, etc.–who have been the direct beneficiaries of the $352 billion in annual drug profits “absorbed into the economic system,” as The Observer reported in 2009.

“In a nutshell,” Villar and Cottle wrote, “the war of drugs and terror is part of a counterrevolutionary strategy designed to maintain rather than eliminate the economic conditions that allow the drug trade to thrive.” That pattern is being replicated today in Mexico. “From Reagan to Obama, U.S. covert intervention has, paradoxically, only accentuated the social violence and systematized the production and distribution of cocaine.”

Corporate grifters, profiting on everything from weapons’ sales to surveillance kit have names. In the context of the Mérida Initiative, one firm stands out, the Israeli-founded spy shop Verint Systems Inc.

Drugs, Terror, War… Whatever

Like the “War on Terror,” the “War on Drugs” is predicated on the fallacy that “persistent situational awareness” obtained through the driftnet surveillance of electronic communications will give secret state agencies a leg-up on their adversaries.

Better think again! As Villar and Cottle pointed out, “the 1994 discovery of a computer owned by members of the Cali cartel offered clues on the complexities of the system and illustrated the technological sophistication of Colombia’s narco-economy.”

Indeed, the $1.5 million IBM AS400 mainframe “networked with half a dozen terminals and monitors and six technicians overseeing its operations,” and its “custom-written data-mining software cross-referenced the Cali phone exchange’s traffic with the phone numbers of American personnel and Colombian intelligence and law enforcement officials.”

That network was “set up by a retired Colombian army intelligence officer,” a fact which the Colombian government denied despite strong evidence to the contrary. And when Colombian officials “established a toll-free hotline for information about the Cali cartel leaders,” Villar and Cottle reported that a “former high-level DEA official said: ‘All of these anonymous callers were immediately identified, and they were killed.”

By today’s standards, that IBM mainframe is a throwback to the stone age. With advanced communications and encryption technologies readily available to anyone, and with any number of dodgy spy firms specializing in everything from the mass harvesting of information from social networks to the installation of malware on personal computers and GPS smartphone tracking as the WikiLeaks Spyfiles revealed, only a fool–or a State Department bureaucrat–would believe that weaponized spy kit won’t fall into the hands of billion dollar organized crime groups. Yet that’s exactly what Washington plans to do.

In the NextGov report cited above, we were informed that the State Department’s “Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, in a contract notice published late Friday, said it will fund what it called the Mexico Technical Surveillance System for use by that country’s Public Security Secretariat to ‘continue to help deter, prevent and mitigate acts of major federal crimes in Mexico that include narcotics trafficking and terrorism’.”

The contract proposal specifies that “all awards will be based on the following criteria in order of importance for 1) Technical Approach/Understanding/Personnel, 2) Corporate Experience, 3) Past Performance and 4) Price. Technical merit (captured in the three (3) technical evaluation factors enumerated above, taken together) is significantly more important than cost/price.”

But as NextGov reported while the procurement, at least on paper, is “competitive,” the State Department “came close to ruling out any other bidder except Verint with the caveat that ‘the new equipment must function seamlessly with the existing in a single system or be entirely replaced’.”

That pretty much “levels the playing field” for the Israeli firm and the suite of surveillance tools it offers, the Reliant Monitoring System, which “intercepts virtually any wired, wireless or broadband communication network and service.” Indeed, the State Department plans to “triple the capacity of the current Verint system from 30 workstations to 107,” according to NextGov. Given the spooky nature of the company, no doubt El Chapo is drooling over the prospect.

As James Bamford pointed out in The Shadow Factory and in a series of recent articles in Wired Magazine, “Verint was founded in Israel by Israelis, including Jacob ‘Kobi’ Alexander, a former Israeli intelligence officer. Some 800 employees work for Verint, including 350 who are based in Israel, primarily working in research and development and operations.”

As Antifascist Calling disclosed back in 2008 (see: “Thick as Thieves: The Private (and very profitable) World of Corporate Spying”): “When Comverse Infosys [now Verint] founder and CEO Jacob ‘Kobi’ Alexander fled to Israel and later Namibia in 2006, the former Israeli intelligence officer and entrepreneur took along a little extra cash for his extended ‘vacation’–$57 million to be precise.”

Alexander, a veteran of Israel’s ultra-secretive Unit 8200, the equivalent of America’s National Security Agency, fled to Namibia because he faced a 32-count indictment by the Justice Department over allegations that he masterminded a scheme to backdate millions of Comverse stock options which allowed the enterprising corporate grifter to embezzle some $138 million from company shareholders.

As I wrote back then, “despite alarms raised by a score of federal law enforcement agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), fearful that sensitive wiretap information was finding its way into the hands of international narcotrafficking cartels, virtually nothing has been done to halt the outsourcing of America’s surveillance apparatus to firms with intimate ties to foreign intelligence entities. Indeed, as America’s spy system is turned inward against the American people, corporations such as Verint work hand-in-glove with a spooky network of security agencies and their corporatist pals in the telecommunications industry.”

But as we know, software and the spy trojans embedded in their code are “neutral.” What can be used by law enforcement agencies such as Mexico’s Secretaría de Seguridad Pública (SSP) and the Agencia Federal de Investigación (AFI) can also be handed over by corrupt officials to their presumed targets, the Sinaloa, Gulf, Juárez, Knights Templar, Tijuana or Los Zetas narcotrafficking cartels, all of whom have ties to Mexico’s narco-bourgeoisie, police and the military.

It wouldn’t be the first time that “retired” Israeli military officers or “ex” Mossad men were exposed as trainers for some of the drug world’s most notorious killers.

Nearly a decade ago, investigative journalist Jeremy Bigwood revealed in Narco News that drug gangster and far-right political actor Carlos Castaño, the future founder of the blood-soaked Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC, “was only 18 years old when he arrived in Israel in 1983 to take a year-long course called ’562.’ Castaño, a Colombian, had come to the Holy Land as a pilgrim of sorts, but not to find peace. Course 562 was about war, and how to wage it, and it was something Carlos Castaño would eventually excel at, becoming the most adept and ruthless paramilitary leader in Latin America’s history.”

Bigwood reported that Castaño’s IDF trainers emphasized instruction in “urban strategies,” which included the use of fragmentation grenades, RPG-7s as well as “complementary courses” on terrorism and counter-terrorism.

Narco News informed us that “not all was study for Castaño in Israel, and he used his free time to meet with Colombian soldiers undergoing regular military training there–soldiers of the worst human rights violators in the western hemisphere were being trained by some of the worst human rights violators in the Middle East. But these were precisely the connections that would prove so useful in the future.”

A future that encompassed the wholesale massacre of Colombian peasants, union organizers and left-wing activists as the AUC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the CIA-anointed Cali cartel, founded by Iran/Contra drug kingpins, the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, engaged in a brutal war to the death with Pablo Escobars’ Medellín cartel in the 1990s.

According to declassified CIA, DEA and State Department documents published by the National Security Archive in 2008, “U.S. espionage operations targeting top Colombian government officials in 1993 provided key evidence linking the U.S.-Colombia task force charged with tracking down fugitive drug lord Pablo Escobar to one of Colombia’s most notorious paramilitary chiefs.”

Documents published by the Archive “include two heavily-censored CIA memos describing briefings provided by members of a ‘Blue Ribbon Panel’ of CIA investigators to members of U.S. congressional intelligence committees and the National Security Council. The Panel–which included personnel from the CIA’s directorate for clandestine intelligence operations–had been investigating the possibility that intelligence shared with the Medellín Task Force in 1993 ended up in the hands of Colombian paramilitaries and narcotraffickers from the Pepes. That investigation concluded on December 3, 1993, the day Escobar was killed.”

“The collaboration between paramilitaries and government security forces evident in the Pepes episode is a direct precursor of today’s ‘para-political’ scandal,” said Michael Evans, director of the National Security Archive’s Colombia Documentation Project. “The Pepes affair is the archetype for the pattern of collaboration between drug cartels, paramilitary warlords and Colombian security forces that developed over the next decade into one of the most dangerous threats to Colombian security and U.S. anti-narcotics programs. Evidence still concealed within secret U.S. intelligence files forms a critical part of that hidden history.”

While both the Cali and Medellín cartels have faded into history, cocaine processed on an industrial scale continues to flood out of Colombia and other “legs” of the Crystal Triangle. Control over that distribution network, worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually, much of which finds its way into U.S. banks, is the source of the bloodshed currently tearing Mexico and Central America to pieces.

Is history repeating itself when it comes to favoring one drug gang over another? The answer is yes. According to a 2010 National Public Radio report, “an NPR News investigation has found strong evidence of collusion between elements of the Mexican army and the Sinaloa cartel in the violent border city of Juarez.”

“Dozens of interviews with current and former law enforcement agents, organized crime experts, elected representatives, and victims of violence suggest that the Sinaloans depend on bribes to top government officials to help their leader, Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, elude capture, expand his empire and keep his operatives out of jail.”

Sound far-fetched? As Bill Conroy reported last year in Narco News, court pleadings in the case of accused Sinaloa capo Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla “demonstrate the insidious nature of the cooperation that exists between the US government and Mexico’s Sinaloa mafia organization.”

“According to Zambada Neibla, he and the rest of the Sinaloa leadership, through the informant [Humberto] Loya Castro, negotiated a quid-pro-quo immunity deal with the US government in which they were guaranteed protection from prosecution in exchange for providing US law enforcers and intelligence agencies with information that could be used to compromise rival Mexican cartels and their operations.”

“The alleged deal,” Conroy averred, “assured protection for the Sinaloa Cartel’s business operations while also undermining its competition–such as the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes organization out of Juarez, Mexico, the murder capital of the world.”

Inquiring minds can’t help but wonder why, if Zambada Neibla’s allegations are so much hot-air, would U.S. prosecutors invoke “national security” under provisions of the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) “in his trial in an attempt to assure certain sensitive and/or embarrassing evidence is not made available to Zambada Niebla’s attorneys”?

As Narco News disclosed, “Perhaps any deal that might exist between the Sinaloa leadership is limited to Chapo Guzman and Ismael Zambada, perhaps it was put in place by a US intelligence agency under the guise of law enforcement, or through some secret pact cobbled together by the US State Department that does not have to be honored by the Justice Department because it applies only in Mexico. In this case, the devil is in the details, and in all those scenarios, the cloak of national security could easily be invoked to prevent evidence of the pact surfacing in a court of law.”

With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake and a “drug war” that favors one group of cut-throats over another to obtain leverage over corrupt politicians, along with an endless source of funds for intelligence-connected black operations, the Verint deal seems like a slam-dunk.

After all, with powerful communications’ intercept technologies in the hands of the Mexican secret state, “national security,” on both sides of the border, is little more than code for business as usual.

(Image courtesy of Daniel Hopsicker’s MadCow Morning News)

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May 11, 2012

This city has a new way of fighting crime: Employees who are out and about, trimming trees or picking up litter on the beach, are officially on the lookout for signs of a crime.

A group of about 70 landscapers and garbage truck drivers got training from the Broward Sheriff’s Office this week so they know what to look for. Another group of about 35 will train next week.

BSO calls the program Operation B.O.L.O. When an employee reports something suspicious, on-duty BSO deputies will drive to the scene. If the information leads to an arrest, the employee gets a reward of up to $100.

“We’re targeting employees out and about throughout the day, who can be an extra set of eyes and ears,” said BSO Deerfield Police Chief Pete Sudler. “There’s no doubt while they’re out there, things are going on around them they’re not trained to spot yet.”

The program is the first of its kind in South Florida, Sudler said, though there are similar programs in Illinois, Texas and in Central Florida. He’s never heard of a city paying employees for good information, though.

The program is funded by BSO’s Law Enforcement Trust Fund, which is made up of funds seized during investigations. By Florida law, the trust fund must be spent on special programs or crime prevention and can’t be used to defray normal operating costs for a police department.

Read More…

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Why are we born and what are we doing here?

Are we all mindless beings, mere products of chance born to consume, grind out a living chasing fulfillment in “things and then die?” [1]

Monotheism teaches that Man’s purpose is to worship a Jealous God, die a natural death and then off to Heaven or Hell. Man can do whatever he likes while he is here on earth and still go to heaven as long as he accepts the free gift of Salvation when God’s son was crucified on the cross.

Naturalism and Pantheism teaches Man’s purpose is to worship Mother Earth [an indifferent infinite impersonal God that encompasses all of reality], die a natural death. Man can do whatever he likes while he is here on earth because All is one, all is God, therefore in the end we All go back to the earth: heaven is not an issue.

Buddhism teaches Man’s purpose is to suffer: There is no God to worship. You can do whatever you like on this earth but if don’t pass the “good” test you are reborn [reincarnation] but not as the same person [similar but not identical to]. If you pass the “good” test and release your attachment to desire and the self then you are finally liberated from suffering and attain a Nirvana heaven.

Hinduism teaches that Man’s purpose is to worship a formless, limitless, all-inclusive, and eternal God, Brahman. You can do whatever you like on this earth but the actions of your soul while residing in your body require that it reap the consequences of those actions in the next life — the same soul in a different body. The Hindu soul is immortal therefore you don’t die you transmigrate. Your karma determines the kind of body your soul inhabits in the next life. If you pass the “good” test you attain Moksha, the soul’s liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth. [2]

None of the Ism’s make any sense unless you are looking for a viable alternative to an existential view of the world; being and nothingness.

Metaphysical Chess

What if we were born and we are here to be pawns in a Metaphysical “chess” game between Gaea (mother-earth) and The Global Financial Elite (TGFE)? [3]

Unlike the game of chess the pawns do not belong to either side. Gaea wants the pawns to see their purpose as caretakers of her garden — Earth. TGFE, armed with the lost knowledge from the ancient world Atlantis, creates a world where human pawns see their purpose in Monotheism and therefore can do whatever they like while they go shopping for useless toxic “stuff.” [4]

read the entire article: http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2012/04/29/the-game-of-metaphysical-chess

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You will be surprised.

Which Country in the World is Preventing World War III?

By Robert Singer

World War III: Countdown To Armageddon – U.S. Closes Embassy In Syria And Ayatollah Declares “Kill All Jews, Annihilate Israel”! Update: UK Ambassador Withdrawn From Syria For Talks!

February 06, 2012 – The officials said the deterioration of the situation in the country [Syria] made it impossible for the embassy to continue operations and for the staff to remain. “The government is getting stretched beyond its ability to control the various elements of violence in the country,” one senior official said. – CNN. Relations have been strained between the United States and Pakistan, Libya, Syria and Iran in recent months. Iran has recently shot down a US stealth drone and has also been performing drills practicing closing the Strait of Hormuz.

Albert Pike, allegedly in August 15, 1871, saw three world wars as necessary to bring about the One World Order:

The Third World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences caused by the “agentur” of the “Illuminati” between the political Zionists and the leaders of Islamic World. The war must be conducted in such a way that Islam (the Moslem Arabic World) and political Zionism (the State of Israel) mutually destroy each other. Meanwhile the other nations, once more divided on this issue will be constrained to fight to the point of complete physical, moral, spiritual and economical exhaustion…We shall unleash the Nihilists and the atheists, and we shall provoke a formidable social cataclysm … Then everywhere, the citizens, obliged to defend themselves against the world minority of revolutionaries, will exterminate those destroyers of civilization, and the multitude, disillusioned with Christianity, whose deistic spirits will from that moment be without compass or direction, anxious for an ideal, but without knowing where to render its adoration, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of the pure doctrine of Lucifer, brought finally out in the public view.

Yes I am aware of the controversy over when the letter was written. However, to my knowledge, there is no one dumb enough to claim the letter was written after 1917. [1]

Which Country in the World is doing everything possible to prevent “The Third World War:” A worldwide conflict that would fulfill the agenda of the New World Order, and greatly reduce the world’s population in a matter of months?

Keep reading, the answer will surprise you.

Here is the end-of-the-world-timeline from the Bible: [Scofield Bible]

read the entire article
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2012/03/25/which-country-in-the-world-is-preventing

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The Turkish daily Aydinlik said that suicide bombings represent a way of incitement carried out by the CIA and Mossad agents in Iraq, and are applied now in Syria, Lebanese daily Al-Benaa reported.

“CIA and Mossad agents have carried out – and still – various attacks in several countries including Iraq, Pakistan and Libya,” Aydinlik stated in a report published Monday.

The report made it clear that the agents have bombed mosques during the occupation of Iraq in order to incite Shiites against Sunnis and vice versa.

“Those agents have achieved their goal where most of their operations were targeting Shiite and Sunnite mosques. All bombings were declared suicide attacks, while the suicide bombers were announced killed, but the fact is contrary to what was claimed,” the daily added.

The newspaper pointed out that CIA and Mossad are adopting the same method now in Syria in order to thwart the plan of UN envoy to the country, Kofi Annan.

“Political analysts stress the suicide attacks level will increase in coming days in Syria, where the Mossad and the U.S. intelligence officials will be undoubtedly responsible,” the Turkish report stated.

“However, suicide bombs will be the most dangerous tools for incitement and chaos in Syria, but, unfortunately, the Turkish borders will be the rear front of those operations for they will host Mossad and CIA perpetrators, or in other words, possible to say, that Turkey is a partner of these planned operations against the administration of President Bashar al-Assad,” according to Aydinlik daily.

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May 10, 2012

By Mike Masnick
Techdirt

Remember the NDAA? Yeah, for a variety of reasons that bill got a lot of attention last year — mostly focused on the question of detainment of terrorists. But there are some other nuggets in the bill, including one tidbit about “military activities in cyberspace.” The existing version of the NDAA does grant the Defense Department the ability to conduct such military activities, but only “upon direction by the President” and if the purpose is to “defend our Nation, Allies and interests,” subject to existing laws.

Here’s the existing text:

SEC. 954. MILITARY ACTIVITIES IN CYBERSPACE.

Congress affirms that the Department of Defense has the capability, and upon direction by the President may conduct offensive operations in cyberspace to defend our Nation, Allies and interests, subject to—

(1) the policy principles and legal regimes that the Department follows for kinetic capabilities, including the law of armed conflict; and

(2) the War Powers Resolution (50 U.S.C. 1541 et seq.).

However, the House Armed Services Committee is getting ready to do a markup on the NDAA that includes a change to that section (section 954), which expands the powers of the Defense Department, and basically gives it broad powers to conduct any military actions online — with it specifically calling out clandestineoperations online. Here’s the text they want to substitute:

SEC. 954. MILITARY ACTIVITIES IN CYBERSPACE.

‘‘(a) AFFIRMATION.—Congress affirms that the Secretary of Defense is authorized to conduct military activities in cyberspace.

‘‘(b) AUTHORITY DESCRIBED.—The authority referred to in subsection (a) includes the authority to carry out a clandestine operation in cyberspace—

‘‘(1) in support of a military operation pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (50 U.S.C. 1541 note; Public Law 107-40) against a target located outside of the United States; or

‘‘(2) to defend against a cyber attack against an asset of the Department of Defense.

‘‘(c) RULE OF CONSTRUCTION.—Nothing in this section shall be construed to limit the authority of the Secretary of Defense to conduct military activities in cyberspace.’”

Note a bunch of slightly sneaky things going on here. First, it gives blanket powers to the DoD, rather than saying it can only take actions on the President’s direction. While we may not have much faith that the President wouldn’t let the DoD do such things, giving such blanket approval upfront, rather than requiring specific direction is a pretty big change.

Second, and perhaps more important, the new language specifically grants the DOD (and the NSA, which is a part of DOD) the power to conduct “clandestine operations.” This is (on purpose) left basically undefined. Combine this with the fact that the “Authorization of Use of Military Force” is so broadly defined in the current government, this then grants the DOD/NSA extremely broad powers to conduct “clandestine” operations with little oversight. Related to this is that it removes the restriction that the DOD must take actions that are “subject to the policy principles and legal regimes that the Department follows for kinetic capabilities, including the law of armed conflicts.” Instead it lets them use such powers, without these restrictions, against anyone declared an enemy under the AUMF (lots and lots of people) or in any effort to stop a cyberattack against the DOD — which again you can bet would be defined broadly. This is a pretty big expansion of online “war” powers for the Defense Department, with what appears to be less oversight. And all done while people are looking the other way…

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May 8, 2012

Source: Red Ice

According to Dr. Boian Alexandrov at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, terahertz (THz) waves destroy human DNA. The waves literally unzip the helix strand. Now a team of technologists at UT Dallas are planning to take chips broadcasting THz waves and embed them into mobile phones for use as an imaging system for consumers, law enforcement and medical personnel… a potentially deadly technology that could eventually kill or sicken millions of people.

The controversial THz scanner technology used by the TSA at many of the nation’s airports is being adapted for cell phone use. Studies of terahertz radiation have caused experts to raise alarms over the significant health risks to humans.

Recently major media touted a new chip that permits the adaption of a THz generating device to be embedded into cellular phones.

Is the price for seeing through walls, a grisly death?

The excited press painted grand pictures of such technology being used by consumers to see through walls and objects, while health professionals like physcians might incorporate the technology to seek out small tumors inside patients without the need for invasive surgery.

THz radiation unzips the DNA molecule

In a breakthrough study conducted by Dr. Boian Alexandrov at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a team of physicists, they discovered terrifying evidence that exposure to THz radiation builds cumulatively and affects human and animal tissue DNA. In essence, it tends to unzip the DNA molecule.

The Los Alamos scientists paper, DNA Breathing Dynamics in the Presence of a Terahertz Field reveals very disturbing—even shocking—evidence that THz radiation significantly damages the DNA of the people being directed through airport scanners and all TSA workers in close proximity to the machines.

Their synopsis: “We consider the influence of a terahertz field on the breathing dynamics of double-stranded DNA. We model the spontaneous formation of spatially localized openings of a damped and driven DNA chain, and find that linear instabilities lead to dynamic dimerization, while true local strand separations require a threshold amplitude mechanism. Based on our results we argue that a specific terahertz radiation exposure may significantly affect the natural dynamics of DNA, and thereby influence intricate molecular processes involved in gene expression and DNA replication.“

Image: Source

What all that means is the resonant effects of the THz waves bombarding humans unzips the double-stranded DNA molecule. This ripping apart of the twisted chain of DNA creates bubbles between the genes that can interfere with the processes of life itself: normal DNA replication and critical gene expression.

Likely to cause cancer

David J. Brenner, a Columbia University doctor and expert on the effects of radiation stated that it’s quite likely the TSA scanners will cause cancer in some individuals.

[...]

Picked up from: fourwinds10.net

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May 8, 2012

Source: Reason

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May 6, 2012

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May 7, 2012

By Michael Synder
The American Dream

Despite what you may have heard from the mainstream media, Mitt Romney does not have the Republican nomination locked up.  In fact, he is rapidly losing delegates that almost everyone assumed that he already had in the bag.  To understand why this is happening, you have to understand the delegate selection process.  Each state has different rules for selecting delegates to the Republican national convention, and in many states the “voting” done by the public does not determine the allocation of delegates to particular candidates at all.  And the truth is that delegates are the only thing that really matters in this race.  In state after state, the Ron Paul campaign is focusing on the delegate selection process with laser-like precision, and it is paying off big time.  At this point, there is still a legitimate chance that Ron Paul will be able to win enough delegates to deny Mitt Romney the nomination on the first ballot at the Republican national convention in Tampa.  If Romney does not have the 1,144 delegates that he needs on the first ballot, then it becomes a brokered convention and anything becomes possible at that point.

Sadly, most Americans have no idea how this process really works.

For example, originally we were all told that Mitt Romney won Iowa.

Then, later on we were told that a mistake was made and that Rick Santorum actually won Iowa.

Well, it turns out that Ron Paul actually won 20 out of the 28 delegates in Iowa.  That is because the process of actually selecting the delegates occurred long after the voting by the public was over.

So what happens if the Ron Paul campaign is able to produce similar results in state after state?

The Ron Paul campaign is very organized, very motivated and they understand the rules of the game.  As a recent Politico article detailed, there are huge amounts of unbound delegates out there that are still up for grabs….

There are roughly 30 states and territories where delegates aren’t bound to a particular candidate. The majority of the other states, according to a number of party officials, call for delegates to be bound for a first round of balloting but not the ensuing rounds.

“The dirty little secret is: At the end of the day, these guys and gals can vote any way they want,” said a Republican who has attended national conventions for decades. “Each state has different (laws) on pledged delegates.”

In many states, the “official” results of voting done by the public mean next to nothing.  The talking heads on television often tell us how many delegates are “projected” to go to a particular candidate, but as we have seen in Iowa and in so many other states, those “projections” are basically meaningless.

A recent Salon article discussed how the delegate selection process really works and how the Ron Paul campaign is using these rules to shake up the game….

In many caucus states, the “official” results that most people saw this winter were from nonbinding straw polls conducted in conjunction with precinct-level caucuses. But when it comes to choosing national convention delegates, the real action is at district caucuses and state conventions. In the past, this distinction hasn’t mattered much, but for the Paul forces – who lack the numbers to win statewide primaries but have the devotion to pack any room, anywhere, at any time – it has offered an inviting loophole. When turnout is small and no one is looking, the Paul folks can win, and that’s what’s been happening in a number of states.

To Paul die-hards, this will all culminate in a surprise for the ages in Tampa, with the political world suddenly realizing that Romney actually doesn’t have the 1,144 delegates needed to win the nomination, thereby allowing Paul to extract major concessions or even steal the nomination for himself.

So could Ron Paul really deny Mitt Romney the Republican nomination?

At this point, nobody really seems to know what the real delegate count is.

Websites such as The Real 2012 Delegate Count are more accurate than most sources in the mainstream media, but even that site has been underestimating the true number of Ron Paul delegates.

Right now, Mitt Romney is not anywhere close to having the number of delegates that he needs for the nomination and Ron Paul just keeps picking up more delegates with each passing week.

For example, a Washington Post article that was posted on Sunday reported that Ron Paul just achieved a stunning delegate victory in Nevada….

Despite former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s overwhelming victory in the Nevada caucuses, Texas Rep. Ron Paul has won a majority of the state’s delegates to the party’s national convention later this year in Tampa, Florida.

Thanks to organized Paul supporters, who have been working to increase their candidate’s support at state conventions around the country, 22 of the 25 Nevada delegates up for grabs will be Paul supporters. (Another three are automatic delegates.)

That was a state that Romney supposedly “won”.

It looks like Romney has a real problem.

In state after state, Ron Paul is gobbling up delegates.  The following are quotes from a recent Huffington Post article about what the Ron Paul campaign has been able to achieve in the past few weeks….

-”Sure enough, Paul has already won 20 out of the 24 delegates allocated in Minnesota, by winning a majority of the congressional district contests.”

-”In Louisiana, Paulites “dominated” the congressional district caucuses this past Saturday, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Paul’s supporters carried four of the state’s congressional districts, and are guaranteed at least 17 of 46 delegates in the Bayou State, with the potential to pick up more at the state convention on June 2.”

-”The other state that Benton likely has his eye on is Colorado, where the Denver Post reported in mid-April that Paul supporters and Santorum backers combined forces to win a “stunning upset” at the state convention, guaranteeing that about half of the state’s 33 delegates will be for Paul in August.”

And look what just happened in Maine according to USA Today….

In votes leading to the close of the two-day Maine convention, Paul supporters were elected to 21 of the 24 delegate spots from Maine to the GOP national convention in Tampa, Fla.

So Ron Paul is definitely accumulating a huge pile of his own delegates, but even many so-called “pledged delegates” for Romney could end up playing a huge role for Ron Paul.

In some states, Ron Paul supporters have been getting elected into delegate slots that are supposed to go to Romney.  This is highly unusual, and it could really shake things up at the national convention.  As a Salon article recently explained there will be quite a few Ron Paul supporters that will actually be going to Tampa “disguised” as Romney delegates….

Besides the pledged delegates he’s won so far and the extras he’s collecting through caucuses and state conventions, Paul will also have some supporters disguised as Romney delegates. To understand how this works, just consider his campaign’s mischief in Massachusetts, where Romney won 72 percent of the primary vote – and with it, a monopoly on the state’s pledged convention delegates. But to determine who would fill those pledged delegate slots, the state GOP held caucuses recently, and the Paul crowd came out in force, gobbling up 16 of the 19 available positions. In how many other states will this happen, or has it already happened?

But those delegates are required to vote for Romney, right?

Not so fast.

The Ron Paul campaign could actually ask those “disguised” Romney delegates to abstain during the first round of voting in Tampa.  If Romney did not win on the first ballot, those delegates would then become unbound and would be able to support Ron Paul.

In fact, Ronald Reagan considered using this tactic against Gerald Ford in 1976.  The following is from a 1976 article entitled“Reagan Forces May ‘Steal’ Ford Votes”….

“In secret strategy sessions, Reagan aides have toyed with the idea of asking delegates to abstain as long as their state laws require them to honor the primary verdicts.  This would prevent the President from riding up an early-ballot victory.  Then, in subsequent ballots, they could legally switch to Reagan.

Delegates have abstained from voting before.  Back in 2008, at least 14 delegates abstained from voting at the Republican national convention.

So what would happen if the Ron Paul campaign was able to get 100 or 150 “Romney delegates” to abstain from voting during the first ballot in Tampa?

That is a very intriguing question.

And remember, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich also have significant numbers of delegates pledged to each of them.

So Ron Paul does not need to accumulate 1,144 delegates himself to deny Mitt Romney the nomination on the first ballot.  He just needs to keep Romney from getting to 1,144.

The race for the Republican nomination is not over.

You can find a state by state breakdown of delegate voting rules right here.

It is not too late to get involved.

If nobody gets to 1,144 on the first ballot in Tampa, it becomes a “brokered convention” and anyone can become the nominee – even someone that is not running right now.

So if you are not satisfied with Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee, don’t lose hope yet.

The game is still being played.

It would be a challenge, but if his supporters get energized enough, it certainly is possible that Ron Paul could still win enough delegates to deny Mitt Romney the Republican nomination on the first ballot in Tampa.

And if that happens, anything is possible.

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