Author: Dave LIndorff

(This article originally written for and published by Counterpunch Magazine)
 

Maple Glen, PA war zone — Although I have been a journalist now for 40 years, I have, by design, never sought an assignment as a war correspondent. The idea of dodging enemy bullets, avoiding mines, and of course “friendly” fire, has never appealed to me. And yet, even as President Obama is claiming to be having second thoughts about the drone slaughter he has been overseeing from the White House, I find that I am now a war correspondent in a combat zone in spite of myself.

A month ago I learned, courtesy of my congressional representative, Republican Pat Meehan, that my neighborhood, the Upper Dublin and Horsham area of Montgomery County, PA, is being made into a front-line battle zone in the Afghanistan War.

Not that Rep. Meehan put it that way. No. His announcement was that Montgomery and Bucks County were going to get 250 new jobs thanks to a decision by the Pentagon to set up a new piloting facility for killer drones at the currently mothballed Willow Grove Naval Air Station. This new drone piloting facility, like the ones in Nevada and upstate New York, will be flying drones not from the Willow Grove facility’s huge airfield, but in Afghanistan, Pakistan and wherever else America is fighting the so-called War on Terror.

With this decision, the war has literally come home. Two miles from my house, to be exact.

According to a report in the Lansdale Patch, a local weekly, the US Air Force “has chosen the Pennsylvania Air National Guard’s 111th Fighter Wing, located at the 238-acre Horsham Air Guard Station, adjacent to the shuttered Willow Grove air base to take on a new Remotely Piloted Aircraft mission.”

Effective October 1 the Air Force will have established, in already existing buildings on the currently unused base, a ground-control station for the MQ-9 Reaper. This is one of the two drones (the Predator is the other) that have been responsible for most of the drone killings during the Obama administration’s over four-year expanded use of drone warfare, and that has, according to the organization Drones Watch, been responsible for the documented deaths of over 172 children.

Col. Howard “Chip” Eissler, commander of the Pennsylvania National Guard’s 111th Fighter Wing, which had been flying A-10 Warthog ground attack jets from the base on training runs for years until the base was shut down, issued a press release saying, “This is an exciting time for our wing, and our airmen are energized to embrace this new mission.”
Willow Grove's shuttered Naval Air Station, soon to be on the front line of the Afghanistan War and 'War' on Terror

(This article was originally written for WhoWhatWhy)
 

The horrific bombing of the Boston Marathon, to hear the FBI and the Boston Police tell it, is solved: One bomber, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, is dead, gunned down by police and then run over for good measure by his fleeing brother Dzhokhar, who was captured a day later in a citywide manhunt, after being hit by a fusillade of police bullets fired into a trailered pleasure boat he was hiding in.

Among the reasons law enforcement sources are so confident they “got” their men were video surveillance photos from a Lord & Taylor store-front area showing the two brothers as they arrived at the finish-line area, each wearing a backpack, allegedly carrying what the FBI now says were two identical 6-quart steel pressure cookers marketed by the Canadian corporation Fagor. Fragments of those pots, which the FBI says were packed with black powder (gathered from a collection of fireworks) as well as nails and BBs, were recovered at the scene.

Besides the photos of the two brothers wearing their packs, the FBI also has released a photo of the remnants of one of the backpacks, allegedly the black, or dark-colored, one worn by the elder Tamerlan Tsarnaev. There is also a photo of what is described as a white backpack, that was placed on the street side of a metal crowd-control fence. It was said to contain the second bomb, which exploded 10 seconds later, further from the finish line. This is presumed to be the same light-colored pack Dzhokhar is seen wearing in the store video as he arrives on the scene.

There are a number of serious problems with this supposedly damning evidence, however.

First of all, nobody looking at the evidence to date has tried loading up one of these Fagor pots with the amount of weight that would have been created by a big four or five quarts’ worth of black powder, perhaps two quarts of nails, and perhaps a pound or two of BB shot, to see what it would look like in a basic unstructured book bag of the type the two men were wearing.

I decided to do that…

Note obvious wrinkles on the coat caused by the strap with a fully loaded pot in the book bag in the right picture (worn by a model in a test), compared to the smooth coat under the strap of the book bag carried by Dzohkhar Tsarnaev (lleft image from store surveillance cam). Clearly not much weight in his bag
 

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF, please go to: WhoWhatWhy

A new study reported by TCBH! journalist Dave Lindorff in the May issue of American Banker magazine details how the mission of microlending has gotten off track, and why helping impoverished women is getting harder to do.
 

In the three decades since Muhammad Yunos came up with the idea of microloans for women to start businesses as a way of combating poverty in the world’s poorest societies, it has attracted widespread support, and even earned Yunos and his Grameen Bank a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.

There are now roughly 2000 microfinance institutions around the globe, and, as of 2009, the last time a complete survey was attempted, an estimated 74 million borrowers had $38 billion of the tiny loans outstanding.

But microlending is becoming a victim of its own success. The big money that now flows into this niche has tended to transform microloans into more of a business enterprise than a social one — which, a recent study shows, shifts the focus away from the poor in general and women in particular.

“A lot more money is doing a lot less good,” says Tyler Wry, an assistant professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, who conducted the study with Eric Yanfei Zhao, a docoral fellow at the University of Alberta School of Business in Canada. they analyzed data from 1,800 microfinance institutions in 121 developing countries.

“There has been a strong pattern over time in many countries of these microloans moving away from targeting the poor and from focusing on women,” Wry says. This is problematic because, he says, micofinance’s original goal of lending to poor women is based on sound principles: women in impoverished societies are generally the most destitute of all, and giving them loans to start small businesses yields a substantial gain in family income and better outcomes for children…
 

For the rest of this article by Dave Lindorff please go to American Banker

Microloans, begun as a way to alleviate poverty through aiding women, is losing its way by seeking profits

I used to read the news in the morning and often find myself saying “This can’t be happening!,” which is actually how this news site got its name. But if I were just getting set to create the site these days, I’d have to call our publication “WTF!?,” which is what I find myself saying more and more often over my morning paper.

Just consider some recent news.

* In late April, Cameron D’Ambrosio, a high school student and amateur rapper in the town of Methuen, outside Boston, posted a rap on his Facebook page that made a musical, non-specific reference to making a bomb bigger than the Boston Marathon bomb. He didn’t do anything, didn’t make a bomb, didn’t attempt to get the materials for a bomb, and by all accounts didn’t know how to make a bomb. He just wrote and sang about the idea. No matter, he was arrested by Methuen’s Finest, and is now in jail on — get this — $1 million bail — awaiting arraignment on state “terrorism” charges that carry a potential prison sentence of 20 years. The kid has the misfortune of being 18, so he’s being treated as an adult, though he clearly is not one.

The chief of police of Methuen, exhibiting that incredible mentality of police these days in 9-11 all-the-time America, explained the arrest of an over-the-top wannabe songwriter saying, “When we’re just recovering from what occurred in Boston, to make a threat and use what occurred in Boston to enhance your threat, is extremely alarming for us.”

Really, what can you say to something like this but WTF!? Once when I was 14, I and two friends painted the side of a girl’s house orange on Halloween. I suppose that could have been terrifying, but when we got caught later, our penalty was to repaint the house, not arrest. Ditto when we threw some rocks at cars as kids and one broke a guy’s windshield as he drove by. Stupid, yes. Terror inducing for the driver, probably. And certainly worse than writing a song. But we didn’t get arrested or go to jail. We paid for a new windshield.

* Then there’s the sad story of a five-year-old who fatally shot his two-year-old sister with a rifle while their mother had “stepped outside” the house, leaving the two small kids alone and unsupervised. Such tales of gun accidents by children are all too common, but this one came with a bizarre twist: the five-year-old was reportedly firing his own rifle! It was a cute little “starter” .22-cal. gun called a Crickett (motto: “My first rifle”) available in blue, pink and red-white-and-blue. His doting grandma had bought for him as a birthday gift.

Only in America: Selling “starter” rifles for the pre-school and kindergartner set. WTF!?

My mother died last Thursday at the age of 89. Her death, fortunately coming peacefully after she suffered a stroke during her sleep, followed a long mental decline caused by Alzheimer’s disease.

I’m sure the Veterans Administration is relieved. They won’t have to pay her the thousands of dollars in retroactive pension money they would have owed had she lived until they finally processed her application (or the tens of thousands of dollars more they’d have spent if she’d continued to live).

Mom was a US Navy veteran of World War II. Something of a pioneer for women in the military, she volunteered to become a Navy WAVE (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service) as a young woman in her early 20’s during the war, and was posted at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where she took on the duties of some male sailor who was thus freed up to go to sea. Because she had earned an honorable discharge, she was entitled, in her old age, to a pension, currently worth about $22,000 per year, based upon her financial need.

Dorothy Lindorff (1923-2013), pacifist and WWII Navy WAVE veteran, never got her VA pension

The way these pensions work is, if a retired veteran’s income, after deducting all medical costs, including the costs of home care for those who cannot live on their own because of some disability, falls below the pension amount of $22,000, the VA is supposed to provide pension funds that will “top up” the person’s income to that level. In my mother’s case, because she was unable to take care of herself, and had to have a round-the-clock home-care companion in her house, her cost of care — about $70,000 a year — was entirely eating up both the $36,000 pension my father left her and her $14,000 Social Security widow’s benefit, leaving her with a deficit of $20,000 a year plus the cost of her food and other things, all of which I and my two siblings had to cover.

In early January, I filed her application for a veteran’s pension. We had earlier registered her with the VA, so they had already, two years earlier, processed and confirmed her discharge papers and issued her a veteran’s ID number. Last June, we also applied for her veteran’s medical benefits and she had been approved for VA healthcare last October. All we needed to do in January then, since her service and discharge status had already been confirmed, was document her income, which we did with a statement from both the Social Security Administration and the Connecticut State Comptroller’s pension office (my dad, a US Marine veteran who had died in March, 2012, had been a professor at the University of Connecticut), and document her home-care and other medical expenses, which required only a statement from the licensed home-care agency we were using.

All of that should be so routine and simple that a pension could have been approved with the stroke of a few computer keys, but we were advised by a veterans affairs advocate working for the town of Windham, Connecticut that such applications were taking nine months to a year for the agency to process!

Let’s do a little exercise. Forget nationalities and identities for a moment.

Imagine you are a police detective investigating a horrific bombing in your city — one in which several people were killed and hundreds were injured. You have a captured suspect whom you are sure was one of the bombers, and another was killed in a shootout, but both are young and not very sophisticated.

They might have acted alone, of course, but knowing how these things work, you are also looking for leads to try to determine who else might have been involved, and especially who might have been behind the incident.

As it happens, your two suspects are immigrants. They were brought to your country at a young age by parents who were refugees seeking asylum from a region of the world riven by civil war, brutal repression by a larger power, and that was a breeding ground for terrorists who had been known to have launched terrible attacks against civilians, including schools and full movie theaters in that larger power.

Now supposing you discovered that the national intelligence agency of a rival nation to that larger power had actually provided support to the terrorists that were attacking it, and that, moreover, the two young men who were your suspects were related to an uncle who had for three years been married to the daughter of a top member of that intelligence agency — the latter a man who had had a long history of active involvement in that agency’s major covert operations.

Wouldn’t you be deeply suspicious about the nature of the connections between the two young men and this intelligence agency? Of course you would!

Well, let’s put some names to this scenario.

Two Degrees of Separation? (From left: ex-CIA spook Graham Fuller, his daugter Samantha, his former son-in-law Ruslan Tsarni, and Tsarni nephew Tamerlan Tsarnaev (deceased)

Has the “land of the free and home of the brave” decided to roll over and concede defeat to terrorism?

George Bush’s “war on terror,” supinely backed by a cowed Congress of Democrats and Republicans, re-introduced torture to the American playbook, finished what Bill Clinton started in taking away our right to habeus corpus, made illegal wiretapping routine and built a culture of fear in our national psyche in order to keep us from rising up against these assaults on our Constitution. Barack Obama has continued these practices and gone further with his obsession with drone attacks worldwide, including strikes that murder American citizens without even bothering with indictments, let alone trials, and with his further expansion of wiretaps, secret government and police spying and repression of Constitutionally protected protest.

Now, in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing and subsequent manhunt, we’re being told that there are a couple of new aspects to this “new normal” that we’ll just have to get used to. Functional martial law–the shutting down of an entire metropolitan region — has now happened without even an official declaration from the governor or the president. Our 4th Amendment right protecting us from unwarranted search and seizure no longer has any meaning if the powers that be deem it inconvenient. And the right to be told that we can remain silent rather than incriminate ourselves under interrogation is now optional, again at the discretion of the police authorities.
 
Let’s examine these two new nails in the Constitution’s coffin. During the manhunt, Boston and federal authorities, backed by National Guard troops and possibly private mercenaries (who were observed, though never officially acknowledged, working at the scene of the marathon), locked down the city, ordering residents to stay inside while police officers ignored the fourth amendment and entered any house at will in their search.

Welcome to the new America: Stay inside, don't question police, and you probably won't get hurt…

Occupy Wall Street’s dynamic grass roots movement is quiescent and may or may not return. Its respite or demise is due to a combination of deliberate and apparently nationally directed police violence and federal, state and local government spying, as well as to its own lack of political direction. It remains a political space to focus tremendous energy and passion, and draw to it many millions of the 99%.

Many sympathetic to OWS maintain that it needs a political party. One of them is Patrick Walker, a native of the gritty industrial city of Scranton in northeastern Pennsylvania. Walker participated the OWS movement as part of Occupy Scranton. He has also joined in anti-fracking activism via the Gas Drilling Awareness Coalition and End Gasocracy Now, which put him under the watchful eye of Homeland Security.

Following a move to Georgia, Walker now seeks to gain political traction by focusing his efforts on progressive Democrats within the Democratic Party (D.P.), hoping to bring the party “back” to the 99%. He does not seek D.P. permission as do many other insider party reform efforts.

Walker began his effort—which he calls Start a True Blue Democrat Progressive Revolt—on two websites:
RuckUs and at True Blue Democrats: A Progressive Revolt

“We need to take our political system back from Big Money. I offer this as a promising strategy idea for making that happen,” Walker says.

As he sees it, “The people in Washington and our statehouses — Republicans and Democrats — are already too bought off by (or scared of) Big Money to listen to ‘We the people’.”

Can the passion of the Occupy Movement be turned to taking over the Democratic Party, or is the Democratic Party a lost cause?

Speaking as an investigative reporter with almost 40 years’s experience, I can say that when government officials won’t talk, they’re generally hiding something embarrassing or worse.

I tried, and nobody will talk about those Craft International Services private security personnel who were widely observed and photographed near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, wearing security ear-pieces, hats and T-shirts bearing the company’s skull logo, and all wearing the same dark coats, khaki pants and combat boots, some carrying what appear to have been radiation detectors. (I got no hard answers, though there were some inadvertent hints given.)

I first contacted a man identifying himself as Jack Fleming, a public affairs person with the Boston Athletic Assn., sponsor of the marathon. Fleming advised me that “If you want to ask about that you should contact the Commonwealth (of Massachusetts) Executive Office of Public Safety.”

I called that agency and spoke with the public information office there, a man named Terrell. He first said, “Did you call the Marathon organizers?” When I replied that I had, and that they had said to call his office, he replied, “They did?” Then he said, “You should call the City of Boston Police Department. They released a security plan to some media organizations.”

Indeed they had released that plan to the Boston Globe. Based upon the information it got from the police the article the Globe ran, did report that the Police had deployed “air patrols, K9 units, and more than 1,000 uniformed officers and soldiers along the 26-mile course and the finish line,” but it made no mention of the private contracting of soldiers-for-hire, which is what Craft International does (see the Craft website). News agency Reuters reported, meanwhile, that a top official for the Massachusetts state Homeland Security Department, Undersecretary Kurt Schwartz, told a group at Harvard U. that his agency had “planned” for a possible bombing attack on the marathon, even running a “table-top” exercise about such an event a week before the race.

I called the Boston Police to ask if they had hired the Craft International personnel who were observed at the scene just before and after the bombing, and was told by the public affairs office there that “Anything having to do with the investigation of the bombing would have to be referred to the FBI Boston Division office.” When I pointed out that I wasn’t asking anything about the investigation, but was simply asking who had hired the security personnel from Craft International, the answer was simply repeated: “You’ll have to ask the FBI.”

So I called the FBI, and got a public affairs person there named Amanda Cox. Her initial response to my question was, “I do not have any information on that.”

Seven apparent Craft International rent-a-soldiers behind and departing (top rt. with backpack) a communications van

I’m not a conspiracy-minded person, but something definitely stinks about this whole Boston Marathon bombing story.

From what we’re reading about the case, the FBI had for at least two and possibly as many as five years been investigating Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the 26-year-old older brother killed during a shootout between police and the two brothers, Tamerlan and 19-year-old Dzhokhar. They had interviewed Tamerlan in his home, warned him they were watching what he ate, what he looked at on his computer, etc. They knew he had gone to Russia, Dagestan and Chechnya.

Then there’s the money thing. We’re told that Tamerlan had dropped out of community college because of money problems, right? Community college? That costs almost nothing to attend. That’s the whole point of community colleges: everyone can afford them. And he was reportedly only going part-time! But then, the two brothers are driving around in a Mercedes and wearing fancy clothes?

We’re talking about two brothers, both graduates of public school, with a father who was ill and living in Dagestan, who had worked as a curbside mechanic while in the US, and a mother who had a in-home beauty salon business, and these lads somehow were stylish dressers and drove around in an expensive car — expensive to buy even used, and terribly expensive to maintain, too.

Where did all that money come from? We don’t know. Tamerlan was reportedly working at things like delivering pizza during that period This while living with his wife and caring at home for their young daughter, now three. Tamerlan’s artist wife was said to be supporting the struggling family by working “60-80 hours a week” as a home health care aide, one of the lowest-paying jobs you can find, often paying less than minimum wage.

Why is all this troubling? Because time and time again, when purported terrorist plots are “disrupted” and alleged terrorists are arrested, it turns out they are inept dupes who have been led into their “plots” by FBI provocateurs.

A stylishly dressed Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his Mercedes-Benz: hard-luck guy or someone with a government sugardaddy?