Dedicated to fighting authoritarianism, bigotry, greed, corruption, climate change denial, white supremacy, racism, stupidity and general evil, as well as the exploration of interesting ideas and conspiracy theories including 9/11, UFOs, ET's, the paranormal and the general unknown.
A majority of states have bills passed or have proposed bills which affirm 10th Amendment rights. Some affirm additional rights and/or give specific reasons. New Hampshire has written the most aggressive legislation.
With the economy collapsing, it is a very real and immediate danger that the federal government can turn into a completely criminal and fascist government. They’ll put foreign troops on their streets. They’ll grab people to put in forced labor or concentration camps if they are unemployed or protesting. They’ll conduct experiments on these prisoners.
This is especially true since a private corporation owned by a small group of people, who own over half the world’s wealth, control our currency and monetary policy through the Federal Reserve. They also have such power over the world as a whole through the World Bank, IMF, most other national central banks, numerous well-funded non-government organizations, and numerous corrupted government officials.
The Federal Reserve owners want the economy to collapse so they can grab real assets and power. Their whole monetary system is a giant ponzi scheme designed to fail because money is based on the issuance of debt, and the interest owed is not put into the system except through more debt with more interest.
The stock market has dropped 50% in value since this started last year. This is a great depression. The unemployment will rise. The spending of the two bailouts plus the trillions the Federal Reserve has printed will cause inflation to rise sharply. This same situation happened to the Soviet Union. This is not just an economic recession.
This is not just about mortgages since the value of mortgages is much less than the spending packages. The financial releveraging of the mortgages in the form of financial derivatives has magnified the problem. Giving loans to high risk individuals and giving ARM loans did stimulate the problem. The manipulation of oil prices through dollar devaluation and speculation also helped stimulate problem.
This current economic problem is largely due to the fact that we’ve been existing on borrowed time, running huge trade deficits and growing debt exponentially. Our assets now exceed our debt. We now owe more interest on our debts than we can possibly earn. The debt ponzi scheme our currency is based has busted and has started the process of collapse. We can’t spend our way out of this because we’re out of assets and out of credit.
This group of men who own most of the world’s currencies and wealth want complete centralized control of printing money. They also want a powerful undemocratic regional and world government which can usurp the sovereignty of national governments. They want more European Unions. They want a stronger United Nations. They want to push their own agendas, which include population reduction through eugenics. The threat is real and well documented in policy documents and in the mainstream press.
The Federal Reserve is doing to the United States exactly what the IMF and World Bank do to third world nations. Unless we wake up and get our head out of our fluoride and Prozac ass, we’re going to find ourselves as a third world nation, if not in the middle of World War III, the Fourth Reich, civil war, and revolution.
The only way we can stop the U.S. government and these banks is through the states. If the states are united, the people are united. If the people are united, the U.S. government ceases to function, and the states are able to reform a functioning and lawful U.S. government instead of the completely corrupt, rogue, destructive, and lawless federal government we have now.
Armed rebellion is not going to work. It will just result in a lot of dead people because the U.S. government has excessive firepower. Violent rebellion is exactly what the men in control of our money want.
I encourage everyone to write, email, or call their state legislatures to encourage the passage of such bills. You may also wish to contact your Federal Reserve senators and representative letting them know you’ve lost faith in their ability to represent the people of the United States.
We need stronger legislation with stronger teeth to make a stand peacefully and legally. We must act to prevent what is happening in Arcadia, Iowa, with the Iowa National Guard training for door-to-door gun confiscation.
We can’t allow the U.S. government to continue to usurp state sovereignty. If we allow the U.S. government to do this, we’re going to have a lot of dead people in this nation because a lot of people aren’t going to give up their guns and aren’t going to tolerate the U.S. military, corporate militias, and foreign troops invading their communities and homes.
The states may be forced to stand down. However, we started the process of thinking locally to solve our problems and to make it through these tough times. We want local, responsible, and focused local and state law enforcement to maintain order. We don’t want foreign troops and the U.S. military to do this for us.
We should consider training our local and state law enforcement to stop such door-to-door terrorism by agents of the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve. We should consider making it a high crime in the state for a federal official to offer a bribe or give threats and a high crime to receive such a bribe. We should consider forming voluntary local and state minutemen under the authority of local and state government to maintain order in emergencies.
The global economic meltdown has already caused bank failures, bankruptcies, plant closings, and foreclosures and will, in the coming year, leave many tens of millions unemployed across the planet. But another perilous consequence of the crash of 2008 has only recently made its appearance: increased civil unrest and ethnic strife. Someday, perhaps, war may follow.
As people lose confidence in the ability of markets and governments to solve the global crisis, they are likely to erupt into violent protests or to assault others they deem responsible for their plight, including government officials, plant managers, landlords, immigrants, and ethnic minorities. (The list could, in the future, prove long and unnerving.) If the present economic disaster turns into what President Obama has referred to as a "lost decade," the result could be a global landscape filled with economically-fueled upheavals.
Indeed, if you want to be grimly impressed, hang a world map on your wall and start inserting red pins where violent episodes have already occurred. Athens (Greece), Longnan (China), Port-au-Prince (Haiti), Riga (Latvia), Santa Cruz (Bolivia), Sofia (Bulgaria), Vilnius (Lithuania), and Vladivostok (Russia) would be a start. Many other cities from Reykjavik, Paris, Rome, and Zaragoza to Moscow and Dublin have witnessed huge protests over rising unemployment and falling wages that remained orderly thanks in part to the presence of vast numbers of riot police. If you inserted orange pins at these locations -- none as yet in the United States -- your map would already look aflame with activity. And if you're a gambling man or woman, it's a safe bet that this map will soon be far better populated with red and orange pins.
Unlike dogs and cats, who have had thousands of years to adapt to us, nonhuman primates have the psyches they need to survive in a jungle or on a savannah, not in a human home. Most people buy them when they are cute little babies. At this point, like infants of most (mammalian) species, they are tractable and submissive. However, this (predictably) doesn't last. When they hit puberty, many of them become aggressive, and try to start dominance fights with members of what they think of as their pack (i.e., your household.) Sometimes they start with the pack's weakest members (i.e., your children.) Since most apes and monkeys are very strong, and have vicious bites, this is not pleasant.The rest is worth a read. I have to imagine that the way primates act in human captivity gives some intriguing clues about human behavior.
Moreover, they are agile, athletic, clever, inquisitive, and have opposable thumbs. As someone who has owned cats and dogs, I have often been very grateful that they had neither the intelligence nor the opposable thumbs required to do things like open cupboards and turn doorknobs. Monkeys do. And they love to tear things apart for fun -- the contents of your pantry, your tax files, your clothes, the curtains, whatever.
Doublethink and doubletalk with regard to “nationalizing” or “socializing” the banks and other sectors is a travesty of political and economic discussion from the 17th through mid-20th centuries. Society’s basic grammar of thought, the vocabulary to discuss political and economic topics, is being turned inside-out in an effort to ward off discussion of the policy solutions posed by the classical economists and political philosophers that made Western civilization “Western.”
Today’s clash of civilization is not really with the Orient; it is with our own past, with the Enlightenment itself and its evolution into classical political economy and Progressive Era social reforms aimed at freeing society from the surviving trammels of European feudalism. What we are seeing is propaganda designed to deceive, to distract attention from economic reality so as to promote the property and financial interests from whose predatory grasp classical economists set out to free the world. What is being attempted is nothing less than an attempt to destroy the intellectual and moral edifice of what took Western civilization eight centuries to develop, from the 12th century Schoolmen discussing Just Price through 19th and 20th century classical economic value theory.
Any idea of “socialism from above,” in the sense of “socializing the risk,” is old-fashioned oligarchy – kleptocratic statism from above. Real nationalization occurs when governments act in the public interest to take over private property. The 19th-century program to nationalize the land (it was the first plank of the Communist Manifesto) did not mean anything remotely like the government taking over estates, paying off their mortgages at public expense and then giving it back to the former landlords free and clear of encumbrances and taxes. It meant taking the land and its rental income into the public domain, and leasing it out at a user fee ranging from actual operating cost to a subsidized rate or even freely as in the case of streets and roads.
Nationalizing the banks along these lines would mean that the government would supply the nation’s credit needs. The Treasury would become the source of new money, replacing commercial bank credit. Presumably this credit would be lent out for economically and socially productive purposes, not merely to inflate asset prices while loading down households and business with debt as has occurred under today’s commercial bank lending policies.
How neoliberals falsify the West’s political history
The fact that today’s neoliberals claim to be the intellectual descendants of Adam Smith make it necessary to restore a more accurate historical perspective. Their concept of “free markets” is the antithesis of Smith’s. It is the opposite of that of the classical political economists down through John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx and the Progressive Era reforms that sought to create markets free of extractive rentier claims by special interests whose institutional power can be traced back to medieval Europe and its age of military conquest.
Economic writers from the 16th through 20th centuries recognized that free markets required government oversight to prevent monopoly pricing and other charges levied by special privilege. By contrast, today’s neoliberal ideologues are public relations advocates for vested interests to depict a “free market” is one free of government regulation, “free” of anti-trust protection, and even of protection against fraud, as evidenced by the SEC’s refusal to move against Madoff, Enron, Citibank et al.). The neoliberal ideal of free markets is thus basically that of a bank robber or embezzler, wishing for a world without police so as to be sufficiently free to siphon off other peoples’ money without constraint.
A middle-school student with autism was Tased twice by a Carmel police officer, according to a lawsuit filed by the boy's parents against the Police Department, one of its officers and a local school district.
According to the suit, the electrical bursts temporarily knocked the 90-pound boy unconscious during a confrontation at Creekside Middle School. The boy, who was 14 at the time, was taken to a local hospital before being released to his mother.
He was finally arrested last July by Hezbollah, which now has perhaps the most powerful intelligence apparatus in this country. It handed him to the Lebanese military — along with his brother Yusuf, who is accused of helping him spy — and he awaits trial by a military court.
Several current and former military officials agreed to provide details about his case on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to discuss it before the trial began. Their accounts tallied with details provided by Mr. Jarrah’s relatives and former colleagues.
It is not the family’s first brush with notoriety. One of Mr. Jarrah’s cousins, Ziad al-Jarrah, was among the 19 hijackers who carried out the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, though the men were 20 years apart in age and do not appear to have known each other well.
Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, declined to discuss Mr. Jarrah’s situation, saying, “It is not our practice to publicly talk about any such allegations in this case or in any case.”
The US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), the Army's criminal Investigation Command and the Justice Department are investigating US soldiers and officials in the alleged misuse of a portion of the $125 billion initially sent to Iraq for reconstruction shortly after the fall of Saddam.Where exactly did all the money go? This story is frustratingly vague. How can so much money disappear with so little accounting? Though of course this pales in comparison to the 2.3 trillion dollars the DOD couldn't account for right before 9/11/01.
Monday, The Independent's Iraq correspondent Patrick Cockburn reported the inspectors believe misuse may account for over $50 billion, exceeding the scope of Bernie Madoff's massive Ponzi scheme and making it potentially the "greatest fraud in US history."
"In one case, auditors working for SIGIR discovered that $57.8m was sent in 'pallet upon pallet of hundred-dollar bills' to the US comptroller for south-central Iraq, Robert J Stein Jr, who had himself photographed standing with the mound of money," wrote Cockburn. "He is among the few US officials who were in Iraq to be convicted of fraud and money-laundering.
Attempting to prosecute political opponents at home or facilitating their prosecution abroad, however much one disagrees with their policy choices while in office, is like pouring acid into our democratic machinery. As the history of the late, unlamented independent counsel statute taught, once a Pandora's box is opened, its contents can wreak havoc equally across the political and party spectrum. If, for example, al-Qaeda is nothing more than a criminal conspiracy -- as some have claimed for many years -- President Obama's charge sheet has already been started. By authorizing continued Predator missile attacks against al-Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan, he has directly targeted those "civilians" with deadly force. That is a war crime.
"A former member of a C.I.A. transport team has described the 'takeout' of prisoners as a carefully choreographed twenty-minute routine, during which a suspect was hog-tied, stripped naked, photographed, hooded, sedated with anal suppositories, placed in diapers, and transported by plane to a secret location. A person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry, referring to cavity searches and the frequent use of suppositories during the takeout of detainees, likened the treatment to 'sodomy.' He said, 'It was used to absolutely strip the detainee of any dignity. It breaks down someone’s sense of impenetrability. The interrogation became a process not just of getting information but of utterly subordinating the detainee through humiliation.' The former C.I.A. officer confirmed that the agency frequently photographed the prisoners naked, 'because it’s demoralizing."and this
A US military investigation, carried out by Major General Antonio Taguba, uncovered evidence of war crimes against the inmates, including: breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.
AMHERST, N.Y. — The commuter plane that crashed near Buffalo on Thursday night slammed to the ground flat on its belly, with almost no forward momentum and facing opposite its intended route, seconds after two automatic warnings to the pilots that the plane was not moving fast enough to stay aloft, the National Transportation Safety Board said on Saturday.There are some other interesting details in the article, but the key point is that the crash makes little sense. I imagine either they will: 1) blame it all on ice, or 2) invent some new theory to explain what happened. And foul play will never be suggested by the officials.
The description indicates that the plane, a Bombardier Dash 8 Q400, suffered an aerodynamic stall, meaning the flow of air over the wings was either disrupted or too slow to sustain flight, but the reason why remains a mystery.
Icing, which the crew of the plane reported shortly before the crash, is one possible reason, but Steven Chealander, the safety board member assigned to the investigation and a retired airline captain, said the aircraft had a sophisticated ice protection system. (snip)
According to investigators, the last minute of flight, as described so far, unfolded this way: As the plane flew about 1,600 feet above the ground, southwest toward a runway at the Buffalo airport, the crew lowered the landing gear. Twenty seconds later, one of the two pilots set a lever to extend the flaps, movable metal panels on the back of each wing, to 15 degrees, a standard step before landing.
Immediately, the airplane’s nose began to pitch radically up and down, and soon after, the airplane rolled left and right. A stick shaker, a device that warns that the plane is flying so slowly that its wings are about to stall, losing lift, gave its warning by shaking the yoke in the pilots’ hands. Then the stick pusher came on, a system that literally takes matters out of the pilots’ hands by pushing the yoke forward, to push the nose down and increase airspeed to avoid stall.
The crew increased engine power, but never regained control: the plane hit the house, having spun around to face northeast, although it had been flying southwest. It happened so fast that the flaps never made it to 15 degrees.
And the plane was moving so slowly that it hit only a single house in the densely settled neighborhood. A garage behind the house remained intact.
The cockpit voice recorder, which investigators will examine more thoroughly on Sunday, recorded the captain and the first officer noting ice on the windshield and the leading edge of the wing. The crews of other planes also noted icing conditions. But there is nothing yet to indicate that conditions were unusual for a February night in the Buffalo area.
NEW YORK (CNN) -- A leading human rights official known for her expertise on the Rwandan genocide was traveling on the Newark-to-Buffalo flight that crashed into a house, killing all 49 people aboard the plane and one person on the ground.I would bet she had some explosive findings in that report on the recent Congo slaughter...
Alison Des Forges died in the crash of Flight 3407 outside Buffalo, New York, on Thursday night.
Alison Des Forges, senior adviser for Human Rights Watch's Africa Division for almost two decades, was on Flight 3407, the group said Friday.
"Alison's loss is a devastating blow not only to Human Rights Watch but also to the people of Rwanda and the Great Lakes region," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of the humanitarian organization, said in a statement.
Des Forges, who lived in Buffalo, spent four years in Rwandadocumenting the 1994 genocide and had testified about that atrocity and the current situation in central Africa before U.N. and congressional panels, the group said.
Human Rights Watch, which is based in New York, said she was "best known for her award-winning account of the genocide, 'Leave None to Tell the Story.' "
"She was truly wonderful, the epitome of the human rights activist -- principled, dispassionate, committed to the truth and to using that truth to protect ordinary people.
"She was among the first to highlight the ethnic tensions that led to the genocide, and when it happened and the world stood by and watched, Alison did everything humanly possible to save people. Then she wrote the definitive account. There was no one who knew more and did more to document the genocide and to help bring the perpetrators to justice."
The group notes Des Forges' even-handedness in the Rwandan conflict. She insisted that the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the group that toppled the "genocidal regime," be held to account for its killings during and after the slaughter. She was banned from Rwanda last year after Human Rights Watch highlighted problems with its legal system.
"She never forgot about the crimes committed by the Rwandan government's forces, and that was unpopular, especially in the United States and in Britain," said Roth. "She was really a thorn in everyone's side, and that's a testament to her integrity and sense of principle and commitment to the truth."
She most recently was working on a report about killings in eastern Congo.
"My Silence Cannot Be Bought" by Beverly Eckert
I've chosen to go to court rather than accept a payoff from the 9/11 victims compensation fund. Instead, I want to know what went so wrong with our intelligence and security systems that a band of religious fanatics was able to turn four U.S passenger jets into an enemy force, attack our cities and kill 3,000 civilians with terrifying ease. I want to know why two 110-story skyscrapers collapsed in less than two hours and why escape and rescue options were so limited.
I am suing because unlike other investigative avenues, including congressional hearings and the 9/11 commission, my lawsuit requires all testimony be given under oath and fully uses powers to compel evidence.
The victims fund was not created in a spirit of compassion. Rather, it was a tacit acknowledgement by Congress that it tampered with our civil justice system in an unprecedented way. Lawmakers capped the liability of the airlines at the behest of lobbyists who descended on Washington while the Sept. 11 fires still smoldered.
And this liability cap protects not just the airlines, but also World Trade Center builders, safety engineers and other defendants.
The caps on liability have consequences for those who want to sue to shed light on the mistakes of 9/11. It means the playing field is tilted steeply in favor of those who need to be held accountable. With the financial consequences other than insurance proceeds removed, there is no incentive for those whose negligence contributed to the death toll to acknowledge their failings or implement reforms. They can afford to deny culpability and play a waiting game.
By suing, I've forfeited the "$1.8 million average award" for a death claim I could have collected under the fund. Nor do I have any illusions about winning money in my suit. What I do know is I owe it to my husband, whose death I believe could have been avoided, to see that all of those responsible are held accountable. If we don't get answers to what went wrong, there will be a next time. And instead of 3,000 dead, it will be 10,000. What will Congress do then?
Beverly Eckert, whose husband was killed in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, joined other relatives of 9/11 victims and victims of the 2000 attack on the destroyer Cole last Friday in a meeting with President Obama to discuss changes in the handling of terrorism suspects.
On Thursday night, Ms. Eckert, 57, was aboard Continental Flight 3407 when it crashed near Buffalo, killing all 49 people on board and one person on the ground. Ms. Eckert, who lived in Stamford, Conn., was traveling to her hometown in western New York to help celebrate what would have been her husband’s 58th birthday.
“Beverly lost her husband on 9/11 and became a tireless advocate for those families whose lives were forever changed on that September day,” President Obama said at the White House on Friday morning. “And in keeping with that passionate commitment, she was on her way to Buffalo to mark what would have been her husband’s birthday and launch a scholarship in his memory. So she was an inspiration to me and to so many others and I pray that her family finds peace and comfort in the hard days ahead.”
(snip)
Mr. Rooney was one of 32 Aon employees who were at work on the 98th floor of the trade center’s south tower. When the north tower was hit at 8:46 a.m., Mr. Rooney saw the devastation and called his wife at her job in Connecticut, but she had not yet arrived, according to “102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers” (Times Books, 2005), by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn of The Times.
Mr. Rooney left his wife of 21 years a voice-mail message at 8:59 a.m.:
Hey, Beverly, this is Sean, in case you get this message. There has been an explosion in World Trade One — that’s the other building. It looks like a plane struck it. It’s on fire at about the 90th floor. And it’s, it’s — it’s horrible. Bye.
A couple of minutes later, he left her a second voice-mail message to say that he was O.K. In the background was a public-address announcement telling occupants they could evacuate.
Later that morning, around 9:30 a.m., Mr. Rooney and other people trapped in the tower attempted to climb to the roof, only to find that the doors were locked and the way blocked. He pounded on a door but found that it wouldn’t move, he told his wife by phone. She urged him to try again while she waited on the line. When he returned to the phone, he said the door still would not move and told his wife, “Tell me what you see on TV.”
Ms. Eckert later recounted in an interview, “His breathing was becoming more labored. He was telling me he loved me.”
By then, he was on the 105th floor, on the north side of the south tower. While she listened, Ms. Eckert dialed 911 on another line; the operator said emergency crews were on their way. In fact, only one of three stairways in the south tower — Stairway A — was unobstructed. Mr. Rooney never made it to that stairway.
After her husband’s death, Ms. Eckert was a co-chairwoman of the 9/11 Family Steering Committee, a group of victims’ relatives who were committed to looking into the government failures that led up to the attacks. Ms. Eckert supported the work of the 9/11 Commission, and, after its recommendations were released, she urged Congress to adopt their findings.
(snip)
Ms. DiNucci said Ms. Eckert’s top concerns were transparency in the investigations into 9/11, the improvement of building codes and emergency communications, and her desire to see Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is believed to be the mastermind of the attacks and is in United States custody, put on trial.
(snip)
Mr. Verderame recalled how Ms. Eckert had plunged herself into 9/11 advocacy. “Boy, we didn’t see hide nor hair of Beverly for a long long time because she was so involved with all these Sept. 11 widows’ activities and testimony in Washington, and then we started seeing this other Shawn here, I guess around 2003, maybe 2004, perhaps. And he quickly became a permanent fixture around here. I would see him about — a couple of neighborhood barbecues that I would see them at.”
Blackwater Worldwide is abandoning its tarnished brand name. Blackwater officials said Friday its family of two dozen business will now operate under the name Xe (zee), pronounced like the letter "z."
Sen. Susan Collins, the Maine GOP dealmaker who's been in the limelight this week for helping to pass a watered down stimulus, has been talking a good game about the need to avoid wasting taxpayer money. But it looks like Collins also worked today to strip from the final bill a measure that's crucial to exposing that waste.
Here's what happened:
The House stimulus bill contained a provision designed to protect federal whistleblowers. Currently, those protections are shockingly weak. According to the Project On Government Oversight, whistleblowers who are fired or demoted can file a complaint with a government board -- but over the last eight years, that board has ruled in favor of whistleblowers only twice in 55 cases.
More to the point, the protections were designed to encourage federal workers to point out cases where taxpayer money is subject to waste, fraud, or abuse -- a legitimate concern when Congress spends $800 billion, and one that centrists and Republicans have been particularly exercised about.
(snip) But, according to a person following the bill closely, Collins used today's conference committee to drastically water down the measure, citing national security concerns as the reason for her opposition.
So Obama is adopting the same expansive interpretation of the privilege as the Bush/Cheney administration, and using it in order to cover up American involvement in torture and rendition programs that have been in the public record already for years and can hardly even be said to be secrets, let alone state secrets that are vital to U.S. national security. This is decidedly not change we can believe in.
Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopan janitor who was seeking asylum in Britain, allegedly admitted to browsing a story that instructs readers how to building a nuclear bomb. Trouble is, that story was apparently a joke.
Mohamed says that he made the admission -- and others relating to purported terrorism -- after being beaten, hung by his wrists for a week, having a gun held to his head, and held in a dungeon-like cell at the US prison at Guantanamo Bay.
A British newspaper reported Sunday that the "offending article," "How to Build An H-Bomb," was actually published in Seven Days magazine and re-posted on other websites.
"Written by Barbara Ehrenreich, the publication’s food editor, Rolling Stone journalist Peter Biskind and scientist Michio Kaku, it claims that a nuclear weapon can be made ‘using a bicycle pump’ and with liquid uranium ‘poured into a bucket and swung round,'" the Daily Mail wrote Sunday.
"We can reveal that the story which apparently led to Mohamed’s ordeal could not possibly have been used by a terrorist to build a nuclear weapon," the paper added. "The satirical article, published in Seven Days magazine, says its authors were given ‘three days to cook up a workable H-bomb. They did and we have decided to share their culinary secrets with you.’
"Not that Seven Days supports nuclear terrorism," it adds. "We don’t. We would prefer to die from familiar poisons like low-level radiation, microwaves, DDT or food dyes, rather than unexpectedly, say as hostage to a Latvian nationalists brandishing a home-made bomb.'"
The CIA decided that despite its humorous intentions, the reading of the piece was enough to accuse the 30-year-old janitor of plotting a dirty bomb attack, Mohamed's lawyer said. Mohamed was also accused of being trained at an Al Qaeda paramilitary camp in Afghanistan; his lawyer says he visited Afghanistan to see the Muslim world for himself.
"Unclassified evidence corroborates Binyam’s claims that he was threatened – at the time the White House was obsessed by the idea terrorists had access to nuclear materials," said Mohamed's lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith. "Binyam said that he told them about a website he had once seen on the internet called How To Build An H-Bomb. He said that this was a joke but they thought it might be serious.
"I am speculating but I think this news was sent up the line to the White House, which is when the paranoia kicked in," Stafford Smith added. "This is how they made their huge mistake, thinking he was a major terrorist as opposed to a London janitor."
Mohamed was subject not simply to apparent torture but also to the Bush Administration's extraordinary rendition program, in which terrorist suspects are kidnapped and put on private jets, then dropped in third-party countries that condone torture.
The charges of a dirty-bomb plot were later dropped -- just as they were against US citizen Jose Padilla, who was held in a military brig without charges for several years. Padilla was later convicted of other terror charges.
"The Foreign Secretary is refusing to release classified documents relating to Mohamed’s detention," the Mail added. "Last week, the High Court ruled that the 42 intelligence papers must remain secret. However, the judges insisted they had no choice because the Government had informed them of a ‘threat’ by the US to withdraw all intelligence co-operation with Britain if the papers were published by the court."
Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) criticized Senate "centrists" for cutting $40 billion in state aid from the stimulus package, noting that the aid, which appeared in the House version, was intended to stop states from "laying off cops and firefighters, money to help keep teachers going." Republican Sen. John Ensign of Nevada rejected Frank's comments, labeling the remarks "fearmongering." Indeed, Ensign seemed encouraged by the fact that state budgets, including his own, would have to be slashed, calling the budgets "bloated." He said, "What we should be doing is cutting back."The Republican position is even more inexplicable when they ignore their supporters in the business world.
Got that? As the recession worsens, and government spending is needed to prevent more Americans from losing their jobs, a leading Republican senator whose own state is about to get pummeled, believes it's a good idea to "cut back."
American spy chiefs have told the President that the CIA has launched a vast spying operation in the UK to prevent a repeat of the 9/11 attacks being launched from Britain.
They believe that a British-born Pakistani extremist entering the US under the visa waiver programme is the most likely source of another terrorist spectacular on American soil.
Intelligence briefings for Mr Obama have detailed a dramatic escalation in American espionage in Britain, where the CIA has recruited record numbers of informants in the Pakistani community to monitor the 2,000 terrorist suspects identified by MI5, the British security service.
A British intelligence source revealed that a staggering four out of 10 CIA operations designed to thwart direct attacks on the US are now conducted against targets in Britain.
And a former CIA officer who has advised Mr Obama told The Sunday Telegraph that the CIA has stepped up its efforts in the last month after the Mumbai massacre laid bare the threat from Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group behind the attacks, which has an extensive web of supporters in the UK.
The CIA has already spent 18 months developing a network of agents in Britain to combat al-Qaeda, unprecedented in size within the borders of such a close ally, according to intelligence sources in both London and Washington.
(snip)
The British official said: "The Americans run their own assets in the Pakistani community; they get their own intelligence. There's close cooperation with MI5 but they don't tell us the names of all their sources.
"Around 40 per cent of CIA activity on homeland threats is now in the UK. This is quite unprecedented."
(snip)
One former intelligence officer who does contract work for the CIA dismissed Britain as a "swamp" of jihadis.
(snip)
The British intelligence official revealed that CIA chiefs sent more resources to the UK because they were not prepared to see American citizens die as a result of MI5's inability to keep tabs on all suspects, even though the Security Service successfully uncovered the plot.
(snip)
For their part, some British officials are queasy that information obtained by the CIA from British Pakistanis was used to help target Mr Rauf, a British citizen, whom they would have preferred to capture and bring to trial.
(snip)
Tensions in transatlantic intelligence relations which were laid bare last week during the High Court battle over Binyam Mohamed, the British resident held in Guanatanamo Bay. British judges wanted to publish details of the torture administered to Mr Mohamed, an Ethiopian national, in US custody. But key paragraphs were blacked out after American officials threatened it could damage intelligence sharing between the two countries.
UK ministers must answer allegations that Britain was complicit in torture, a senior Conservative MP has said.
David Davis said a High Court ruling on Wednesday alleged that Binyam Mohamed, a UK resident held in the Guantanamo Bay camp in Cuba, had been tortured.
The judges also said the US threatened to withdraw intelligence help from the UK if details were released.
(snip)
The judges said they wanted the full details of the alleged torture to be published in the interests of safeguarding the rule of law, free speech and democratic accountability.
But they had been persuaded that it was not in the public interest to publish those details as the US government could then "inflict on the citizens of the United Kingdom a very considerable increase in the dangers they face at a time when a serious terrorist threat still pertains".
No United States president since Abraham Lincoln dared to go against the system and create his own money, as many of these so-called elected presidents were actually only instruments or puppets of the Bankers. That is until President John F. Kennedy came into office.
President Kennedy was not afraid to "buck the system", for he understood how the Federal Reserve System was being used to destroy the United States. As a just and honorable man, he could not tolerate such a system, for it smelled corruption from A to Z. Certainly he must have known about the Greenbacks which Abraham Lincoln created when he was in office.
On June 4th, 1963, President Kennedy signed a presidential document, called Executive Order 11110, which further amended Executive order 10289 of September 19th, 1951. This gave Kennedy, as President of the United States, legal clearance to create his own money to run the country, money that would belong to the people, an interest and debt-free money. He had printed United States Notes, completely ignoring the Federal Reserve Notes from the private banks of the Federal Reserve.
Our records show that Kennedy issued $4,292,893,825 of cash money. It was perfectly obvious that Kennedy was out to undermine the Federal Reserve System of the United States.
But it was only a few months later, in November of 1963, that the world received the shocking news of President Kennedy's assassination. No reason was given, of course, for anyone wanting to commit such an atrocious crime. But for those who knew anything about money and banking, it did not take long to put the pieces of the puzzle together. For surely, President Kennedy must have had it in mind to repeal the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, and return back to the United States Congress the power to create its own money.
It is interesting to note that, only one day after Kennedy's assassination, all the United States notes which Kennedy had issued were called out of circulation. Was this through an executive order of the newly-installed president, Lyndon B. Johnson? Or was he one of their instruments? At any rate, all of the money President Kennedy had created was destroyed. And not a word was said to the American people.
I blog about politics, interesting ideas and conspiracy theories. Many or most of the official stories for key events are lies. For instance, the 9/11 plane hijackings and crashes appear to be clever hoaxes. The WTC1, WTC2 and WTC7 towers were brought down by demolition, and there is evidence for the use of small nuclear bombs in the demolition of WTC1 and 2. It seems that 9/11 was an evil hoax foisted upon the world, done in order to spark the obscene "war on terror", to cover up financial fraud and to further the ends of the global elite. However, 9/11 was only part of the fraud and evil committed by the evil powers that be (PTB).
