Link: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/02/hbc-90004409

Army Private Brandon Neely served as a prison guard at Guantánamo in the first years the facility was in operation. With the Bush Administration, and thus the threat of retaliation against him, now gone, Neely decided to step forward and tell his story. “The stuff I did and the stuff I saw was just wrong,” he told the Associated Press. Neely describes the arrival of detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb, he details their sexual abuse by medical personnel, torture by other medical personnel, brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution, the first hunger strike and its causes, torturous shackling, positional torture, interference with religious practices and beliefs, verbal abuse, restriction of recreation, the behavior of mentally ill detainees, an isolation regime that was put in place for child-detainees, and his conversations with prisoners David Hicks and Rhuhel Ahmed. It makes for fascinating reading.

Link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6829416.ece?token=null&offset=12&page=2

A conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher(September 23 1989 : transcript) Thatcher: I wanted to raise some questions regarding the situation in the countries of Eastern Europe. I was deeply impressed by the courage of General Jaruzelski in Poland and by his patriotism. Of course, the future of Poland and its alliance with you are very important. I noticed that you reacted calmly to the results of the Polish elections and generally to processes taking part in this and other Eastern European countries. My understanding of your position is following: you welcome each country developing in its own way on the condition that Warsaw Pact stays. I understand this position perfectly. Now I would like to say something in complete confidence and would ask you not to record this part of our conversation. Gorbachev: I agree to your request. (The following part of the conversation is reproduced from memory) Thatcher: We are very concerned about the processes taking place in Eastern Germany. Some big changes could happen there, forced partly by the state of the society and partly by the illness of Erich Honecker. One example of this is the flight of thousands of people from the GDR to the FRG. All of this is on the surface, it is very important but even more important is something else. The reunification of Germany is not in the interests of Britain and Western Europe. It might look different from public pronouncements, in official communiqué at Nato meetings, but it is not worth paying ones attention to it. We do not want a united Germany. This would have led to a change to post-war borders and we can not allow that because such development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security.

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8245447.stm

[The five were Malcolm Rennie, Greg Shackleton, Gary Cunningham, Brian Peters and Tony Stewart] Australian police have launched a war crimes investigation into the deaths in East Timor in 1975 of the "Balibo Five" group of journalists. In 2007, an Australian coroner found that they were executed by Indonesian special forces in the town of Balibo. It is believed they were killed to stop them revealing details of an impending Indonesian invasion of East Timor. Indonesia maintains the men were killed in crossfire. An official said Jakarta had no intention of reopening the case. Successive Australian governments have accepted Indonesia's version of events. In June, East Timor President Jose Ramos Horta - a Timorese resistance commander at the time - accused Indonesian soldiers of having tortured and deliberately killed the journalists. "Allegations of war crimes committed overseas give rise to complex legal and factual issues that require careful consideration by law enforcement agencies before deciding to investigate," the Australian Federal Police (AFP) said in a statement.

Stalin’s Terror of 1937-1938: Political Genocide in the USSR. The publication of the English-language edition of Stalin’s Terror of 1937-1938: Political Genocide in the USSR by the late Marxist historian and sociologist Vadim Rogovin is a major contribution to the study of the purges that wiped out the entire generation of Bolshevik leaders and socialist workers and intellectuals who led the October 1917 Revolution and created the Soviet Union.

The appearance of this work in English is all the more important given the extent to which contemporary American and British historians have ignored the political motivations and objectives which determined Stalin’s actions between 1936 and 1939. Rogovin presents a compelling and uncompromisingly political interpretation of the Terror.

Stalin’s aim, the author insists, was to eliminate all traces of the substantial Marxist-inspired socialist opposition to his bureaucratic regime. Moreover, Stalin’s fixation on Trotsky was not, Rogovin maintains, an incidental phenomenon that served little more than propaganda purposes. Rather, Stalin perceived the exiled Trotsky as the most significant threat to his dictatorship. He was the personification of a revolutionary program and tradition that the bureaucratic regime was determined to extirpate.

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/03/drugs-prohibition-latin-america

While Latin American countries decriminalise narcotics, Britain persists in prohibition that causes vast human suffering. Simon Jenkins guardian.co.uk, Thursday 3 September 2009 20.30 BST Article historyI guess it had to happen this way. The greatest social menace of the new century is not terrorism but drugs, and it is the poor who will have to lead the revolution. The global trade in illicit narcotics ranks with that in oil and arms. Its prohibition wrecks the lives of wealthy and wretched, east and west alike. It fills jails, corrupts politicians and plagues nations. It finances wars from Afghanistan to Colombia. It is utterly mad. There is no sign of reform emanating from the self-satisfied liberal democracies of west Europe or north America. Reform is not mentioned by Barack Obama, Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy or Angela Merkel. Their countries can sustain prohibition, just, by extravagant penal repression and by sweeping the consequences underground. Politicians will smirk and say, as they did in their youth, that they can "handle" drugs.

Link: http://www.truthout.org/090609C

Chief executives of the top 20 financial firms that received taxpayer bailout funds averaged $13.78 million in personal compensation last year, according to a report released today. The annual "Executive Excess" study, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies, this year looked at bank recipients of Troubled Asset Relief Program funds. Those 20 firms, which eliminated more than 160,000 jobs since Jan. 1, 2008, awarded a combined total of $3.2 billion- including bonuses - to their top five executives. The compensation for those 100 top executives "would bankroll 66 weeks of unemployment insurance benefits for 160,000 workers," the report said. "America's executive pay bubble remains unpopped," said Sarah Anderson, who has worked on 15 previous executive pay reports.

Link: http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/solutions/forest_solutions/protecting-trees-protecting.html

We already know we are putting too much heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2) into the air when we burn fossil fuels to generate electricity, fuel our cars, and heat our homes—but by cutting down and burning trees, we are also releasing an astounding amount of the same heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Tropical deforestation accounts for about 20 percent of the world's global warming pollution. About 20 percent of carbon emissions come from tropical deforestation—more than every car, truck, plane, train, and ship on the planetcombined. Deforestation is happening at an alarming rate—an acre of tropical forest every second. We cannot address global warming effectively if we ignore 20 percent of the problem.

Link: http://www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/40891prs20090901.html

The government has said it will continue to withhold dozens of documents related to the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody overseas. The Justice Department was facing an August 31 deadline to release the documents, including a presidential directive authorizing CIA "black sites" as well as CIA inspector general (IG) records and documents from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) regarding the CIA's use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," in response to two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. U.S. District Court Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York ordered the government to turn over the documents by August 31 or else provide justification for continuing to withhold them. In a filing late Monday, the CIA said it will not release the documents, claiming that disclosing details about the enhanced interrogation program would harm national security.

Link: http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/world/How-Hitler39s-deputy-was-tipped.5604109.jp

Hitler's deputy led government officials and journalists on a wild goose chase for years after his reported death, MI5 files released today showed. Martin Bormann was spotted everywhere from Switzerland to Bolivia, to the exasperation of the British security services. The search inspired a series of increasingly wild headlines, including the claim that he and Hitler were alive and Bormann was plotting a Nazi revival. One official drily speculated it was only a matter of time before he was reported to have been seen riding the Loch Ness monster.

Bormann was private secretary to Hitler and head of the Nazi party chancellery. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg tried him in absentia in October 1946 and sentenced him to death. Although he was reported to have been killed trying to escape from the Reich chancellery in May 1945, his body was not found until 1972 and it was not until the remains were DNA tested in 1998 that rumours he had survived were put to rest. British security bosses were sufficiently convinced of his death by the late 1940s to take reported sightings with a pinch of salt. The MI5 files released at the National Archive in Kew show Bormann was variously described as living in Bolivia, Italy, Norway, Switzerland and the Middle East and in prison or having defected to the Russians. An official description of him stated that he was assuming various disguises including a thick beard, facial scars and – when in Gottingen, in Lower Saxony, Germany – wore traditional Bavarian clothing, including halter braces and a Tyrolean hat. The constant stream of news reports and sightings from agents out in the field left some in MI5 rather frustrated.

Link: http://www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/40838prs20090824.html

Justice Department Documents Describe Enhanced Interrogation Techniques Used As Late As 2007 The government today handed over to the American Civil Liberties Union a detailed official description of the CIA's interrogation program. That document, a December 2004 CIA background paper sent to the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), provides a detailed official account of the CIA's detention, interrogation and rendition programs - from a detainee's initial apprehension, to his transfer to a CIA "black site," to his interrogation - and describes the use of abusive interrogation techniques including forced nudity, sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation and stress positions. The document was one of dozens of documents, comprising hundreds of pages, that were made public today in response to two ACLU Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits for documents related to the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody overseas. The OLC documents are available online at: www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/40833res20090824.html and www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/40834res20090824.html Earlier today, the ACLU released a CIA Inspector General report on the agency's "enhanced interrogation" program and related documents. Those documents are available online at: www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/40832res20090824.html

Link: http://www.greenleft.org.au/2009/808/41587

The coup d’etat carried out by the generals and their civilian front men in Honduras on June 28 poses an immediate threat to the Venezuelan revolution and the international Bolivarian movement for unity and social change throughout Latin America. An attack on any progressive Latin American government, and in particular a member of the Bolivarian Alliance for Latin America (ALBA - the nine-nation, anti-imperialist alliance initiated by Venezuela and Cuba, which Honduras joined last year), is a danger to all people’s governments in the region. The coup, which overthrew Honduras’ democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya, was a direct attempt to undermine ALBA, pave the way for an assault on revolutionary Venezuela, and enable Honduras to once again be used (as it was in the 1980s) as a launching pad for imperialist attacks on left-wing governments and movements in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Mobilize the Workers To Defeat the Putsch! Honduras: Coup d’État in the Maquiladora Republic Yankee Imperialism, Hands Off! For a Federation of Workers Republics of Central America!

Link: http://shuswapnews.com/news/2009/08/14/who-recommends-global-mandatory-vaccination-canada-prepares/

President Barack Obama holding a Homeland Security Council meeting about the swine flu outbreak in the Cabinet Room, while Dr. Richard Bresser speaks, May 1, 2009. (White House photo by Pete Souza) Why are health ministers in places like British Columbia, Australia and Greece telling the public that ’swine flu’ is just ordinary H1N1 type A seasonal flu, while at the same time they are preparing to vaccinate their entire populations against H5N1 avian flu using untested vaccines that contain live avian flu? Why are pandemic plans being laid to combat a more serious second wave of ’swine flu’ when it is already clear that such an outbreak is not happening in the southern hemisphere, where the flu season is already under way? Both Australia and Argentina report a normal flu season with no mutation of the ’swine flu’ virus.

Link: http://novakeo.com/?p=4601

The Internet is abuzz with news about the construction of internment camps all across America. Of course, “mainstream” media outlets refuse to touch the subject; or if they do, they pooh-pooh the story; they do what Glenn Beck recently did: try to debunk the story as fallacious and impugn people who speak of it as “conspiracy nuts.” The fact that the Becks, Hannitys, Limbaughs, and O’Reillys of the media circus refuse to deal with the construction of large numbers of internment camps does not make them disappear, however. For starters, all anyone need do to begin a serious investigation of the subject of internment camps is Google the phrase “FEMA Camps.” There is more than enough evidence in that search engine alone to keep one busy with some in-depth private investigation of the subject for quite a while.

Link: http://www.antemedius.com/content/fifty-top-us-war-criminals-who-need-be-prosecuted

Compiled below, in hopes that it may be of some assistance to Eric Holder, John Conyers, Patrick Leahy, active citizens, foreign courts, the International Criminal Court, law firms preparing civil suits, and local or state prosecutors with decency and nerve is a list of 50 top living U.S. war criminals. These are men and women who helped to launch wars of aggression or who have been complicit in lesser war crimes. These are not the lowest-ranking employees or troops who managed to stray from official criminal policies. These are the makers of those policies.

Link: http://www.aclu.org/safefree/nsaspying/40805prs20090820.html

A federal court today dismissed an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit challenging an unconstitutional government spying law. The ACLU and the New York Civil Liberties Union filed the landmark lawsuit in July 2008 to stop the government from conducting surveillance under the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), which gives the executive branch virtually unchecked power to sweep up Americans' international e-mails and telephone calls. The ACLU filed the lawsuit on behalf of a broad coalition of attorneys and human rights, labor, legal and media organizations whose ability to perform their work – which relies on

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/aug/17/environment-climate-change

The collapse of civilisation will bring us a saner world, says Paul Kingsnorth. No, counters George Monbiot – we can't let billions perish. Dear George On the desk in front of me is a set of graphs. The horizontal axis of each represents the years 1750 to 2000. The graphs show, variously, population levels, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, exploitation of fisheries, destruction of tropical forests, paper consumption, number of motor vehicles, water use, the rate of species extinction and the totality of the human economy's gross domestic product... in the last inch or so – around 1950 – it veers steeply upwards... The root cause of all these trends is the same: a rapacious human economy bringing the world swiftly to the brink of chaos.

Link: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Federal-deficit-higher-in-apf-3876319127.html?x=0&.v=5

Record federal deficit climbs higher, $180.7 billion in July, $1.27 trillion so far this year. The federal deficit climbed higher into record territory in July, hitting $1.27 trillion with two months remaining in the budget year. The Treasury Department said Wednesday that the July deficit totaled $180.7 billion, slightly more than the $177.5 billion economists had expected. The Obama administration is projecting that when the current budget year ends on Sept. 30, the imbalance will total $1.84 trillion, more than four times last year's record-high. The soaring deficits have raised worries among foreign owners of U.S. Treasury securities including the Chinese, the largest holder of such debt. Massive amounts of government spending to combat the recession and stabilize the U.S. financial system have pushed the deficit higher. The cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with depleted government tax revenues, also are major factors.

Link: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m57008&hd=&size=1&l=e

The Pentagon has approached Congress to grant the Secretary of Defense the authority to post almost 400,000 military personnel throughout the United States in times of emergency or a major disaster. This request has already occasioned a dispute with the nation’s governors. And it raises the prospect of U.S. military personnel patrolling the streets of the United States, in conflict with the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. In June, the U.S. Northern Command distributed a "Congressional Fact Sheet" entitled "Legislative Proposal for Activation of Federal Reserve Forces for Disasters." That proposal would amend current law, thereby "authorizing the Secretary of Defense to order any unit or member of the Army Reserve, Air Force Reserve, Navy Reserve, and the Marine Corps Reserve, to active duty for a major disaster or emergency."

Link: http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_5013.shtml

I’ll bet you forgot all about it. How a half million kids came together on a 600-acre dairy farm in rural Bethel, New York. Woodstock, the concert lasted from August 15 to 17, 1969, southwest of the town of Woodstock, New York, in Ulster County. And somehow it managed to change our world as well as the history of rock and roll as listed by Rolling Stone.

What’s most impressive is that despite all the reports of rampant drug-taking, 20-mile traffic jams, not enough Porta Johns, and too much rain, the music brought a lack of violence and, more importantly, the kids took incredibly good care of themselves. Two deaths out of 500,000 people were reported, one by heroin overdose, the other of someone all covered up in a sleeping bag in a field, run over by a tractor that didn’t see him. But then, there were two births, amen.

Even though Bob Dylan (a local recluse resident at the time) skipped Woodstock to do a concert on the Isle of Wight, Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, Tim Hardin, Ravi Shankar, Richie Havens, Sly and the Family Stone, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jefferson Airplane, The Who, The Grateful Dead, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Crosby, Stills & Nash (&Young), Santana, Jeff Beck Group, The Band, Johnny Winter, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Joe Cocker, Sha-Na-Na, John Sebastian, Country Joe and the Fish, 32 acts in all, showed up to rock the countryside if not the world.

Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/3222476/Suns-protective-bubble-is-shrinking.html

The protective bubble around the sun that helps to shield the Earth from harmful interstellar radiation is shrinking and getting weaker, Nasa scientists have warned. Data has shown that the sun's heliosphere is shrinking. New data has revealed that the heliosphere, the protective shield of energy that surrounds our solar system, has weakened by 25 per cent over the past decade and is now at it lowest level since the space race began 50 years ago. Scientists are baffled at what could be causing the barrier to shrink in this way and are to launch mission to study the heliosphere. At the boundary where they meet a shock wave is formed that deflects interstellar radiation around the solar system as it travels through the galaxy. The scientists hope the IBEX mission will allow them to gain a better understanding of what happens at this boundary and help them predict what protection it will offer in the future. Without the heliosphere the harmful intergalactic cosmic radiation would make life on Earth almost impossible by destroying DNA and making the climate uninhabitable. Sun Makes History: First Spotless Month in a Century | George Noory with Holly & Stan Deyo part 1-8