Link: http://www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/39710prs20090601.html

Several of the nation's leading human rights and civil liberties organizations sent a letter to President Obama today urging him to release photos depicting the abuse of detainees by U.S. personnel overseas. The letter, signed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and dozens of other groups, calls on the president to reconsider his decision to block the release of the photos. It states, "The hallmark of an open society is that we do not conceal information that reflects poorly on us – we expose it to the light of day, so that wrongdoers can be held accountable and future abuses prevented."

Link: http://www.sott.net/articles/show/185576-Bill-Moyers-How-Can-We-Expect-an-Industry-That-Profits-from-Disease-and-Sickness-to-Police-Itself

The health care industry has spent $134 million on lobbying this year to keep its profits high and public health in the shadows. In 2003, a young Illinois state senator named Barack Obama told a local AFL-CIO meeting, "I am a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program." Single payer. Universal. That's health coverage, like Medicare, but for everyone who wants it. Single payer eliminates insurance companies as pricey middlemen. The government pays care providers directly. It's a system that polls consistently have shown the American people favoring by as much as two-to-one. There was only one thing standing in the way, Obama said six years ago: "All of you know we might not get there immediately because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate and we have to take back the House."

Link: http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/britain/stop_the_us_torture_ship

British human rights campaigners Reprieve have urged the Spanish authorities to board and search US torture ship USS Bataan after it moored at the Palma de Mallorca holiday resort. USS Bataan is one of the US government's most infamous "floating prisons" and will remain at the island until Saturday. At least nine prisoners including John Walker Lindh, David Hicks and Ibn Al-Sheikh Al-Libi, who recently died in mysterious circumstances in Libyan custody, are confirmed to have been held aboard the USS Bataan. 15 ships have been used to hold prisoners beyond the rule of law since 2001. Prisoners are interrogated aboard the vessels and then rendered to other, often undisclosed, locations. "One of my fellow prisoners in Guantanamo was at sea on an American ship before coming to Guantanamo. He was in the cage next to me. He told me that there were about 50 other prisoners on the ship. "They were all closed off in the bottom of the ship. The prisoner commented to me that it was like something you see on TV. The people held on the ship were beaten even more severely than in Guantanamo."

Link: http://english.pravda.ru:80/business/finance/19-05-2009/107581-dollar_russia-0

The US dollar is not Russia’s basic reserve currency anymore. The euro-based share of reserve assets of Russia’s Central Bank increased to the level of 47.5 percent as of January 1, 2009 and exceeded the investments in dollar assets, which made up 41.5 percent, The Vedomosti newspaper wrote. The dollar has thus lost the status of the basic reserve currency for the Russian Central Bank, the annual report, which the bank provided to the State Duma, said. In accordance with the report, about 47.5 percent of the currency assets of the Russian Central Bank were based on the euro, whereas the dollar-based assets made up 41.5 percent as of the beginning of the current year. The situation was totally different at the beginning of the previous year: 47 percent of investments were made in US dollars, while the euro investments were evaluated at 42 percent.

Link: http://www.examiner.com/x-9462-LA-Independent-Examiner~y2009m5d24-Obama-continuing-Bushs-assault-on-the-middle-class

Despite receiving the majority of middle class votes, George Bush was one of the worst presidents for the middle class. Bush promoted free trade deals that sent our jobs overseas, promoted amnesty for illegal immigrants, and greater guest worker programs while our borders remain unsecured. Bush continued to spend to the point of breaking Lyndon Johnson's record by increasing the size of government. He borrowed from nations that are not the friendliest such as China and Saudi Arabia contributing to the current financial crisis, while the federal reserve printed money out of thin air devaluing our currency. Bush passed massive tax cuts that favored the wealthy and did nothing to address the budget deficit.

Link: http://dprogram.net/2009/04/06/exotic-high-tech-explosives-positively-identified-in-world-trade-center-dust/

A ground-breaking scientific paper confirmed this week that red-gray flakes found throughout multiple samples of WTC dust are actually unexploded fragments of nanothermite, an exotic high-tech explosive. The samples were taken from far-separated locations in Manhattan, some as early as 10 minutes after the second tower (WTC 1) collapsed, ruling out any possible contamination from cleanup operations. Authored by an international team of physicists, chemists, and others, the research paper was titled “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe.” It was published in The Open Chemical Physics Journal, 2009, Vol. 2., and is available online for free download. The lead author is Niels H. Harrit of the Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen.

Link: http://www.calleman.com/content/articles/risk_of_2012.htm

About eight years ago John Major Jenkins and I had a debate about the meaning of the Mayan calendar end date focusing especially on whether the energies of the Long Count ends on October 28, 2011 or December 21, 2012. This still remains the most important question anybody interested in the “2012 phenomenon” is faced with, but while at the time the debate might have seemed theoretical, or even hairsplitting, it is now a question that has very significant and practical consequences as to how we relate to the future. While many would like to sweep the end date question under the rug or sit on the fence, no one can do so with their intellectual integrity intact. Since that debate Jenkins has appeared on a History Channel documentary where December 21 2012 is presented as a predetermined “doomsday” when the world is going to come to an end.

Link: http://socialistworker.org/2009/05/07/smells-at-whole-foods

As the Texas Observer argued recently, "People shop at Whole Foods not just because it offers organic produce and natural foods, but because it claims to run its business in a way that demonstrates a genuine concern for the community, the environment and the 'whole planet,' in the words of its motto. In reality, Whole Foods has gone on a corporate feeding frenzy in recent years, swallowing rival retailers across the country...The expansion is driven by a simple and lucrative business strategy: high prices and low wages." Indeed, Whole Foods now stands as the second largest anti-union retailer in the U.S., beaten only by Wal-Mart. Most of Whole Foods' loyal clientele certainly would--and should--shudder at the comparison.

Link: http://www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/39587prs20090513.html

The Obama administration announced today that it is reversing its promise to make public photos depicting detainee abuse by U.S. personnel overseas. The Department of Defense had told a federal judge that it would release a "substantial number" of photos in response to a court ruling in an American Civil Liberties Union Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

"The Obama administration's adoption of the stonewalling tactics and opaque policies of the Bush administration flies in the face of the president's stated desire to restore the rule of law, to revive our moral standing in the world and to lead a transparent government. This decision is particularly disturbing given the Justice Department's failure to initiate a criminal investigation of torture crimes under the Bush administration." - Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU

Link: http://statismwatch.ca/2009/05/08/leaked-1955-bilderberg-docs-outline-plan-for-single-european-currency/

Global elite spoke of agenda to create Euro nearly 40 years before it was first codified in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. Leaked documents from the 1955 Bilderberg Group conference held in Germany discuss the agenda to create a European Union and a single EU currency, decades before they were introduced, disproving once again debunkers who claim that Bilderberg has no influence over world events. Leaked papers from the meeting which took place from September 23-25 1955 at the Grand Hotel Sonnenbichl in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, West Germany, were released by the Wikileaks website yesterday. As we first reported in 2003, a BBC investigative team were allowed to access Bilderberg files which confirmed that the EU and the Euro were the brainchild of Bilderberg. They were probably reading from the same documents that were released by Wikileaks. It was only last month that Belgian viscount and current Bilderberg-chairman Étienne Davignon bragged that Bilderberg helped create the Euro by first introducing the policy agenda for a single currency in the early 1990’s. However, the documents show that the agenda to create a European common market and a single currency go back decades earlier.

Link: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/05/prison-awaiting-hostile-bloggers/

Proposed congressional legislation would demand up to two years in prison for those whose electronic speech is meant to “coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person.” The proposal by Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Los Angeles, would never pass First Amendment muster, unless the U.S. Constitution was altered without us knowing. So Sanchez, and the 14 other lawmakers who signed on to the proposal, are grandstanding to show the public they care about children and are opposed to cyberbullying. The meaasure, H.R. 1966, is labeled the Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act. It’s designed to target the behavior that led to last year’s suicide of the 13-year-old Meier. In response to Meier’s suicide, prosecutors turned to an anti-hacking statute, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and prosecuted Lori Drew. She was accused of violating MySpace’s terms of service agreement in what prosecutors said was a complex conspiracy to harass Meier via a fake MySpace online profile.

Link: http://www.knowthelies.com/?q=node/3577

Submitted by SadInAmerica on Mon, 02/02/2009 - 6:20pm.
Congressman Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) speaking at DC’s annual Stand Up For a Safe America event sponsored by the Brady Center says if your name is on the terrorist no fly list you should not be allowed to own a gun. Why are there so many names on the U.S. government’s terrorist list? ~ In September 2007, the Inspector General of the Justice Department reported that the Terrorist Screening Center (the FBI-administered organization that consolidates terrorist watch list information in the United States) had over 700,000 names in its database as of April 2007 - and that the list was growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month.1 (See also this new March 2008 report.2 )http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/reports/plus/a0816/final.pdf By those numbers, the list now has over one million names on it. Terrorist watch lists must be tightly focused on true terrorists who pose a genuine threat. Bloated lists are bad because: * they ensnare many innocent travelers as suspected terrorists, and * because they waste screeners’ time and divert their energies from looking for true terrorists.

Link: http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=10603

Two French students, working on the real origins of bird flu, were murderedin London. Both were savagely tortured and between the them stabbed over two hundred times More ... The two researchers had discovered that the alleged bird flu vaccine, H-7, which was designed to neutralize and stop the H5N1 avian flu virus, had been spliced using DNA to actually create a vaccine and an illness producing virus at the same time. The French students had also discovered that the bird flu vaccine, i.e. a virus, had links to U.S., British and Israeli laboratories associated with the noted Mossad agent, Dr. Philip M. Zackerie. Israeli microbiologist Zackerie, known as “Dr. Zack,” worked for the U.S. bio-weapons lab at Ft. Detrick, Md., where he was photographed handling the strain of anthrax used in the post 9-11 attack according to published reports. He was a consultant at the FBI linked company Gilead Sciences Inc. of Boulder, Colo. Gilead Sciences has been linked to the 9-11 anthrax strain and to the bird flu vaccine. The two French students, who had their apartment broken into one week before their brutal assassination, also had their lap-top computer stolen and their apartment fire-bombed. The operation has been traced to a team of 10 Israeli Mossad and British MI5 agents.

Link: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KD24Ak01.html

It's a script worthy of Freddie Krueger, the fictional character from the A Nightmare on Elm Street films. Nearly five years after the irruption of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq, here's another chamber of horrors, another glimpse of how The Dark Side really works. But the George W Bush torture memos released by the Barack Obama administration last week, written in legalese by Jay Bybee and Stephen Bradbury, are just a preview. Many will relish the newspeak. ("We conclude that - although sleep deprivation and use of the waterboard present more substantial questions in certain aspects under the statute and the use of tile waterboard raises the most substantial issue - none of these specific techniques, considered individually, would violate the prohibition in sections 134:0•2340A.") As for the whole movie - a 21st century remix of a D W Griffith epic - it could be called Death of a Nation. The US Senate report, also just released, reads like deja vu all over again: the US establishment under Bush was a replay of the Spanish Inquisition. And it all started even before a single "high-profile al-Qaeda detainee" was captured. What Bush, vice president Dick Cheney, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and assorted little inquisitors wanted was above all to prove the non-existent link between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaeda, the better to justify a pre-emptive, illegal war planned by the now-defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in the late 1990s. The torture memos were just a cog in the imperial machine.

Link: http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=10607

An award-winning Texas scientist was given a standing ovation after he advocated the extermination of 90 per cent of the Earth's population by an airborne Ebola virus. The University of Texas evolutionary ecologist, Dr Eric R. Pianka, was addressing the 109th meeting of the Texas Academy of Science at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, in early March, after the academy had named him 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist. Present at Pianka's speech was Forrest M. Mim III, a popular science writer and editor of the bi-weekly journal, The Citizen Scientist.

Link: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=aColIYAe.RaU&refer=home

Give money away. That was a solution to the housing crisis mortgage giant Fannie Mae hit on last year. Faced with growing numbers of homeowners unable to make mortgage payments, Fannie decided to fund loans to borrowers that were instant losers. The point was to buy time. Even though those loans resulted in a $453 million loss, they helped keep troubled homeowners from defaulting. That meant Fannie for now didn’t have to make good on loan guarantees that may have cost it as much as $2.4 billion. The big game of kick the can strikes at a deep-seated fear among many investors -- that banks and others faced with mounting housing losses are finding all manner of dubious ways to push a day of reckoning into the future.

Link: http://pakalert.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/a-must-read-the-crash-of-09-the-collapse-of-10/

My dear Muhammad Ali - I told you that it’s a funny world getting funnier. Many American analysts are saying that America’s real economic collapse could come by the end of this year. “It will come to known as The Crash of 09,” they say. Others, especially a Russian political analyst, are predicting its physical collapse too. There’s no doubt that the country is up the dirtiest of imaginable creeks without a paddle. But what’s amazing is that America remains mired in stunning denial, continuing to make bad situations worse with useless bailout plans and messing around with the world instead of facing up to the reality that its time as a hyper-power is up, that’s its economic system has failed and that its only recourse is to end its adversarial doctrine and get out of its lost wars as painlessly and honorably as possible. There’s no point in going on flogging dead horses. The only sensible thing that survival demands is to craft a new moral economic and financial system and a moral foreign policy.

Link: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/14/surveillance/index.html

Right-wing polemicists today are shrieking in self-pitying protest over a new report from the Department of Homeland Security sent to local police forces which warns of growing "right-wing extremist activity." The report (.pdf) identifies attributes of these right-wing extremists, warning that a growing domestic threat of violence and terrorism "may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single-issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration" and "groups that reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority."

Link: http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/article.aspx?id=3614

The tiny desert town of Abeche, in eastern Chad, offers a curious sight: Sandwiched between the mud huts that most people call home and the compounds belonging to international aid workers is a humble Chinese restaurant catering to Chad's growing population of Chinese engineers and managers. Significantly, no equivalent American-style restaurant is to be found. The same holds true across the resource-rich, institution-poor developing world, in countries as remote as East Timor and as dangerous as Somalia. While much of the military establishment in Washington continues to plan for a possible conventional war with China, Beijing is studiously avoiding a direct confrontation, instead expanding its influence through means other than traditional warfare. Principal among them is the deployment of Chinese technocrats abroad on profit-seeking missions for the world's third-largest economy.04/18/09

Link: http://www.aclu.org/pizza/

The government and corporations are aggressively collecting information about your personal life and your habits. They want to track your purchases, your medical records, and even your relationships. The Administration's policies, coupled with invasive new technologies, could eliminate your right to privacy completely. Please help us protect our privacy rights and prevent the Total Surveillance Society. Government programs such as MATRIX and Carnivore are destroying our privacy. We live in a democratic society and government-controlled data systems are a dangerous step toward establishing a 24-hour surveillance society. Recently Northwest Airlines provided the names, addresses, travel plans and credit card numbers of its customers to a NSA project in complete violation of its own privacy policy. In another example, JetBlue provided information from over a million of its customers to the Transportation Security Administration, also in violation of its own privacy policy. Tell Congress to enact privacy laws that protect us from these intrusions into our private lives. If you want to protect your personal privacy, take action right now, tell your friends and family.