1. “The FBI used faked terrorism emergencies to illegally obtain Americans’ phone records
“It involved use of an “exigent circumstances letter,” a document that allowed a supervisor to declare an emergency and get the records and then – after the fact – issue a national security letter detailing the terrorism risk.
The required national security letters were sometimes concocted and covered by broadbrush generic phrases like “threats against transportation facilities,” “threats against individuals” and “threats against special events,” internal e-mails show.
http://www.911blogger.com/node/22407
2. “MLK assassinated by US government: King family civil trial 1999 decision. Why didn’t you know this?
Martin Luther King’s family and his attorney, William F. Pepper, won a civil trial that found US government agencies guilty in the wrongful death of Martin Luther King. The 1999 trial, King Family versus Jowers and Other Unknown Co-Conspirators, is the only trial ever conducted on the assassination of Dr. King. The King family’s attempts for a criminal trial were denied, as suspect James Ray’s recant of what he claimed was a false confession was denied.
…
Hundreds of writers have documented US corporate media collusion with US government to disinform the American public with wars and supporting policy of fascism. Corporate media’s refusal to cover this trial and report upon it is a revealing case study.
Policy response: Gandhi and Martin Luther King advocated public understanding of the facts and non-cooperation with evil. I’m among hundreds who advocate:
1.Understand the laws of war. These were legislated after WW2 and are crystal-clear that only self-defense, in a narrow legal meaning, can justify war. The current US wars are not even close to being lawful. Those involved with US military, government, and law enforcement have an oath to protect and defend the US Constitution, not “always place the mission first.” To fulfill their oath they must immediately refuse and end all orders associated with unlawful wars and military-related constant violation of treaties.
2.End the transfer of trillions of American taxpayer money to banksters and admitted as “lost” by our military. End poverty through global cooperation to achieve the UN Millennium Goals by developed countries investing 0.7% of their income. Support global security through cooperation, dignity, justice, and freedom. Create a US Department of Peace to help.”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/22402
3. “The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle
Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama’s young administration with crimes that occurred during the George W. Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.
Late in the evening on June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners.
As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Guantánamo to leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths “suicides.” In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. “I believe this was not an act of desperation,” he said, “but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” Reporters accepted the official account, and even lawyers for the prisoners appeared to believe that they had killed themselves. Only the prisoners’ families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen rejected the notion.
…
As retired Rear Admiral John Hutson, the former judge advocate general of the Navy, told me, “Filing false reports and making false statements is bad enough, but if a homicide occurs and officials up the chain of command attempt to cover it up, they face serious criminal liability. They may even be viewed as accessories after the fact in the original crime.” With command authority comes command responsibility, he said. “If the heart of the military is obeying orders down the chain of command, then its soul is accountability up the chain. You can’t demand the former without the latter.”
The Justice Department thus faced a dilemma; it could do the politically convenient thing, which was to find no justification for a thorough investigation, leave the NCIS conclusions in place, and hope that the public and the news media would obey the Obama Administration’s dictum to “look forward, not backward”; or it could pursue a course of action that would implicate the Bush Justice Department in a cover-up of possible homicides.”
http://harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006368
4. “Aid Groups, Nations Complain US Military Blocking Haiti Aid
US Spokesmen Shrug Off Complaints as Medical Aid Flights Blocked
Still other commanders promised that the military would change its practices so that humanitarian aid was given a higher priority, sparking inevitable questions about why this wasn’t the case in the first place.
Despite efforts to get some clarification from Defense Secretary Robert Gates about the scope of the operation, he would speak only in vague terms. Troops in the country insisted they “aren’t here to fight,” but their actions on the ground suggest that even in a purely humanitarian operation the US is very comfortable with the role of occupier, and the perpetual war mentality is extending to control over the tiny airport, with disastrous consequences.”
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/01/18/aid-groups-nations-complain-us-military-blocking-haiti-aid/
5. “What’s often forgotten about Martin Luther King
However, few speakers, if any, will point out that, if King were alive today, he most assuredly would be leading the opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Few people will recall that King became an outspoken adversary of the Vietnam war, which was waged in the “national interest,” as are the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
In their “canonization” of King, making him a saint, American leaders conveniently forget about his adamant anti-war stance and his persistent challenge to this country’s economic structures that leave so many people in severe poverty. Rather, they focus only on the “safe” part of King’s life, not his prophetic voice against war and poverty. That would make them uneasy and have to answer the contradictions King laid bare about the United States,
As a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, King surely would have found it unbelievable and shocking that another recipient of that award, President Barack Obama, would use the Nobel podium to defend those wars.”
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/6820815.html
6. So why continue using drones to kill civilians?
“US drones unlikely to break militants in long term “
7. Yea, that’s likely to work:
“Pak may fence 2,250-mile border with Afghanistan”
http://www.pakistannews.net/story/590139
8. “U.S. Military Weapons Inscribed With Secret ‘Jesus’ Bible Codes
U.S. military rules specifically prohibit the proselytizing of any religion in Iraq or Afghanistan and were drawn up in order to prevent criticism that the U.S. was embarked on a religious “Crusade” in its war against al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents. “
… and these commanders are obviously morons:
“Weinstein, an attorney and former Air Force officer, said many members of his group who currently serve in the military have complained about the markings on the sights. He also claims they’ve told him that commanders have referred to weapons with the sights as “spiritually transformed firearm[s] of Jesus Christ.”
He said coded biblical inscriptions play into the hands of “those who are calling this a Crusade.”
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/
9. “Top Ten Counter-Terrorism Scandals 2010″
10. “US Military to Enforce State of Emergency in Haiti
The Haitian government declared a state of emergency on Monday, six days after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake laid waste to much of the nation and its capital, Port-au-Prince, killing at least 200,000, according to the latest estimate.
The state of emergency creates martial law conditions that will be enforced by the US military. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had demanded the imposition of the emergency decree during her visit to Haiti on Saturday. “The decree would give the government an enormous amount of authority, which in practice they would delegate to us,” Clinton declared.
With tens of thousands more Haitians in peril for lack of water, food and medical supplies, Haiti’s imposition of martial law until February 1 makes clear that the central preoccupation of the US-led rescue operation is not to save lives, but to establish military control over the nation.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17090
11. “The crime of not “Looking Backward”
Incidents like this dramatically underscore what can only be called the grotesque immorality of the ”Look Forward, Not Backwards” consensus which our political class — led by the President — has embraced. During the Bush years, the United States government committed some of the most egregious crimes a government can commit. They plainly violated domestic law, international law, and multiple treaties to which the U.S. has long been a party. Despite that, not only has President Obama insisted that these crimes not be prosecuted, and not only has his Justice Department made clear that — at most — they will pursue a handful of low-level scapegoats, but far worse, the Obama administration has used every weapon it possesses to keep these crimes concealed, prevent any accountability for them, and even venerated them as important “state secrets,” thus actively preserving the architecture of lawlessness and torture that gave rise to these crimes in the first place.
Every Obama-justifying excuse for Looking Forward, Not Backwards has been exposed as a sham (recall, for instance, the claim that we couldn’t prosecute Bush war crimes because it would ruin bipartisanship and Republicans wouldn’t support health care reform). But even if those excuses had been factually accurate, it wouldn’t have mattered. There are no legitimate excuses for averting one’s eyes from crimes of this magnitude and permitting them to go unexamined and unpunished. The real reason why “Looking Forward, Not Backwards” is so attractive to our political and media elites is precisely because they don’t want to face what they enabled and supported. They want to continue to believe that it just involved the quick and necessary waterboarding of three detainees and a few slaps to a handful of the Worst of the Worst. Only a refusal to “Look Backwards” will enable the lies they have been telling (to the world and to themselves) to be sustained. But as Horton’s story illustrates, there are real victims and genuine American criminals — many of them — and anyone who wants to keep that concealed and protected is, by definition, complicit in those crimes, not only the ones that were committed in the past, but similar ones that almost certainly, as a result of Not Looking Backwards, will be committed in the future.”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/
12. “I Am The Resistance
You can call me names but history knows I am a hero
Whenever there is injustice, there are people fighting it with every possible means. We have seen it so many times before: the oppressed rise up, the oppressor dehumanizes them calling them such names as “terrorists”, “saboteurs”, “death loving” extremists… It is only normal that the oppressor will always lie to justify his actions and its crimes.
What is different in the case of Palestine, is that the Israeli regime has built an effective media and communications networks and campaigns to distort the image of the Palestinian resistance, and that a large portion of the world has believed the Israeli line and hence adopted it.
It is our duty to remember and remind the world that the Palestinian freedom fighter is a man, a woman, like any other. He loves his family. She loves her country. They seek a better future. They are willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of justice and freedom. They waited for the world to lift the blatant injustice that has befallen them since 1948. They expected the world to understand when they took up arms to lift this injustice themselves.
Now, they don’t care what anyone else calls them. They do not seek anyone’s permission, just like any resistance movement. They believe that their cause will be triumphant because it is a cause for justice and humanity. They are merely fulfilling their duty to make the day of justice in Palestine come sooner. So should we.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24446.htm
13. “US Security Company Offers to Perform “High Threat Terminations”
Confront “Worker Unrest” in Haiti
Here we go: New Orleans 2.0
On January 15, a Florida based company called All Pro Legal Investigations registered the URL Haiti-Security.com. It is basically a copy of the company’s existing US website but is now targeted for business in Haiti, claiming the “purpose of this site is to act as a clearinghouse for information seekers on the state of security in Haiti.”
“All Protection and Security has made a commitment to the Haitian community and will provide professional security against any threat to prosperity in Haiti,” the site proclaims. “Job sites and supply convoys will be protected against looters and vandals. Workers will be protected against gang violence and intimidation. The people of Haiti will recover, with the help of the good people from the world over.”
The company boasts that it has run “Thousands of successful missions in Iraq & Afghanistan.” As for its personnel, “Each and every member of our team is a former Law Enforcement Officer or former Military service member,” the site claims. “If Operator experience, training and qualifications matter, choose All Protection & Security for your high-threat Haiti security needs.”
Among the services offered are: “High Threat terminations,” dealing with “worker unrest,” armed guards and “Armed Cargo Escorts.” Oh, and apparently they are currently hiring.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24435.htm
