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Other Important News
Tuesday, April 21 2009 - Other Important News
Are Members of Congress (and Maybe Even the President) Being Blackmailed?Two articles with more details on the Harman wiretap follow Lindorff's piece.
– Ed.
April 21, 2009 For some time now, many Americans have wondered how Congress, the elected body that the nation’s Founding Fathers saw as the bulwark of liberty, could have been so thoroughly unwilling to, or incapable of challenging the dictatorial power-grabs and the eight-year Constitution wrecking campaign of the Bush/Cheney administration. There has been speculation on both the far left and the far right, and even among some in the apolitical, cynical middle of the political spectrum, that somehow the Bush/Cheney administration must have been blackmailing at least the key members of the Congressional leadership, most likely through the use of electronic monitoring by the National Security Agency (NSA). I’ll admit that I considered the idea of blackmail a bit far out. But now suddenly there is at least some evidence that such seemingly wild speculation may not have been off the mark, with reports that the NSA was indeed monitoring Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), and that the Bush Administration used the evidence it had obtained of her improper conversations with and promises to assist agents of the Israeli government and its lobby here in the US, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), to blackmail her into supporting the NSA’s warrantless spying program—the very kind of spying that led to her being caught on tape plotting with an agent of a foreign power. At the time of the taping of Harman’s incriminating phone conversations, the administration was trying desperately (and ultimately successfully) to get the New York Times to hold off on publishing a shocking investigative report by journalist James Risen about a massive campaign of warrantless tapping of Americans’ phone and internet communications.
Monday, April 6 2009 - Other Important News
Resist or Become SerfsApril 6, 2009 By Chris Hedges Truthdig.com and International Clearinghouse America is devolving into a third-world nation. And if we do not immediately halt our elite’s rapacious looting of the public treasury we will be left with trillions in debts, which can never be repaid, and widespread human misery which we will be helpless to ameliorate. Our anemic democracy will be replaced with a robust national police state. The elite will withdraw into heavily guarded gated communities where they will have access to security, goods and services that cannot be afforded by the rest of us. Tens of millions of people, brutally controlled, will live in perpetual poverty. This is the inevitable result of unchecked corporate capitalism. The stimulus and bailout plans are not about saving us. They are about saving them. We can resist, which means street protests, disruptions of the system and demonstrations, or become serfs. We have been in a steady economic decline for decades. The Canadian political philosopher John Ralston Saul detailed this decline in his 1992 book "Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West." David Cay Johnston exposed the mirage and rot of American capitalism in "Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill)," and David C. Korten, in "When Corporations Rule the World" and "Agenda for a New Economy," laid out corporate malfeasance and abuse. But our universities and mass media, entranced by power and naively believing that global capitalism was an unstoppable force of nature, rarely asked the right questions or gave a prominent voice to those who did. Our elites hid their incompetence and loss of control behind an arrogant facade of specialized jargon and obscure economic theories.
Sunday, April 5 2009 - Other Important News
Cowardice in the Time of TortureBy Ray McGovern I used to take a certain pride by association with prominent Bronxites who have "made it." Cancel that for Attorney General Eric Holder and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. You might think that as African-Americans, they would be especially outraged by torture, given what blacks have suffered at the hands of white torturers in this country and abroad. Why is it that they seem to value more their admittance into a privileged white-dominated ruling class than doing the right thing? How else to explain their stunning reluctance to hold torturers accountable and thus remove the stain of torture from our nation's soul and reputation? One might say that Attorney General Holder is proving himself to be part of that "nation of cowards" that he called the United States in a different context, i.e. our unwillingness to address the issue of race. What about when the victims of torture are Muslims? Where's Holder's courage then?
Sunday, April 5 2009 - Other Important News
Mexican president: US authorities 'complicit' in drug trafficking (and more links)April 4 2009 The President of Mexico has an unfortunate message for Americans still ignorant of the Drug War's cold realities: Some of your politicians are involved. AND For more excellent reporting about drug running in and out of US/Mexico, see investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker's site, Mad Morning News, at www.madcowprod.com. Hopsicker's latest film is "New American Druglords". A few recent story headlines follow.
Thursday, April 2 2009 - Other Important News
Darkness Renewed: Terror as a Tool of EmpireApril 1, 2009 By Chris Floyd Empire Burlesque - Chris-floyd.com Here's a purely hypothetical scenario. Let's
say you were a dedicated imperial militarist who believed that your country's
security, prestige and financial interests could best be served by war and the
ever-present threat of war. Let's say you had some really hot and juicy operations
going on, endless deadly conflicts that were pouring hundreds of billions of
dollars into your war machine and entrenching national policy even more deeply
in the militarist philosophy – the machtpolitik – that you believe
in.
Wednesday, April 1 2009 - Other Important News
Hersh: Cheney ‘Left A Stay Behind’ In Obama’s Government, Can ‘Still Control Policy Up To A Point’In two interviews with Seymour Hersh on March 31st -- Fresh Air with Terry Gross and Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman -- he shared a little bit on what he perceives is going on within the new White House ... and how much influence Cheney still has.
– Ed.
. . . "Are you saying that you think Vice President Cheney is still having a chilling effect on people who might otherwise be coming forward," asked Gross. "I'll make it worse," answered Hersh, adding that he believes Cheney "put people back" in government to "stay behind" in order to "tell him what's going on" and perhaps even "do sabotage": HERSH: I'll make it worse. I think he's put people left. He's put people back. They call it a stay behind. It's sort of an intelligence term of art. When you leave a country and, you know, you've driven out the, you know, you've lost the war. You leave people behind. It's a stay behind that you can continue to contacts with, to do sabotage, whatever you want to do. Cheney's left a stay behind. He's got people in a lot of agencies that still tell him what's going on. Particularly in defense, obviously. Also in the NSA, there's still people that talk to him. He still knows what's going on. Can he still control policy up to a point? Probably up to a point, a minor point. But he's still there. He's still a presence.
Tuesday, March 24 2009 - Other Important News
Historical Archives Lead to Arrest of Police Officers in Guatemalan Disappearance25 years later--thanks to the tireless work of investigators, truthseekers and archivists, including at the National Security Archive in the US--a breakthrough in yet another government's role in the devastating terror inflicted on their own people. Doyle and Franzblau's closing statement rings quite familiar in America today, as well as for Guatamela, of which they speak ... "The struggle for justice and accountability for Guatemala's past crimes has a direct relationship to the current efforts to dismantle illegal armed networks. Last week's arrests marked an important initial step in the right direction towards ending blanket impunity in Guatemala."
– Ed.
Declassified documents show U.S. Embassy knew that Guatemalan security forces were behind wave of abductions of students and labor leaders. Washington, DC, March 17, 2009 -- Following a stunning breakthrough in a 25-year-old case of political terror in Guatemala, the National Security Archive today is posting declassified U.S. documents about the disappearance of Edgar Fernando García, a student leader and trade union activist captured by Guatemalan security forces in 1984. The documents show that García's capture was an organized political abduction orchestrated at the highest levels of the Guatemalan government. ... Government Campaign of Terror The abduction of Fernando García was part of a government campaign of terror designed to destroy Guatemala's urban and rural social movements during the 1980s. On February 18, 1984, the young student leader was captured on the outskirts of a market near his home in Guatemala City. He was never seen again. Although witnesses pointed to police involvement, the government under then-Chief of State Gen. Oscar Humberto Mejía Víctores always denied any role in his kidnapping. According to the Historical Clarification Commission's report released in 1999, García was one of an estimated 40,000 civilians disappeared by state agents during Guatemala's 36-year civil conflict.
Sunday, March 22 2009 - Other Important News
6 Years On ... 'Soldier suicides skyrocket' and America is OUTRAGED over AIG's paltry $159 millionThis week marks the beginning of the 7th year of the US war on Iraq, we're 7-1/2 years into bombing Afghanistan, with 17,000+ more troops now headed that way thanks to the changes wrought by a new administration, and we now have US drones bombing Pakistanis at an increased rate ...
America is outraged, OUTRAGED, that AIG execs got $159 million (or is it now $200+ million?) of our money. Where is the outrage over the fact that we're still spending $720 million EVERY DAY on this continuing illegal occupation of Iraq? Condoleeza Rice is again spewing nonsense, "We never tried to tie Saddam Hussein to 9/11." W. is on the speaking circuit (yes, seriously!) talking about his "momentous" years in the Oval Office while hundreds outside the Calgary Chamber of Commerce demand his arrest as a war criminal. Cheney is still declaring victory in Iraq and proclaiming the economy is crashing because "stuff happens". – Ed.
Sunday, March 22 2009 - Other Important News
Richard Falk: Gaza attacks "war crime of the greatest magnitude"by Reprehensor UN envoy Richard Falk, who wrote the foreword for David Ray Griffin's New Pearl Harbor, and has also praised Peter Dale Scott's book, The Road to 9/11, was yesterday quoted by Haaretz speaking out strongly against Israel's attacks in Gaza as war crimes;
Wednesday, March 18 2009 - Other Important News
The Real AIG ScandalWhy is this at 911truth.org? In 2004, after more than a year of significant work, we presented the Justicefor911.org legal complaint and petition to then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's representative in a press conference. Two weeks later, without having responded to our voluminous material offering, essentially, the full legal case for 9/11 prosecution, Spitzer announced he would run for Governor of New York. Of course, he won. But it would seem that speaking out against Bush (and now Obama) Administration bankers has not been good for his political health... This occasional tendency of his to spit in the face of authority is partly why we went to Spitzer in the first place. It is interesting to read his "outrageous" comments on the AIG scandal and see a tiny glimpse of what's actually behind the curtain in this whole sordid mess... We encourage you to have a look at Catherine Austin Fitts' Solari.com and Michael Ruppert's book, Crossing the Rubicon, for more of this kind of information.
– Ed.
It's not the bonuses. It's that AIG's counterparties are getting paid back in full. By Eliot Spitzer Tuesday, March 17, 2009 Slate.com Everybody is rushing to condemn AIG's bonuses, but this simple scandal is obscuring the real disgrace at the insurance giant: Why are AIG's counterparties getting paid back in full, to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars? For the answer to this question, we need to go back to the very first decision to bail out AIG, made, we are told, by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, then-New York Fed official Timothy Geithner, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke last fall. Post-Lehman's collapse, they feared a systemic failure could be triggered by AIG's inability to pay the counterparties to all the sophisticated instruments AIG had sold. And who were AIG's trading partners? No shock here: Goldman, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, and on it goes. So now we know for sure what we already surmised: The AIG bailout has been a way to hide an enormous second round of cash to the same group that had received TARP money already.
Sunday, March 15 2009 - Other Important News
Sunshine Week 2009: March 15-21
This week, newspapers across the country will once again sponsor panel discussions, Webcasts and op-eds pushing the American ideals of a free press and citizen access to the inner workings of government. ... Survey Of State Government Information Online Most Americans can easily find videos of water skiing squirrels on the Internet but they’ll have less luck finding out whether their children's school buses and classrooms are safe, or if neighborhood gas stations are overcharging. The Sunshine Week 2009 Survey of State Government Information online found that while more and more government records are being posted online, some of the most important information is being left offline. And in some cases governments are charging taxpayers to access records that they already paid for, such as death certificates. Read the report....
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