1. “Anger in Costa Rica Over Deal to ‘Invite’ 46 US Warships
US Marines, Warships to Operate ‘at Will’ in Quiet Nation
Costa Rica’s opposition is expressing increasing opposition to the government’s agreement to allow the United States to send a significant force, 7,000 US Marines and 46 warships, into the tiny Central American nation.
Ostensibly the extension of a long-standing agreement to cooperate in the US war on drugs, the new version actually explicitly allows the US to send warships instead of Coast Guard ships and allows the troops to “carry out the activities it deems necessary” in the nation, basically giving the US military a blank check for all operations in Costa Rica.”
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/07/11/costa-rican-opposition-pans-us-troop-deal/
2. “Infinite Jest: State Terror From Nixon to Obama
Yes, we’ve come a long way since those bad old days of weird old Nixon. He and Super K had to skulk around, straining to swathe their crimes in clouds of misdirection, implication and winking allusion. Now we have, as Silber aptly puts it in another recent essay, “evil in broad daylight”: state murder on tap, cheery admissions of death squads and secret armies operating in 75 countries, free passes for torturers, indefinite detention championed by “progressives,” and the bipartisan, widespread, institutional acceptance of Nixon’s own pernicious doctrine: “If the president does it, that means it’s legal.”
So who cares if the American president and his minions ordered the murder of Rene Schneider almost 40 years ago because he tried to defend the democratic system of his country? Who cares if this murder helped pave the way to mass butchery and repression under an American-backed dictator? Who cares if this kind of moral rot is now accepted as normal, even praiseworthy, by the entire American establishment? Who cares if it has led us to a place where a Nobel Peace Prize laureate can order the murder of his own citizens without charges, trial or evidence, while killing multitudes of innocent foreigners each year with drones, with bombs, with midnight raids?
Who cares? Look around you. Look at the news. Look at our politics. Look at our leaders. Look at our culture. Look at our people. What is the answer to the question?
That’s right. No one. No one cares.
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/07/former-high-level-bp-contractor-working.html
4. “You Are Not Authorized to See These Pictures of the Oil Spill, Citizen … Do Not Look!
Preface: The title is a parody of the fact that the government has effectively made it a felony to take pictures of oiled wildlife.
While most of these pictures have previously been published by the mainstream media – and presumably will remain publicly available – that assumption is not 100% certain. By way of analogy, the government sometimes reclassifies as top secret information which was previously declassified.
More importantly, while some of these photos have been widely seen, most have not, and I have never seen them rounded up in a single page before.”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/07/you-are-not-authorized-to-see-these.html
