Link: http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1284.htm

According to these reports, Obama stated to Putin that the US Government was in “total disarray” after what the American President called a “putsch” made against him by high-ranking members of the US Military during a ‘fractious’ meeting in the White House of the United States top Military, Intelligence and National Security officers over the future course of the war in Afghanistan... Obama further reported to Putin that Gates told him, “in no uncertain terms” that the President had “no power whatsoever” over US Military decisions regarding Afghanistan whereupon Gates then ‘leaked’ to the US propaganda media his intention to massively increase America’s troop levels in the Afghan war zone. Even worse for Obama, who is already struggling with a collapsing economy, Gates further undermined the President by ordering 6,600 armored war trucks at a cost estimated to be in excess of $8 billion the US Military intends to pour into Afghanistan during the coming year at the expense of his Nations people already struggling under their Nations massive war debts. When queried by Putin as to his ability to regain control of those factions opposing him Obama in these reports is quoted as saying, “I may not make it”. Further troubling evidence of the disarray the US Government now finds itself in as Obama wages this titanic battle against the right-wing fascist forces seeking to destroy him can be seen in the actions of the powerful US Senator Jim DeMint who is openly defying the White House by traveling to the Central American Nation of Honduras to give his support to the CIA backed coup leader, Roberto Micheletti, who recently overthrew that countries legitimate President Manuel Zelaya and put his Nation under martial law.

Link: http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=107650&sectionid=351020606

Italian prosecutors have pressed on with a bid to arrest 26 US Central Intelligence Agency officers over their 'grave crime' of abducting a 'terror suspect' in 2003. Public prosecutors in Italy have called upon a Milan court to issue the arrest warrant for the CIA agents who participated in a 2003 kidnapping operation, as part of US 'renditions' of terrorism suspect authorized by former US administration, which led to the detention and 'harsh' interrogation of the Egyptian Muslim cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, aka Abu Omar. The Italian lawyers have also urged the court to convict the CIA agents involved in the so-called US war on terror and put them behind bars for at least 10 to 13 years for their offense. Moreover, they have requested the court to mete out similar imprisonment term for Italy's former head of secret service, Nicolo Pollari. Under renditions program, the US spy agency relocated suspects to a third country where torture was exercised as an attempt to outsource the afflicting practice, human rights activists say.

Link: http://liberty.hypermart.net/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2005/11/18/extraordinary_rendition_the_hunt_for_mis

The story that you are about to read is a true one. It’s a story about the kidnapping of a 39 year old Eyptian on February 17, 2003, by a team of CIA agents. This happened in the middle of Milan. Nasr Oussama Mustafa Hassan (alias Abu Omar), who was a native of Alexandria, had obtained political asylum in Italy in 2001. He had been arrested in Egypt in 1993 for political reasons. He had wrongly been assumed to be an imam of the Islamic center on the Jenner boulevard in Milan, and had simply been noticed because he had led the prayers at the other mosque, on Quaranta street in Milan. His kidnapping was followed by an”extraordinary rendition” to the Egyptian secret services in Cairo (Mabahith Amn Al Dawla). We have not heard from Abu Omar in over a year. At worst, he is dead. At best, he languishes in an Egyptian prison.

Link: http://liberty.hypermart.net/Newsletter/4/5_9-11_Commission_Omissions.htm

On May 30, 2001 Tom White, a former Enron executive, was appointed by the Bush administration to be Secretary of the Army, and more importantly the "executive agent for the Department of Defense". The next day on June 1st, Tom White radically altered existing DOD protocols and issued a new DOD directive placing all decision-making powers, specifically in the case of 'Derelict Airborne Objects', under the control of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Having served his purpose, White was eventually fired by Rumsfeld, allegedly for disagreeing about a weapons system.5 The 9-11 Commission has failed to ask Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and others many key questions concerning the mass murder of over 2800 Americans in New York on September 11, 2001. Perhaps the most glaring of these questions is: Why, after the FAA alerted the military concerning the grave threats posed by the hijacked airline flights, was the Air Force prevented from responding?

Link: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/geor-o02.shtml

Georgian attack unjustifiable under international law. When is military aggression not military aggression? For the powers that be in Washington and their media lackeys, the foreign policy interests of US imperialism dictate the answer. Hence, in the August 2008 war between US-ally Georgia and Russia, the former was portrayed as the helpless victim and the latter the aggressive bully. Following 10 months of investigation ordered by the European Union (EU) into the war, a report has found “unequivocal” proof that Georgia was the aggressor. The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia issued a report September 30 that contains more than a thousand pages of evidence. The Council of the EU established the mission in order to verify conflicting claims of responsibility for the war. The inquiry was led by Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini, who stated that “None of the explanations given by the Georgian authorities in order to provide some form of legal justification for the attack” are valid. “In particular, there was no massive Russian military invasion under way, which had to be stopped by Georgian military forces,” Tagliavini added.

Link: http://www.truthout.org/1005093

Unemployment will almost certainly in double-digits next year -- and may remain there for some time. And for every person who shows up as unemployed in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' household survey, you can bet there's another either too discouraged to look for work or working part time who'd rather have a full-time job or else taking home less pay than before (I'm in the last category, now that the University of California has instituted pay cuts). And there's yet another person who's more fearful that he or she will be next to lose a job. In other words, ten percent unemployment really means twenty percent underemployment or anxious employment. All of which translates directly into late payments on mortgages, credit cards, auto and student loans, and loss of health insurance. It also means sleeplessness for tens of millions of Americans. And, of course, fewer purchases (more on this in a moment).

News reports today indicate that the Obama administration will not seek legislation or issue an executive order to institute a system of indefinite detention without charge or trial. According to the reports, the administration backed away from seeking legislation because it believes the federal government already has the power to detain terrorism suspects indefinitely under the congressional resolution passed after 9/11 authorizing the president to use force against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The American Civil Liberties Union strongly urges the Obama administration to reject any system of detention without charge or trial. Currently, the United States government continues to hold people indefinitely at Guantánamo and Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan without charging them or bringing them to trial.

Link: http://www.alternet.org/blogs/politics/142726/the_last_time_right-wing_hatred_ran_wild_like_this_a_president_was_killed_

I've been thinking a lot of Kennedy and Dallas as I've watched the increasingly violent rhetorical attacks on Obama be unfurled. As Americans yank their kids of class in order to save them from being exposed to the President of the United States who only wanted to urge them to excel in the classroom. And as unvarnished hate and name-calling passed for health care 'debate' this summer. The radical right, aided by a GOP Noise Machine that positively dwarfs what existed in 1963, has turned demonizing Obama--making him into a vile object of disgust--into a crusade. It's a demented national jihad, the likes of which this country has not seen in modern times.

Link: http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/willie/2009/0910.html

The move to kiss $1000 gold was the foreplay, the first dance, the initial step to capture global attention and to preview the next much bigger move. Some important less visible factors are at work to push the gold price up, somewhat hidden from view. The Intl Monetary Fund and the London G-20 Meeting bear on the gold forces. The full breakout is imminent. It could be days, or a couple weeks, probably not more than a month. Ramadan ends in ten days, and Chinese anger is spilling over. Underlying structures are breaking with each passing week. Bank ripples are being felt. Insolvency is spreading like a disease, while corruption spreads like a cancer. Central bank money creation occurs like from a garden hose. Stories will be told about these days for decades. This is history in the making. They are accumulating gold bullion here. The fools are still selling gold, unaware of its 100% rise in price upcoming. Actually, what comes is a quasi-global 50% currency devaluation. China is cutting deals with the I.M.F. to secure central bank gold in huge blocks, much like geopolitical horse trading amidst grand power shifts for global control. If the West wishes to enjoy the benefits of Chinese credit supply, then China must be given much of what it demands. In short, the gold price will break out past 1100 and past 1200, toward a 1300 target, WHEN CHINA DECIDES TO GIVE THE ORDER.

Link: http://www.rense.com:80/general87/bzzr.htm

Joseph Moshe (Moshe is the man's middle name) is a bio-scientist. He works (worked?) for a unit within Mossad. He is an Israeli citizen. The Secret Service was not the agency involved in the surveillance of Moshe at his home in California. This was done by the FBI, who had orders to detain him, or "bring him in." Moshe did not send a threat to the White House. Rather, he communicated that he intended to go public with information he had regarding the flu vaccine that is being prepared by Baxter Labs, an Austrian company (headquartered in the US - ed). The information is this: The vaccine is being manufactured in Ukraine. It is not a vaccine at all, but rather an engineered genetically mutated bio-weapon meant to cause sickness and death. Moshe informed the White House he intended to go public with this information. When he became aware that the FBI was about to detain him, he packed some belongings in his car and set out for the Israeli consulate, located in close proximity to the federal building where the standoff took place. FBI pursuit kept him from reaching his destination.

Link: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090928/younge

Spare a thought, and maybe even a dime, for Kenneth Gladney. In August he and other members of the right-wing St. Louis Tea Party arrived at a town-hall meeting organized by Missouri Democrat Russ Carnahan to lobby against universal healthcare. In the spirit of this fraught summer, a fight broke out, ending in six arrests. Who threw the first punch depends on whom you ask. But who got the worst of it was fairly clear. Gladney was taken to the emergency room with injuries to his knee, back, elbow, shoulder and face and ended up in a wheelchair. His troubles were just beginning. Recently laid off, this particular anti-health reform protester, it turned out, had no health insurance. Last heard, he was still accepting donations for his medical expenses.

Link: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/09/11-9

Some people cancel holidays abroad, others stage yard sales or start shopping at low-cost supermarkets. To that list must now be added a new way to get through economic hard times: grow cannabis. So far this year, police in parts of the country where cannabis is traditionally grown have chopped down plants with a street value of $12bn. The core growing area is in California, Washington and Oregon to the west, but the Appalachian states of Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia are also witnessing an explosion. More than 600,000 cannabis plants have been cut and burned in those states this summer, reversing a previous decline in production brought about by stringent law enforcement. It is not only the quantity of crop that is on the rise, the nature of the growers is also changing.

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.