U.S. vs international editions:
Wikileaks News
CIA, Mossad and Soros Behind Wikileaks
WMR has learned from Asian intelligence sources that there is a strong belief in some Asian countries, particularly China and Thailand, that the website Wikileaks, which purports to publish classified and sensitive documents while guaranteeing anonymity to the providers, is linked to U.S. cyber-warfare and computer espionage operations, as well as to Mossad’s own cyber-warfare activities.
Wikileaks claims to have decrypted video footage of a U.S. Predator air strike on civilians in Afghanistan and that covert U.S. State Department agents followed Wikileaks’s editor from Iceland to Norway in a surveillance operation conducted jointly by the United States and Iceland. Iceland’s financially-strapped government recently announced a policy of becoming a haven for websites that fear political oppression and censorship in their home countries. However, in the case of Wikileaks, countries like China and Thailand are suspicious of the websites’ actual “ownership.”
Wikileaks says it intends to show its video at an April 5 press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC but that its presenters may be detained or arrested before that time. WMR’s sources believe the Wikileaks “militancy” in the face of supposed surveillance appears fake.
Our Asian intelligence sources report the following: “Wikileaks is running a disinformation campaign, crying persecution by U.S. intelligence- when it is U.S. intelligence itself. Its [Wikileaks’] activities in Iceland are totally suspect.”
(Read more from truthrss.com)
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The hypocrisy of the media attack on Wikileaks
The traditional media has become so toothless it is reduced to attacking Wikileaks for doing its job properly. (Read more from politics.co.uk)
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Wikileaks cable release ‘attack on world’
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has denounced the release of classified diplomatic cables as an “attack on the international community”. (Read more from bbc.co.uk)
Jim Rogers and Andrew Schiff debate some socialist
It’s unusual for the good guys to have numbers on the statists.
World Bank head calls for monetary system linked to gold
Of course, I don’t think we need any world bank. Around 1900 almost all international trade conducted in gold and silver. This emerged voluntarily without any massive, tax-payer funded, secretive bureaucracies telling us that it ought to be that way. I’m suspicious of his true motives and intent in making this declaration.
In the run-up to the G20 summit of leading economies, to be held Thursday and Friday in Seoul, the president of the World Bank has published a column in the Financial Times calling for a fundamental revamping of the global currency system involving a lesser role for the US dollar and a modified gold standard. The Financial Times underscored the significance of the column by making it the subject of its front-page lead article on Monday.
In his column, World Bank chief Robert Zoellick, a former US Treasury official, points to the crisis conditions prompting his proposal. (Read more from wsws.org)
Ron Paul: QE2 Signals the Fed’s Desperation
Ron Paul: Bernanke and Krugman are Destroying the Dollar
The USS of A breaks the Soviet record
Even for the humble among us who try to avoid jingoistic outbursts, some national achievements are so grand that they merit a moment of pride and celebration: US presence in Afghanistan as long as Soviet slog (Read more from salon.com)
The FBI successfully thwarts its own Terrorist plot
The FBI is obviously quite pleased with itself over its arrest of a 19-year-old Somali-American, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, who — with months of encouragement, support and money from the FBI’s own undercover agents — allegedly attempted to detonate a bomb at a crowded Christmas event in Portland, Oregon. Media accounts are almost uniformly trumpeting this event exactly as the FBI describes it. Loyalists of both parties are doing the same, with Democratic Party commentators proclaiming that this proves how great and effective Democrats are at stopping The Evil Terrorists, while right-wing polemicists point to this arrest as yet more proof that those menacing Muslims sure are violent and dangerous. (Read more from salon.com)
I’m liking Glenn Greenwald more and more. Hope Salon doesn’t fire him for telling the truth.
Dollar rally, sovereign debt, black Friday
A Thanksgiving Lesson — the settler experience with property rights
TSA Gropes Ron Paul
Recently, Ron Paul had to go through his first invasive pat-down at the airport; his knee replacements bar him from the gulagoscan. This is one of the most well-mannered men I know, but after four very hard jabs to his genitals, he asked the blue-gloved TSA agent: “How can you live with yourself, feeling up strange men all day long?”
“I love my job,” sneered the goon.
How to Improve Society
Jeffrey Tucker covers a lot in this video. History, books, anti-capitalism. Interesting commentary on Upton Singclair’s The Jungle.
He talks about America’s gilded age 1870-1900ish, and a free-market aristocracy in Rhode Island that, from what it sounds like, consciously compared itself to the government enforced European aristocracy.
His principles for great entrepreneurs:
1- don’t let school take you out of the real world
2- don’t worry about money
3- fanatical focus on task at hand
4- surround themselves with good, smart people
5- don’t plan & act now
6- compete, but don’t seek to destroy
7- look to give others what they want
8- stay away from politics & the state! Find a realm of freedom and create within it!
Enviro-Insanity
One of the most upvoted Youtube comments is “I love you Doug Stanhope, I am also vasectomized man and I am for abortion and I am NEVER EVER having kids.”
Terrorist Show Trials
The trial of Omar Khadr has been called a travesty of justice, a violation of the rule of law, a kangaroo court and lots of other things beside. But what it really was, was a show trial.
On the main charge, “murder in violation of the laws of war” (a crime that doesn’t appear to even exist in international law, given that combatants who kill other soldiers in combat are not violating the laws of war), the chief evidence against the then-15-year-old child soldier was his own confession. And that confession, made years ago and long since recanted, was obtained under conditions that any normal human being would describe as torture.
Omar Khadr was captured in 2002 in Afghanistan. He was the only survivor after a firefight and an air strike on an al-Qaeda position. He had been wounded in his shoulder and in both eyes, shot twice in the back and was near death. It was alleged that, just before he was shot, he had thrown a grenade at attacking American troops, killing one of them. As already noted, he was 15 years old.
He then spent several months in the hellhole that was Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, where he claims — credibly, given all that we know about what went on at Bagram — that he was subjected to sleep deprivation, the chaining of his hands above his head for hours, that he was hooded and threatened by dogs, and sometimes forced to urinate on himself because he was not unshackled to go to the bathroom.
His chief interrogator at Bagram admitted to telling the teenage boy that unless he co-operated, he would be sent to a U.S. prison, where a group of black men would gang rape him to death. Ponder that for a moment.
He was interviewed about 25 times by this interrogator, Joshua Claus. Claus was also the interrogator for an Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar who was chained to the ceiling and beaten to death in Bagram in 2002; Claus pled guilty to his involvement in the affair and received a five month sentence. In a lovely Orwellian touch, the U.S. government insisted that reporters covering Khadr’s trial not name Claus, but instead refer to him as “Interrogator 1.”
In Bagram, Khadr confessed that he had thrown the grenade that killed an American soldier. No one saw him do this, so his confession is really the only evidence of the act. Last summer, U.S. military judge Colonel Patrick Parrish ruled that the confession, despite the obviously coercive circumstances under which it was made, had been freely given, and could be used against Khadr in court.
This week, Omar Khadr was offered the following choice: plead guilty, or face two different routes to life in prison. He could go to trial, and thanks to a confession that would be laughed out of any real court of law, he’d probably be convicted. But even if the court somehow found him not guilty, the U.S. reserved the right to detain him indefinitely as an enemy combatant. The only sure way to get out of jail early was to tell his interrogators what they wanted to hear.
On Monday, Khadr was even forced to cop to other crimes, including the killing of two Afghan soldiers, something he wasn’t even charged with, and for which the prosecution appears to have had no evidence. And, in a nice touch that Stalin would have appreciated, Khadr appears to have also been forced to sign away his right to sue his jailors for the various forms of deprivation and abuse that he was subject to. In court on Monday, Col. Patrick Parrish repeatedly asked Khadr to confirm that he was agreeing to these terms willingly, that he really, truly, sincerely wanted to plead guilty all of his own accord. Khadr said yes. They could have told him to confess that he had simultaneously piloted all four hijacked planes on 9/11, and he would have done it.
And so the Bush administration project of ridding the world of terrorism by means of torture comes full circle. The U.S. military and CIA, ordered to use force to extract information from detainees, something that violated not just U.S. military tradition but U.S. military law, had to come up with new interrogation techniques, and quickly. They turned to history, including copying communist coercion-based interrogation models, such as those that captured American troops had been subjected to during the Korean War.
The original communist torture techniques, which for a time inspired the standard operating procedures at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantanamo and the secret black sites, were not designed to elicit truth. They were designed to produce false confessions: That was the whole point. (Read more from nationalpost.com)
Naked Body Scanner Manufacturer’s CEO Obama’s Guest on Trip to India
OSI Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: OSIS), a vertically-integrated provider of specialized electronic products for critical applications in the Security and Healthcare industries, today announced that Deepak Chopra, Chairman and CEO, was selected to accompany US President, Barack Obama, to Mumbai and attended the US India Business Entrepreneurship meeting, which was held by the US India Business Council (US IBC). (Read more from dailypaul.com)