April 22, 2010

1.  Goodness.  Civilian deaths aren’t a ‘problem’ – they are war crimes, and need to cease immediately:

“High Profile Civilian Killings a Growing Problem in Afghanistan”

http://news.antiwar.com/2010/04/21/high-profile-civilian-killings-a-growing-problem-in-afghanistan/

2.  “Pentagon Invents Taliban Atrocity in Khataba

Realizing that they had killed seven innocent people, the Americans immediately began to create what would become a series of false stories and fabricated incidents. They would destroy evidence of this potential war crime and ultimately attempt to blame the killings on the Taliban. The killings might well have been accidental, but the cover-up was premeditated, intentional and criminal. It causes one to wonder what other alleged Taliban and al-Qaeda “atrocities” have been manufactured by the Pentagon, and how many other Afghan civilians have been killed by the American military, with the Taliban being falsely blamed.”

http://kabulpress.org/my/spip.php?article6818

3.  It’s also the first casualty of government in general:

‘Truth Is Often The First Casualty Of War’

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,690380,00.html

4.  “The Never Ending Drug War

This never-ending war has been a phony contest, an arm wrestle between two arms of the US state: the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the Central intelligence Agency (CIA). Routinely, the DEA’s attempts at prosecuting major traffickers in US courts were dismissed on national security grounds, because the traffickers were CIA assets. As CIA director George Bush explained in 1976, these cover-ups were legal under a 1954 agreement between the CIA and the Justice Department, which gave the CIA the right to block prosecutions and to keep its crimes secret in the name of national security. The “de-facto” immunity from prosecution enabled CIA assets to brazenly deal drugs, knowing they were ‘protected’.
…

In the process of penetrating the world drug trade, US narcotic agents invariably stumbled upon the CIA’s involvement in drug-trafficking. One of the reasons the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was abolished in the 1960s was that its case-making agents uncovered these political and espionage intrigues. In the 1970s the DEA and the CIA warred over the role of South Vietnamese government officials in the heroin trade and DEA agents were taught the rules of “plausible deniability” to insulate US involvement. During the 1980s the DEA’s priority was protecting the Reagan’s administration’s illegal drug operations in Central America and Central Asia. The DEA was suborned and became an adjunct of the CIA in American foreign policy, politely staying away from CIA sponsored war zones in Central Asia and Central America, operating the War on Drugs along ideological lines.

Today, says Valentine, the DEA is a top-heavy bureaucracy, ruled by ideologues unsullied by street work, strained though a sieve of security clearances, oblivious to their mandate and beholden only to political power brokers. As a consequence, the Northern Alliance can deal drugs with impunity while Taliban associates require investigating. In the never-ending war, the US empire and its assets always win.

Valentine traces the CIA’s hi-jacking of federal drug law enforcement from the early 1950s when a handful of narcotics agents, at the behest of the CIA through its MKULTRA Program, set up safe houses in New York and San Francisco for illegal drug-testing experiments on US citizens. Equipped with two-way mirrors, the drug agents observed US congressmen and others, under the influence of LSD. Over the next decade, federal drug agents helped sprinkle so much acid in the Bay area that it spawned the psychedelic generation. ”

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18769

5.  “The CIA Hit List”: Muslim Men to be Murdered as “Threats to the US”

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18795

6.  Nice violation of Posse Comitatus:

“McCain, Kyl Want Troops on U.S.-Mexico Border”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25281.htm

7.

// <![CDATA[//

// <![CDATA[//

“Borrowing While Poor

Although income discrimination is similar in some ways to racial discrimination, the remedies must be radically different. Under anti-racial-discrimination laws, a lender is not guilty of discrimination if her decision not to lend to a particular individual is motivated by economic considerations. But while it’s legitimate to use the level of a borrower’s income to determine whether that borrower is creditworthy, it should not determine the level of the interest rate she is charged.

If income discrimination is to end, a law that requires banks to offer the same interest rate to all homebuyers, regardless of income, will not suffice. Under such a law, some banks would announce a low interest rate that would be offered to all, but their loan qualification criteria would exclude the poor. Other banks would probably offer a high interest rate to all, but because of the high rate their only customers would be the poor. Each bank would not discriminate, but all the banks collectively would. To solve the problem, the government should establish the criterion for borrowers’ qualifications, requiring that banks offer the same interest rate to any borrower who meets this criterion.”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25288.htm