MEMORY HOLE: OSAMA'S CORPSE AND SOME INTERESTING LISTS

Most people seem to be okay with the idea of Osama bin Laden slipping down one of History's Memory Holes. And yet The Powers That Be still seem to feel the need to cover their tracks when it comes to the fishy circumstances surrounding his execution and subsequent disappearance. So now we have yet another excuse for why we weren't allowed to see the body, a new theory that has sprouted unbidden via Drudge and other propaganda vectors. We are now being asked to believe that the real reason why we've never seen images or video of bin Laden's corpse is because soldiers on the scene all took turns emptying their clips into the villain’s lifeless body, thus breaking a bunch of UN "rules of engagement" and rendering him utterly unrecognizable, anyway. So says former SEAL Matt Bissonette in his new book, No Easy Day. Personally, I’m not yet fully convinced that bin Laden was even alive at the time of his alleged "elimination"... but hey, that's just me.

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Here’s an interesting list of "10 Things we Wouldn’t Know if it Weren’t for Bradley Manning’s Whistleblowing." Some disgusting highlights include...

• During the Iraq War, U.S. authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape, and murder by Iraqi police and soldiers, according to thousands of field reports.

• There were 109,032 “violent deaths” recorded in Iraq between 2004 and 2009, including 66,081 civilians. Leaked records from the Afghan War separately revealed coalition troops’ alleged role in killing at least 195 civilians in unreported incidents, one reportedly involving U.S. service members machine-gunning a bus, wounding or killing 15 passengers.

• The U.S. Embassy in Paris advised Washington to start a military-style trade war against any European Union country that opposed genetically modified crops, with U.S. diplomats effectively working directly for GM companies such as Monsanto.

• In Baghdad in 2007, a U.S. Army helicopter gunned down a group of civilians, including two Reuters news staff.

• A leaked diplomatic cable provided evidence that during an incident in 2006, U.S. troops in Iraq executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence. The disclosure of this cable was later a significant factor in the Iraqi government’s refusal to grant U.S. troops immunity from prosecution beyond 2011, which led to U.S. troops withdrawing from the country.

• The U.S. threatened the Italian government in an attempt to influence a court case involving the indictment of CIA agents over the kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric. Separately, U.S. officials were revealed to have pressured Spanish prosecutors to dissuade them from investigating U.S. torture allegations, secret “extraordinary rendition” flights, and the killing of a Spanish journalist by U.S. troops in Iraq.

Follow the link above to read the other five, and for links to even more ridiculous revelations about American crimes in the name of spreading "democracy" and "liberty" to the savage Middle Eastern masses.

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And here's another fine list, this time detailing "10 Things Americans Underestimate about Our Massive Surveillance State." As the author of this list explains, "it's not just the loss of privacy but also the growing power of the state to target and oppress people who it judges to be critics and enemies." Included (and expanded upon at the link) are the following...

1. Underestimated: The National Security Agency’s abilities. ... As the Internet has grown and more data pathways have been developed ... so has the NSA’s electronic dragnet.

2. Overlooked: The expanding NSA dragnet. ... Americans have overlooked that as the Internet has grown, so has the NSA’s ability to track and trace everyone’s online lives.

3. Underestimated: The erosion of constitutional rights. ... Kirk Wiebe, a former NSA intelligence analyst, told NPR on Thursday that collecting vast reams of electronic data was changing the "innocent-until-proven-guilty" foundation of constitutional law.

4. Overlooked: How the NSA is getting away with this. ... Congress passes laws. The administration drafts regulations to carry out those laws. And lawyers—in and outside of government—find ways to get around what they don’t like in those laws.

5. Underestimated: Loss of privacy. Americans need to realize that every electronic transaction can be traced and seen by the government—period.

There's tons more links and rich layers of information at the link above, which I urge you all to read, clip, save, remember, share and - perhaps most importantly - to think about... long and hard.