‘A Place Where investigating & understanding the truth is the only thing that matters’

Americans and citizens from all over the world are slowly awakening to find that things just might not be as they seem.

Sibel Edmonds has launched BOILING FROGS POST, a website that allows you to explore what you won’t get from the mainstream media. It is a place where investigating and understanding the truth is the only thing that matters; not the political consequences or how daunting the challenges may be to make things right again.

After 9/11 Sibel began working for the FBI as a translator. When she saw the crimes and incompetency at The Bureau, she became a Whistleblower, risking her career, as she attempted to reveal the disturbing things she found there. Thus, we are certain that you can count on Sibel to select investigative material based on truth, as well as that which will keep you best informed.

We hope that you will join us in putting BOILING FROGS POST at the top of your daily must reads for news and insight. Let’s rally reader and financial support for Sibel’s efforts to educate all of us, as to when, how and why bad things happen at the crossroads of U.S. government and foreign policy.

After all, it is only as informed citizenry that we can, as we have in the past, properly mobilize our efforts and focus our energies, in order to make things right again, for humanity’s sake.

Mindy Kleinberg, Lorie Van Auken,
Patty Casazza & Monica Gabrielle

PLEASE DONATE NOW

This project is solely dependent on your donations. Your contributions will allow us to:

• Purchase and publish investigative news stories and exposés
• Bring to you in-depth commercial free Podcast interviews
• Present independent editorials and analyses
• Showcase original editorial cartoons
• Facilitate lively discussions
• Maintain & Manage this Website

We need your support to make this project a reality. Please contribute what you can, and many thanks for all you do.

PLEASE DONATE NOW

The Boiling Frogs Presents Joe Lauria

Joe Lauria relates the latest developments in the United Nations, including the controversies involving the elections in Afghanistan, the removal of Peter Galbraith, and the liability of having an American as the second man in office. He discusses the recent UN report on the Taliban’s funding, including heroin related funds and associated outcomes, the chronic and widespread corruption within the Afghan government, and President Obama’s dilemma when it comes to Af-Pak. The interview also includes his perspective on factors contributing to the fading away of the traditional roles of the press in the US, the media blackout on ‘deep politics,’ shortcomings of amateur news blogs, and more!

Joe Lauria is an author, foreign affairs correspondent and investigative reporter. He has covered the United Nations for 19 years for numerous newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the London Daily Telegraph, the Montreal Gazette and the Johannesburg Star. Joe is a member of the Sunday Times of London’s investigative unit. He is co-author of A Political Odyssey, a look at America’s defense industry and the false threats it thrives on.

Here is our guest Joe Lauria unplugged!

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

A kind of “No Fly� list for emails

We had just emailed the link to our interview discussing the ‘real’ history of Afghanistan on Sibel Edmond’s boilingfrogspost.  As soon as it was emailed a Verizon response spit back immediately with a notice declaring the email we had just sent was spam.   When the culprit turned out to be our friend Sibel’s website we called Verizon to clear up the problem. This was clearly not spam and should be easily reinstated, we thought. While a very chatty employee attempted and failed to fix our problem, we innocently asked how can we get this address back in business. That is when the real fun began. According to the laws of Verizon Central, once you’ve been labeled spam, there is only one course of action and it goes like this:

1. Verizon uses an unnamed third party who decides what is spam.

2. This unnamed third party also reviews complaints like ours.

3. We were told to send the “offending” email to spamdetector.update@verizon.net.

4. The unnamed third party would make a secret decision within 24 hours.

5. If the unnamed third party decides it is spam, regardless of our complaint we will not hear back.

That’s it. There is no recourse to challenge the decision. There isn’t even a confirmation that the email we sent to this third party was received at all.  Of course, after 24 hours we still couldn’t send out an email containing the link. Read more È

Parental Controls on Everyone

In Part one of my piece, I attempted to explain the nature and scope of the US Warrantless Wiretap Program and the growing Surveillance Regime being built in this country. In Part 2, I will compare and contrast the growth and structure of the aforementioned Surveillance Regimes with other countries’ corresponding Systems of surveillance and control. I will also spotlight the International Surveillance Industry and its efforts to market its products by offering this technology to governmental power centers around the world.

Back in 1992, I was living in Vallejo, Ca, a working-class/Navy town in the northeastern San Francisco Bay Area. At that time, there was a local news story about a local drug dealer facing his third-strike conviction under California’s Three-Strikes law who had a brilliant idea. If I blow up the police evidence room and destroy my incriminating evidence, they can’t convict me. He knew the local police evidence storage wasn’t in the Police station, but at the local library of all places. He also knew that if he blew up just the library, sooner or later, the police would get around to him as a suspect. So he hired two other guys he knew who actually managed to find and steal enough explosives to construct three bombs. They planted the first bomb outside the local Solano County government office which detonated late at night doing little damage. The second bomb they planted against the outside wall of the evidence storage room at the library, but a local kid discovered it and the police were able to successfully defuse the bomb. So the two guys planted the third bomb next to the ATM at the local Wells Fargo branch, which also detonated with little damage, as another diversion. Unfortunately, for all concerned, the ATM camera had captured perfect pictures of the two men and police were able to solve the case in short order.

I offer the preceding story to illustrate a point. Had those 2 men just left town in 1992, taken a powder, gone to Buffalo, chances are they would have probably gotten away with it as the surveillance technology had not become so advanced, ingrained and integrated into society. Had those guys attempted the same crime today, their first bomb placement would have been recorded by surveillance cameras surrounding the government building, their facial features subjected to facial recognition software and their identities established from police and prison records, their fingerprints correlated to evidence from the explosives theft site, and their movements tracked from RFID chips embedded in their new “Real ID� driver’s licenses  thus apprehending them before they had a chance to place their second bomb.

I had my first personal experience in Biometric Access in 2000 at Level 3. I had been administratively transferred from the Outside Plant Department on the Central Coast of California to the LA Metro office as I had responsibilities for their fiber routes out to San Bernardino and up to Santa Barbara. Level 3 had installed fingerprint scanners at all access points into their equipment rooms and my prints had to be inputted into the system. I also saw the installations of workplace cameras throughout the facility, where the main long haul fibers terminated into my equipment and then branched off to two floors full of Cisco routers. Since Level 3 was marketing itself as “The Carriers’ Carrierâ€� and selling off a lot of dark fiber to other firms, I took note. Read more È

The Mighty Agency on it’s Knees in a Legal Battle

After 15 years of legal battles the CIA agrees to pay $3 million to a former DEA agent who accused a former CIA official of illegally eavesdropping on him as part of a joint CIA and State Department effort to thwart DEA’s anti-narcotics mission in Burma in the early 1990s.

Richard Horn was stationed in Burma in the early 1990s as the DEA country attaché to Burma, a nation that is ranked as one of the top opium poppy producing countries in the world. He was in charge of overseeing DEA’s mission in Burma involving eradication of the opium poppy, which is used to produce heroin.

Bill Conroy of Narco News covers the latest on State Secrets Privilege recipient Richard Horn. As always Conroy dares to dig and cover this significant story when the rest of the media stenographers are avoiding it like the plague and as they are told by their mighty government sources above.

“The CIA’s efforts to undermine Horn’s work in Burma in getting that nation’s government to stem the flow of heroin to the United States should come as no surprise to those who are familiar with the “Agency’s� history. It seems the CIA, over the decades, has often found itself in the corner of narco-traffickers and thugs who support the Agency’s covert objectives in areas deemed critical to U.S. special interests – whether that be in Southeast Asia, Central Asia or Latin America.�

The CIA list of hotshots involved in the case includes former CIA Director George Tenet and recently retired Acting CIA General Counsel John Rizzo. Tenet and Rizzo played major roles in setting up the legal basis to justify the CIA’s use of torture. Here is Mr. Rizzo in action during the agency’s cover up operation on torture:

Conroy sums up the latest status of the case and the potential deserved sanctions that may be brought against Tenet, Rizzo, and other current and former CIA culprits:

And now, as part of the Horn case filed in a Washington D.C. federal court, we find a U.S. District judge, former FISA court member Royce Lamberth, opening the door for sanctions to be brought (as a result of the fraud, or lie, perpetrated on the court) against Tenet and Rizzo — as well as several other current and former CIA officials, among whom is Robert Eatinger, the current Acting Deputy General Counsel for Operations in the CIA’s Office of General Counsel (OGC).

If Lamberth’s judicial opinions in the Horn case are allowed to remain in the court record — to be recalled and cited going forward by other lawyers, judges and academics — then untold damage could be done to the reputation of the CIA and its leadership. Those judicial opinions memorializing the CIA’s fraud on the court also would serve as a permanent reminder of the occasionally dubious credibility of the Agency’s pronouncements invoking national security and the state-secrets privilege.

As part of this article Conroy provides a complete timeline and background on Horn’s case, involved CIA culprits, and of course, the mind-boggling and nauseating conclusions and implications. I highly encourage you to read Bill Conroy’s A+ piece: Click Here. Afterwards we will have plenty to discuss over here, and plenty to show those who write off CIA’s long past and still present involvement in global Narco-Trafficking as fiction or conspiracy!

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

Boiling Frogs Post: Filling the gaps in in-depth coverage

The crisis in journalism was brought on mostly by industry consolidation and by media owners in denial about wasting billions on consultants, who recommended firing reporters and displacing serious news with puzzles and celebrity-worship, even of business and political leaders. The public must depend on the press for protection against abuses of power by those leaders, not to be distracted from them.

Beneath news of political campaigns, bills in Congress and the latest wars is a deep politics that is going largely uncovered: first, because its participants try to keep it secret and second, because Resources for in-depth reporting have been sharply cut back.    

Amateurish blogs, though raising issues the established media doesn’t, can’t be a substitute for serious journalism. This site is an attempt to fill the gaps in in-depth coverage. I appeal to readers to generously support it.

Joe Lauria

PLEASE DONATE NOW

Joe Lauria is an author, foreign affairs correspondent and investigative reporter. He has covered the United Nations for 19 years for numerous newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the London Daily Telegraph, the Montreal Gazette and the Johannesburg Star. Joe is a member of the Sunday Times of London’s investigative unit. He is co-author of A Political Odyssey, a look at America’s defense industry and the false threats it thrives on.

This project is solely dependent on your donations. Your contributions will allow us to:

• Purchase and publish investigative news stories and exposés
• Bring to you in-depth commercial free Podcast interviews
• Present independent editorials and analyses
• Showcase original editorial cartoons
• Facilitate lively discussions
• Maintain & Manage this Website

We need your support to make this project a reality. Please contribute what you can, and many thanks for all you do.

PLEASE DONATE NOW

National Security Letters, the Deceitful Media & the Convergence of Interests

This week we interviewed Mark Klein, the AT&T whistleblower; the interview should be posted in 3 or 4 weeks. I know you’re going to find it interesting and enlightening. Speaking of AT&T, check out our contributor Ishmael’s informative interview with Jeff Farias here.

I have a few noteworthy tidbits below. Don’t pay attention to their publication dates, since the issues, these cases and reports, are ‘timeless’ in nature.

Another Police State Government Villains & an Irate Minority Fighter Story

This week the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a privacy watchdog organization, released a comprehensive and eye-opening report on a bogus subpoena issued by a US attorney in Indiana to force Indymedia.us , an independent alternative news site to hand over all the data containing about their users who visited the site on a particular day. Not only that, consistent with other National Security Letters practices, the Justice Department issued gag order to prevent the site from speaking about the subpoena:

The report describes how, earlier this year, U.S. attorneys issued a federal grand jury subpoena to Indymedia.us administrator Kristina Clair demanding “all IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us” for a particular date, potentially identifying every person who visited any news story on the Indymedia site. As the report explains, this overbroad demand for internet records not only violated federal privacy law but also violated Clair’s First Amendment rights, by ordering her not to disclose the existence of the subpoena without a U.S. attorney’s permission.

Because Indymedia follows EFF’s Best Practices for Online Service Providers and does not keep historical IP logs, there was no information for Indymedia to hand over, and the government withdrew the subpoena. However, as the report describes, that wasn’t the end of the tale: Ms. Clair wanted EFF to be able to tell the story of the subpoena and shine a light on the government’s illegal demand, yet the subpoena ordered silence. Under pressure from EFF, the government admitted that the subpoena’s gag order had no legal basis, and ultimately chose not to go to court to try to force Ms. Clair’s silence despite earlier threats to do so.

This is another story of our government villains determined to butcher the Constitution and speed up our descent towards a police state. This is another example illustrating how government abuses are thriving and expanding in secrecy. In this case, it took an irate, a determined, and a believer in Constitutional Rights, to get up and challenge the attempted despotism. In this particular case, the despotic villains backed down. But as EFF appropriately questions:

How often does the government attempt such illegal fishing expeditions through internet data? How many online service providers have received similarly bogus demands, and handed over how much data, violating how many internet users’ privacy? How many of those subpoena recipients have been intimidated into silence by unconstitutional gag orders?

Let’s hope the number of those who choose to speak up and fight back keeps increasing. But meanwhile, in addition to sitting and wishing and hoping, let us each be one of the irate minority who keeps on fighting until we become the majority, and the villains are restrained and ruled by we the people.

The Deceitful Media Pimping Tyranny

Freedom daily had a well-presented piece by James Bovard on the US media. I get tons of links and references everyday, and usually all I can do is a quick glance. With this one I was hooked after the first paragraph, and I’m sure those of you who’ve been visiting my site for a while would know why:

Why do politicians so easily get away with telling lies? In large part, because the news media are more interested in bonding with politicians than in exposing them. Americans are encouraged to believe that the media will serve as a check and a balance on the government. Instead, the press too often volunteer as unpaid pimps, helping politicians deceive the public. Read more È