1.  “The chairman of the British Joint Intelligence Committee in 2001 told investigators Monday that elements of the Bush Administration were pushing for regime change in Iraq in early 2001, months before the 9/11 attacks and two years before President George W. Bush formally announced the Iraq war.
…

British investigators are probing how Britain got into the Iraq war and if officials misled the public. Already, a leaked report has shown that then-Prime Minister Tony Blair covered up British military plans for a full Iraq invasion throughout 2002, claiming at the time that Britain’s objective was “disarmament, not regime change.”

 

According to Britain’s Sunday Telegraph, the leaked report condemns the almost complete absence of contingency planning as a potential breach of Geneva Convention obligations to safeguard civilians. Coalition forces were “ill-prepared and equipped to deal with the problems in the first 100 days” of the occupation.

 

Blair’s lies to Parliament and the public, widespread problems with the Army’s supply chain and radio systems, and poor planning for “once Baghdad had fallen” are now confirmed in the public eye.

 

Particularly egregious are statements Blair made to Parliament in the build up to the invasion. On Sept 24, 2002, Mr. Blair told members of the British Parliament, “In respect of any military options, we are not at the stage of deciding those options but, of course, it is important — should we get to that point — that we have the fullest possible discussion of those options.”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/21949

2.  “Blackwater’s Secret War in Pakistan

At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, “snatch and grabs” of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.
…
The use of private companies like Blackwater for sensitive operations such as drone strikes or other covert work undoubtedly comes with the benefit of plausible deniability that places an additional barrier in an already deeply flawed system of accountability. When things go wrong, it’s the contractors’ fault, not the government’s. But the widespread use of contractors also raises serious legal questions, particularly when they are a part of lethal, covert actions. “We are using contractors for things that in the past might have been considered to be a violation of the Geneva Convention,” said Lt. Col. Addicott, who now runs the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary’s University School of Law in San Antonio, Texas. “In my opinion, we have pressed the envelope to the breaking limit, and it’s almost a fiction that these guys are not in offensive military operations.” Addicott added, “If we were subjected to the International Criminal Court, some of these guys could easily be picked up, charged with war crimes and put on trial. That’s one of the reasons we’re not members of the International Criminal Court.”

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091207/scahill

3.  “Why They Hate Us (I): on military occupation

One of the many barriers to developing a saner U.S. foreign policy is our collective failure to appreciate why military occupations generate so much hatred, resentment, and resistance, and why we should therefore go to enormous lengths to avoid getting mired in them. Costly occupations are an activity you hope your adversaries undertake, especially in areas of little intrinsic strategic value. We blundered into Somalia in the early 1990s without realizing that we weren’t welcome; we invaded Iraq thinking we would be greeted as liberators, and we still don’t fully understand why many Afghans resent our presence and why some are driven to take up arms against us.
…
It is sometimes said that Americans don’t understand this phenomenon because the United States has never been conquered and occupied. But this simply isn’t true. After the Civil War, a “foreign army” occupied the former Confederacy and imposed a new political order that most white southerners found abhorrent. The first Reconstruction Act of 1867 put most southern states under formal military control, supervised the writing of new state constitutions, and sought to enfranchise and empower former slaves. It also attempted to rebuild the south economically, but the reconstruction effort was undermined by corruption and poor administration. Sound familiar? However laudable the aims may have been, the results were precisely what one would expect. Northern occupation eventually triggered violent resistance by the Ku Klux Klan, White League, Red Shirts, and other insurgent groups, which helped thwart Reconstruction and paved the way for the Jim Crow system that lasted until the second half of the 20th century.
…
The bottom line is that you don’t need to be a sociologist, political scientist, or a student of colonialism or foreign cultures to understand why military occupation is such a poisonous activity and why it usually fails. If you’re an American, you just need to read a bit about Reconstruction and reflect on how its effects — along with the effects of slavery itself — have persisted across generations. If that’s not enough, visit a society that is currently experiencing occupation, and take the time to go through a checkpoint or two. Then you might understand why the local population doesn’t view the occupying forces as benevolent and isn’t as grateful as occupiers often think they ought to be. “

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/11/23/on_military_occupation

4.  “A hawk who claims the State can properly command the resources of its own citizens to invade or attack the citizens of another State confronts a very high bar of proof. And it is important to understand that the burden of proof is upon the hawk and not upon critics; in other words, the burden falls upon the person who advocates a process that kills non-combatants and not upon those who fundamentally object to the death of innocent human beings.”

http://www.wendymcelroy.com/news.php?extend.2872

5.  “Have Israeli spies infiltrated international airports? South Africa deports airline official after investigation

South Africa deported an Israeli airline official last week following allegations that Israel’s secret police, the Shin Bet, had infiltrated Johannesburg international airport in an effort to gather information on South African citizens, particularly black and Muslim travellers.”

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16242

6.  “Canada ’s Guantanamo

A scandal erupted last week in sleepy Ottawa with the revelations of Canada’s chief diplomat in Kandahar in 2006-07, Richard Colvin, who told a House of Commons committee on Afghanistan that Afghans arrested by Canadian military and handed over to Afghan authorities were knowingly tortured. His and others’ attempts to raise the alarm had been quashed by the ruling Conservative government and he felt a moral obligation to make public what was happening.

 

The startling allegations — the first of their kind from a senior official — have caused extreme embarrassment to the government, which has more than once stated categorically detainees were not passed to Afghan control if there was any danger of torture. Canada has 2,700 soldiers in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, the hotbed of the insurgency, on a mission that is due to end in 2011.

 

Warnings to Colvin to keep quiet were not enough to cow him and he calmly told shocked MPs that he started sending reports soon after he arrived in Kandahar in early 2006 to top officials indicating the Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS) was abusing detainees. “For a year and half after they knew about the very high risk of torture, they continued to order military police in the field to hand our detainees to the NDS.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16259

7.  “By embracing and defending numerous Bush/Cheney policies he once deplored, “Obama hasn’t changed, just adjusted.”  He’s learned secret things that he can’t tell you about but which — you should accept — do justify his “adaptations.”  Whenever Bush followers would run out of arguments to defend their leader’s actions, that’s the same rationale they’d resort to:   he knows secret things that you don’t know and therefore we should trust him.   So Obama has “learned” things that caused him to abandon his vehement condemnations of indefinite detention, state secrets, military commissions and denial of habeas corpus as unjust and un-American travesties and come to embrace them as important and necessary policies?   Wow:  that must have been quite an education.  Don’t he and his supporters owe George Bush and Dick Cheney a sincere apology for criticizing them all those years for these policies when, as it turns out, they were necessary and just all along?
…
Whether Obama has adopted every last radical Bush/Cheney terrorism policy — he hasn’t — is not the point.  And the question of whether “Obama is as bad as Bush” — he isn’t — is no more relevant than the excuse that Bush’s torture program shouldn’t be criticized because at least it never reached the level of Saddam’s rape rooms and limb removals.  As even Time now recognizes, many of the policies once widely declared by Democrats to be a grave threat to the Constitution are now explicitly adopted by the Obama administration.  And it’s flatly inconsistent to invoke “the rule of law” to defend Obama’s decision to give trials to a few Guantanamo detainees without pointing out that he’s violating that very same precept by denying trials to so many.
…
McClatchy reports that Obama has made a decision to send 34,000 more troops to Afghanistan which, if true, means, as Juan Cole says, that “Gen. Stanley McChrystal has won the struggle for policy decisively.”

So, to recap:  we have indefinite detention, military commissions, Blackwater assassination squads, escalation in Afghanistan, extreme secrecy to shield executive lawbreaking from judicial review, renditions, and denials of habeas corpus.  These are not policies Obama has failed yet to uproot; they are policies he has explicitly advocated and affirmatively embraced as his own.”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/

8.  “Republican members of Congress and what masquerades as a “conservative” media are outraged that the Obama administration intends to try in federal court Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of 9/11, and four alleged co-conspirators.

The Republican and right-wing rant that a trial is too good for these people proves what I have written for a number of years: Republicans and many Americans who think of themselves as conservatives have no regard for the US Constitution or for civil liberties. They have no appreciation for the point made by Thomas Paine in his Dissertations on First Principles of Government (1790): “An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”

Republicans and American conservatives regard civil liberties as coddling devices for criminals and terrorists. They assume that police and prosecutors are morally pure and, in addition, never make mistakes. An accused person is guilty or government wouldn’t have accused him. All of my life I have heard self-described conservatives disparage lawyers who defend criminals. Such “conservatives” live in an ideal, not real, world. They desperately need to read The Tyranny of Good Intentions.
…
The price that Mohammed will pay will be small compared to the price we Americans will pay. The outcome of Mohammed’s trial will complete the transformation of the US legal system from a shield of the people into a weapon in the hands of the state. Feige writes that Mohammed’s statements obtained by torture will not be suppressed, that witnesses against him will not be produced (“national security”), that documents that compromise the prosecution will be redacted.

At each stage of Mohammed’s appeals process, higher courts will enshrine into legal precedents the denial of the Constitutional right to a speedy trial, thus enshrining indefinite detention, the denial of the right against damning pretrial publicity, thus allowing demonization prior to trial, and the denial of the right to have witnesses and documents produced, thus eviscerating a defendant’s rights to exculpatory evidence and to confront adverse witnesses, The twisted logic necessary to disentangle Mohammed’s torture from his confession will also be upheld and will “provide a blueprint for the government, giving them the prize they’ve been after all this time–a legal way both to torture and to prosecute.” http://www.slate.com/id/2236146

It took Hitler a while to corrupt the German courts. Hitler first had to create new courts, like President George W. Bush’s military tribunals, that did not require evidence, using in place of evidence hearsay, secret charges, and self-incrimination obtained by torture.

Every American should be concerned that the Obama administration has decided to use Mohammed’s trial to complete the corruption of the American court system. When Mohammed’s trial is over, an American Joe Stalin or Adolf Hitler will be able to convict America’s Founding Fathers on charges of treason and terrorism. No one will be safe.”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24040.htm

9.  “

The Indian [was thought] as less than human and worthy only of extermination. We did shoot down defenseless men, and women and children at places like Camp Grant, Sand Creek, and Wounded Knee. We did feed strychnine to red warriors. We did set whole villages of people out naked to freeze in the iron cold of Montana winters. And we did confine thousands in what amounted to concentration camps. — Wellman, The Indian Wars of the West, 1934

European invaders exterminated nearly the entire indigenous population to create the United States. Without that holocaust, the United States as we know it would not exist. The United States celebrates a Thanksgiving Day holiday dominated not by atonement for that horrendous crime against humanity but by a falsified account of the “encounter” between Europeans and American Indians.”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24039.htm

10.  “In a similar vein, I am sure that many European immigrants, who came to America during the last three hundred years, thought that they, too, were carrying out positive actions when they eradicated indigenous tribes at the behest of their community leaders. I am, also, convinced that many of those conducting the killings felt relieved that such a strange scourge (as the “dirty savages” seemed to be) was systematically obliterated. Indeed, there probably was little remorse on the part of the majority of the butchers as the so-called Indians were viewed as subhuman, just as were Blacks, Jews, Asians and many other persecuted peoples in this country. Indeed, the killers’ sense of identity, doubtlessly, was strengthened individually and as members of a culturally cohesive unit (i.e., an exclusive social assemblage) in the process of carrying out their communally sanctioned, xenophobic brutality.

In this manner, the murderers managed to avoid acknowledging any sense of shared and universal humanity in the maligned others with whom they refused to identify. As such, they recognized few, if any, commonalities. Instead they called the natives alienating terms (such as “blood thirsty vermin,” “Indian giver” and “scalpers”) that further strengthened a feeling of estrangement, made it easier to destroy them and assigned them to the position of “The Other,” an unfortunate and dangerous category in which to be placed.”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24044.htm

1.  “The Democrats’ War Tax

David Obey, chairman of the influential Appropriations Committee, John Murtha, who chairs the Defense Subcommittee, and Barney Frank, the banksters’ catamite who heads up the House Financial Services Committee, have proposed the “Share the Sacrifice Act of 2010” – and isn’t that a title worthy of Atlas Shrugged’s mealy-mouthed villains? In this “share-the-shafting” version of the Democrats’ war tax, everyone is conscripted into paying for our foreign policy of endless war, including those who are least able to afford it. If you make “up to $150,000″ a year you would have to pay an extra 1 percent. The balance will come from those who make more. Now that’s real egalitarianism for you: all must suffer, none are spared, because… well, don’t you know there’s a war on?

What – you’re against a tax hike? You’re no doubt a terrorist sympathizer, or, perhaps, even an agent of al-Qaeda.

 

I can hardly wait for the Democrats to employ this type of rhetoric, memorializing the neocon charge, made during the post-9/11 madness, that opponents of invading Afghanistan and Iraq constituted a “fifth column” – oh, wait, it’s already happened. (Andrew Sullivan, who made just that accusation against the antiwar movement, can now hurl the same charge at tax opponents, since he seems to have switched sides, or parties, in the meantime. Oh, the advantages of ideological ambidexterity!)

…

The greasy evasiveness of the Obey-Murtha-Frank tax-’em triumvirate is epitomized in their joint statement, which declares: “Regardless of whether one favors the war or not, if it is to be fought, it ought to be paid for.” This is one of those oh-so-serious-sounding aphorisms, popular in Washington, which have neither moral sense nor logical consistency. If you’re a member of Congress who opposes the war, why then are you voting to fund it – and in what sense, other than a purely Platonic one, can such legislators claim to be war opponents? “
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/11/22/the-democrats-war-tax/

2.  Of course he is:

“The key question – is Blair a war criminal?”

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/oliver-miles-the-key-question-ndash-is-blair-a-war-criminal-1825374.html

3.  “Once conservatives became embarrassed by their cowardly warnings that we would all be killed if we held a 9/11 trial in New York, they switched to a new argument:  trials in a real court would lead to the disclosure of classified information that would help the Terrorists.  In advancing this claim, they relied on the always-unhinged rantings of National Review’s Andy McCarthy — who has also suggested that Bill Ayers was the real author of Barack Obama’s “Dreams from my Father”; attacked his own editors for pointing out the falsehoods of Sarah Palin’s “death panel” claims, which McCarthy insisted were true; defended the Birther movement and dissented from NR’s editorial rejection of it; and was excoriated by Rich Lowry for claiming that Obama “rather likes tyrants and dislikes America.”  This person — someone who is often too fringe, hysterical and delusional even for National Review — is the “legal expert” on which the Right is relying to claim that real trials will jeopardize classified information.
…
Does that sound like a judicial process incapable of concealing secrets, or does it sound more like a Star Chamber where the justice system operates in the dark, even to shield government torture and illegal prisons from disclosure?  Many federal judges — particularly in criminal cases — are notorious for being highly sympathetic to the government.  That’s even more true in a case involving one of the most hated criminal defendants ever to be tried in an American court, sitting a very short distance from the site where he is alleged to have killed 3,000 people in a terrorist attack.  And note that the law permits the judge no discretion:  if the Government claims something is classified, then “the court shall issue an order to protect against the disclosure of any classified information.”  With some exceptions, ever since the “War on Terror” began, nobody has safeguarded government secrets as dutifully and subserviently as federal judges — even when those secrets involve allegations of war crimes and other serious felonies.  That’s what DOJ officials mean when they keep praising Southern District of New York judges for their supreme competence and expertise in handling terrorism cases.  Federal courts in general love to keep what is supposed to be their open proceedings a secret, but that instinct is magnified exponentially in national security and terrorism cases.

 

Even during the Bush years, numerous defendants accused of terrorist acts were tried and convicted in federal courts — John Walker Lindh, Richard Reid, Zacarias Moussaoui, Ali al-Marri, Jose Padilla.  Those spewing the latest right-wing scare tactic (Osama bin Laden will learn everything if we have trials!) cannot point to a single piece of classified information that was disclosed as a result of any of these trials.  If that were a legitimate fear, wouldn’t they be able to?  Like most American institutions, our federal court system is empowered to shield from public disclosure anything the government claims is secret. Just look at the extreme measures invoked in the Ghailani case to see how true that is.”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/

1.  “Perhaps KSM is also a magician, and used voodoo to make WTC 7 fall at partial freefall, to make jet fuel “switch elevators” on its way to the lobby, and to then spring the jet fuel over to WTC 7. Perhaps he used magic to persuade the FBI to drop their surveillance of the 1993 bombers, and to fill the towers with nano-thermite. Perhaps KSM used voodoo to vaporize lead and steel in the towers, and to hide Saddam’s mysterious WMD.”

http://www.911blogger.com/node/21923

2.  What a grotesque charade:

“Albania: Town to Unveil Statue of President Bush”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/world/europe/21briefs-Albania.html?_r=1&ref=world

3.  “USA Today undermines the entire master narrative of US/NATO military operations in Afghanistan, writing: “The U.S. military says the vast majority of the 700 detainees at its biggest prison in Afghanistan could eventually be released because they’re fighting more for money than ideology.”

War hawks are always saying we are there to fight the Taliban because they are ideologically aligned with and inseparable from al-Qaeda. But the guys we’ve been fighting and imprisoning seem just to be poor schmucks looking to make a buck by militia activity.”

http://www.juancole.com/

4.  “Wells Fargo Says It Doesn’t Have to Reserve Against Its Off-Balance Sheet Residential Exposure Because the FHA (Meaning the Taxpayers) Will Pay For It

WFC is basically saying that none of the bank’s $1.1 trillion in conforming OBS [off balance sheet] exposures need to be represented or reserved against.
…
Bottom line: Wells Fargo is saying that since the FHA – that is, the government, that is, the taxpayers – will bail out Wells for loans that go bad, the giant bank doesn’t have to reserve against these possible losses.

Yes, Wells is as bad as the other too big to fails. See this, this, this and this.”

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/11/wells-fargo-says-it-doesnt-have-to.html

5.  “Why we fight”: The Nature of Modern Imperialism

Aggressive and exclusive military alliances like NATO should be disbanded

Alan McKinnon shows that the UK and US ‘defence’ policy is in fact a ‘projection of power’ policy with the primary purpose of defending the commercial interests of transnational companies

The Gulf area still accounts for up to 70 per cent of known oil reserves where the costs of production are lowest. So it is no surprise that US policy continues to focus on Iran which has the world’s second largest combined oil and gas reserves.

The US response has been largely military – the expansion of NATO and the encirclement of Russia and China in a ring of hostile bases and alliances. And continuing pressure to isolate and weaken Iran by a campaign of sanctions orchestrated through the IAEA and the United Nations with the threat of military action lurking in the background. The danger is that, even under the presidency of Obama, an economically weakened United States will tend to use the one massive advantage it has over its rivals – its global war machine.

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16210

1.  “The outline of the talk was simply to look at ten characteristics of planned, explosive demolition, and see how the collapses aligned with them (with side by side videos of the collapses and known demolitions) as compared with characteristics of collapses due to fire, which is the official cause – even though no high rise steel frame buildings have ever collapsed due to fire.

 

I already knew most of what was presented, but a number of his videos of the tower collapses very clearly showed explosive nature of the collapses and the squibs blowing out the side of the buildings just below the collapse zone, but also much further down.

 

The new info I had not heard of, and there were quite a few photos of this, were large sections of the outer steel framework – weighing 20 tons or so – stuck in the sides of surrounding buildings, blasted out of the towers around 600 feet at an estimated speed of 70mph. These sections were apparently not from the higher parts of the towers but from lower down where more force was required eject them to where they ended up.

…

Why in the world would any firefighter or first responder be allowed to enter a burning giant office building, if buildings are known to collapse into dust in a matter of seconds with no warning?

…

Debunkers know a lot and ask some intelligent questions but turn willingful ignorant when it comes to relevant facs and implications.
THIS MAKES NO SENSE when you are looking for the truth.

…

It seems most professional people particularly in the engineering trades once confronted with scientific forensics concerning the liabilities created by the official story are full on for a real investigation. Professionals in the trades such as Van Romero, and the people at NIST with jobs to lose or grants denied in the case of Van Romero at New Mexico School of Mines, change their stories from condemnatory in tone to one of acquittal of any govt responsibility. Van Romero stated on national television these looked like controlled demolitions. He essentially said what anyone using common sense would think, that a steel building of any type doesn’t just turn to dust. If it does collapse, If by some infinitesimally small chance a huge steel building just collapsed IT WOULDN’T happen symmetrical, and IT WOULDN’T HAPPEN THREE TIMES by any stretch of the imagination.”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/21913

2.  “Should Obama Fire Gen. McChrystal?

It is not too late for President Barack Obama to follow the example of Harry Truman, who fired the famous Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1951 for insubordination. Then, as now, the stakes were high. Then it was Korea; now it is Afghanistan.

…

Today, Gen. McChrystal is conducting a subtler but equally insubordinate campaign for a wider war in Afghanistan, with the backing of CENTCOM commander David Petraeus.

It is clear in retrospect that President Obama either should not have appointed McChrystal or should have at least taken the telegenic general to the woodshed regarding leaks of his troop recommendations, rather than inviting him to confer quietly on Air Force One seven weeks ago.

…

In my view, Obama should fire Gen. Stanley McChrystal.”
http://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2009/11/20/should-obama-fire-gen-mcchrystal/

3.  ” Once again, as always, we have to take a side! “Trying these bastards as if they were human beings is an insult to our great nation! Anyone who attacked us the way they did is a monster! So we should treat them like monsters! Pronounce the death sentence and kill the SOBs!” Versus: “Trying them in federal court shows just what a great nation we are! Yes, they’re monsters, but we are so strong, so virtuous, and so, so, so good that we accord even monsters justice in the same way we do everyone else! Truly we are the best that ever was or ever will be!”

You see the critical point of common agreement: the United States is the bestest ever, in this and every other universe. God, we love us. Verily, ’tis a romance for the ages.
…
And: “Failure is not an option.” That is deep. Isn’t that what the Bush administration said about Iraq? Isn’t that what everyone says about Afghanistan? Isn’t that what our solons told us about why we had to bail out the Wall Street criminals? “Failure is not an option” is the way they seek to compel you to obey, to force you to do whatever the hell they’re demanding today. That’s all. It is, you might say, a vicious, goddamned lie, one of the worst lies that those who would control our lives ever tell.

Of course this will be a show trial.
…
One other aspect of this sordid business merits discussion. Events of recent years have often caused me to note one especially bathetic element of the mythologies with which most Americans, including our political leaders, suffocate themselves. We insist on our fairy tales, on our immovable conviction that no matter what destructive acts we commit, regardless of how monstrous our policies may be, there will always be a happy ending. Thus, as just one example, the United States government and its military murder more than one million innocent people — but we still convince ourselves that the outcome justifies the slaughter, that it was “worth it.”
…
The judicial refusal to consider KSM’s years of quasi-legal military detention as a violation of his right to a speedy trial will erode that already crippled constitutional concept. The denial of the venue motion will raise the bar even higher for defendants looking to escape from damning pretrial publicity. Ever deferential to the trial court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will affirm dozens of decisions that redact and restrict the disclosure of secret documents, prompting the government to be ever more expansive in invoking claims of national security and emboldening other judges to withhold critical evidence from future defendants. Finally, the twisted logic required to disentangle KSM’s initial torture from his subsequent “clean team” statements will provide a blueprint for the government, giving them the prize they’ve been after all this time—a legal way both to torture and to prosecute.“

http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2009/11/hey-i-know-lets-put-on-show-trial.html

4.  ” A lesbian soldier who deserted the U.S. army won a key court victory Friday when a judge ordered the refugee board to reconsider her failed asylum claim and take into account compelling evidence that she was persecuted and that her sexual orientation could mean stiffer punishment for going AWOL.

Federal Court Justice Yves de Montigny’s order for the board to consider a gay U.S. soldier as a credible refugee candidate is believed to be a first,
…
Smith, who says she was outed by another soldier who spotted her walking hand-in-hand with a woman at a shopping mall, contends in court documents that she was badgered daily, saddled with extra work by her superiors and received more than 100 threatening notes on her dormitory door, including a death threat.”

http://www.canada.com/life/Lesbian%2Bsoldier%2Bwins%2Basylum/2246070/story.html

5.  It’s NEVER a good idea to humanize murderers:

“The child of Auschwitz’s Kommandant

But whatever improvement he represented, when measured against the worst Auschwitz kommandants, these were in the end only “minor differences”, he argues.

Liebehenschel still participated in genocide and countless innocent people were sent to their deaths during his time there.

…

Former Auschwitz prisoner Wladyslaw Fejkiel said that during Liebehenschel’s command “there were no positive changes for the care of the prisoners, related to food or medications. The sanitary conditions remained insufficient…”

 

He reports that Liebehenschel asked to be told about prisoners in poor health so that they could be considered first among those to be released from the camp. But he adds that he did “not know of a single case of those prisoners brought to his attention who were therefore released”.

 

Barbara stresses that she is not attempting to excuse her father’s actions, that she is appalled by what the Nazis did. Her aim is to paint a three-dimensional picture, of a kind rarely given of Nazi war criminals, including the good as well as the bad.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/8210135.stm

6.  “Tories, Liberals, compete to demonstrate blind support for Israel

In light of the UN Goldstone report – produced following Israel’s 22-day assault on Gaza last winter – which detailed extensive evidence that Israel committed war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity, unquestioning Canadian support for Israel contradicts its traditional support for human rights and support for international law. Woodley continues, “I find it very difficult to believe that at a time when the majority of the international community is calling for investigations into what happened during Israel’s invasion of Gaza, our leaders are arguing over which party is more blindly supportive of Israel.”

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16203

7.  “”Criminals”?  ”Prosecutions”?  ”Obliged to open a case”?  ”Violations of human rights”?  Just because they maintained a few secret prisons in violation of domestic and international law?  What kind of crazy, purist, Far Leftist utopians are running that place?  They need a heavy dose of pragmatism so they can understand all the reasons why so-called ”crimes” like this can be overlooked — just blissfully forgotten like a bad dream.  Even worse, with intemperate and shrill language of the type they’re throwing around, it’s seems clear that the Lithuanian press is sorely in need of some David Broders, Fred Hiatts, and David Ignatiuses to explain to them that subjecting law-breaking political officials to “investigations” and “prosecutions” is quite disruptive and unpleasant when those crimes involve matters other than consensual sex between adults.
…

Thankfully, the U.S. remains a bastion of pragmatic sanity in this rising sea of accountability extremism.  Unlike those strange Eastern Europeans and absolutist Western European purist judges, we know there are far more important priorities than “investigating” war crimes, compelling transparency, and holding political criminals accountable.  As the rest of the world gets distracted by all this chatter about The Past, our President gallantly protects us from such divisive unpleasantries by aggressively blocking any war crimes investigations and concealing evidence — even modifying decades-old transparency laws to do so if necessary.  Even more inspiring, our patriotic media enthusiastically plays a crucial helping role; The Washington Post has known since 2005 in exactly which countries the CIA maintained its illegal, secret prisons but still refuses to say, even though they’ve now been banned by Executive Order and even though Lithuania and Poland are launching investigations which the Post could easily answer, but chooses not to.

 

When President Obama was in China last week, he proudly boasted of the American commitment to transparency and lamented that China lacked such values.  Fortunately, he doesn’t get carried away with “principles” the way that these short-sighted Lithuanians and Polish and others do.  Unlike those unhinged primitive nations with no democratic traditions, we understand that government crimes should be disclosed, investigated and punished only when they occur during a time other than the Past.  It’s vital that we maintain our leadership role in teaching this critical value to the world, lest the type of crazed accountability/rule-of-law fetish currently engulfing Lithuania spreads even further like some uncontrollable virus.”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/

1.  More military lies and bad faith:

“Army limits media access at Palin event at NC base

The main reason is to stop this from turning into a political platform,” said Fort Bragg spokesman Tom McCollum. “There are Army regulations that basically prohibit military reservations from becoming political platforms by politicians.”

AP Associate General Counsel Dave Tomlin called the proposed pools and restrictions on interviews “unlawful and unacceptable.”

 

“If Army regulations forbid ‘political events’, the Army should have considered that before allowing Palin to hold a public autograph session for a political book on the base,” Tomlin said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091120/ap_on_en_ot/us_palin_fort_bragg

2.  ” US trained butchers of Timor

Exclusive: Washington trained death squads in secret while Britain has spent £1m helping Indonesian army

Kopassus was built up with American expertise despite US awareness of its role in the genocide of about 200,000 people in the years after the invasion of East Timor in 1975, and in a string of massacres and disappearances since the bloodbath. Amnesty International describes Kopassus as ‘responsible for some of the worst human rights violations in Indonesia’s history’.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/1999/sep/19/indonesia.easttimor1

3.  “What Is So Patriotic About Hysteria?

The loudest voices on the right never tire of telling us that they are the truest patriots. They claim to be the deepest believers in our system, the strongest defenders of our Constitution, the most upbeat, bold and courageous Americans anywhere. But now that the government is finally prepared to put the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 terror attacks on trial, these same patriots are the first to spread doubt, instigate anxiety and abandon constitutional principles.

 

When did fear-mongering in a time of war become an act of patriotism?

 

Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to try al-Qaida strategist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other residents of the Guantanamo prison in American civilian courts has provoked angry criticism from all the usual sources, from the Wall Street Journal editorial page to the Fox News airwaves. While some of the complaints are thoughtful, many are nothing more than demagogic appeals that seek to undermine the foundations of justice in a democratic society.”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/what_is_so_patriotic_about_hysteria_20091118/

4.  “Why are we in Afghanistan? To start, we can dismiss the preposterous argument advanced by Obama’s most aggressive advisers about defending our country against “terrorism” in Afghanistan. Al-Qaida is nothing if not decentralized, and its adherents are still perfectly capable of attacking the United States from Canada, Boston, Hamburg, or Fort Hood. Anyway, terrorism, as Timothy McVeigh demonstrated in Oklahoma City, can originate with the nice young white man next door who shops at the gun store around the corner. “Fighting terrorism” in Afghanistan “to prevent another 9/11” simply isn’t a serious argument, and I suspect that even the deluded Gen. Stanley McChrystal understands that his men are shooting at indigenous Afghan rebels, not Osama bin Laden or his followers.

 

No, the more likely reason for killing all those people and wasting nearly $3.4 billion a month is an ugly mixture of vanity, misplaced pride, crass politics, and liberal self-righteousness. The Army still wants to prove it can defeat a guerrilla army and erase the shame of Vietnam. The politicians, Obama included, want to look warlike and tough, so they can’t be accused of being “soft on terror” in 2010. And then there are the civil servants and think-tank denizens known as “humanitarian interventionists” — now led by Hillary Clinton, who think that America’s “civilizing” mission in the world includes not only establishing “democracy” but also “freeing” Afghan women from being required to wear the burqa.”
http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_rick18_11-18-09_5DGFNCP_v9.3f8b504.html

5.  “The trial of the Gitmo defendants isn’t going to be about the rule of law, it isn’t motivated by the Obama administration’s liberal idealism, and it most certainly won’t signify anything as rational as putting an end to the “war on terrorism” and treating Al Qaeda the same way we treated the Mafia and Cosa Nostra, i.e. as a floating international criminal conspiracy rather than a stationary military threat. What it will be about is generating war propaganda, positioning the Obama-ites as “tough”on terrorism and serious about national security.

 

Here’s the narrative the Justice Department will spin out, as the trial – surely to be one of the most closely-watched in recent memory — progresses: the defendants, hiding in their Pakistani-Afghan “safe haven,” were able to plot the 9/11 attacks, and future terrorist acts, from a safe distance, until we swooped in (or, rather, the ISI swooped in, but never mind that … ) and wrecked their plans. The whole legal procedure should be fairly close to its seemingly inevitable verdict just as the debate over the Afghan war reaches an acrimonious crescendo – yet another fortuitous coincidence, no doubt”

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/11/19/the-gitmo-trial-why-now/

6.  “I’m just really really impressed at how KSM has pulled himself together from his middle of the night capture in Pakistan back in ‘03….

we’re actually still treated to that “what time is it, what a night” look he had — very heavy set, stretched neck tshirt, wide face and uncontrolled hair…back in 03…. but what about his new “forget weight watchers try CIA reprogramming diet” new Mug shot they are showing now — in full head arab garb — thin – -and suddenly: HUGE EYES — and other facial features that DO NOT match the pakistan 03 pic.

the bottom line is the 911 commission used the info gleamed from torturing this guy to paint the 911 official narrative — NOBODY has ever seen him since that capture that even in 03 — newsmen commented that the whole event with pakistani police arresting him seemed very staged–

but now we have this picture of thin — elegantly dressed arab with big bambi eyes – with a “hello my name is KSM, I did it all” – -doesn’t make sense.

Obviously this other guy is a stooge – and they’re doing a “real trial ” to give the people “real theatre” — this is staged.

any other opinions about the photo differences here? Weight loss aside.. they don’t look a thing alike —

really, who is this guy with in the new picture?”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/21903

7.  A great letter by Mr. Gibbs:

“Tucson Architect Jody Gibbs Invites Fellow Architects to a Showing of “Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup”

http://911blogger.com/node/21910

8.  “The Washington establishment suffers a serious defeat

Grim details how key Committee Democrats such as Frank — who spent the year claiming to support an audit of the Fed in the face of rising anger over its secret and bank-subservient policies — suddenly introduced their own amendment (sponsored by Democratic Rep. Melvin Watt) that would have essentially gutted the Paul/Grayson provisions. Banking industry and Fed officials, as well as the Democratic leadership, then got behind that alternative provision as a means of pretending to support transparency while protecting the Fed from any genuine examination.
…
For that reason, many of the most consequential political conflicts are shaped far more by an “insider v. outsider” dichotomy than by a “GOP v. Democrat” or “Left v. Right” split.  The pillaging of America’s economic security by financial elites, with the eager assistance of the government officials who they own and who serve them, is the prime example of such a conflict.   The political system as a whole — both parties’ leadership — is owned and controlled by a handful of key industry interests, and anger over the fact is found across the political spectrum.  Yesterday’s vote is a very rare example where the true nature of political power was expressed and the petty distractions and artificial fault lines overcome.”

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/

9.  “The American military has killed roughly two million people in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001. Those attacks were illegal–no declaration of war, no UN mandate–and are largely recognized as such by the American public. Many of the victims were killed with chemical and radioactive weapons, and some while under torture. In other words, these are crimes–some of the biggest mass murders in human history.

There are no angry editorials. The illegal wars, instead of being brought to an end, are being ramped up. The crimes–yes, including the torture–continues. But it’s OK–as long as it doesn’t happen here in the United States. It’s OK to rain death on Pakistanis using drone planes…gotta spare those precious American lives!

Mass murder is shocking when the victims are Americans; it’s doubly shocking when it happens in America.

Thirteen soldiers die in Texas and it’s all we talk about. Two million die in Afghanistan and Iraq and we don’t notice and we don’t even want to hear about it. Only 12 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 can find Afghanistan on a map.”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24011.htm