Briton Tom Grundy Attempts Citizens Arrest On Tony Blair In Hong

Two separate reports; the first and smaller of the two, deals as much with the purpose of Blair's speech in Hong Kong, though falling as it does into the, shit you couldn't make up category. In fact I think it borders on 'one of us is insane' and I know who it ain't.

The other, longer piece with photo's, deals primarily with the incident.

Tom Grundy, the Briton who attempted to arrest Tony Blair in Hong Kong, said the act was symbolic

Protester heckles former British PM Blair in Hong Kong
14 June 2012

HONG KONG: A lone protester on Thursday heckled former British prime minister Tony Blair as he prepared to make a speech on religion and globalisation at the University of Hong Kong.

The man shouted about breaches of the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war during Blair's years in office as the ex-leader took the stage.

"I wouldn't come any further... you can go," Blair said as the man approached the podium where he was standing.

The unidentified man, who spoke with a British accent, came within metres (feet) of the former prime minister before being blocked by university staff and escorted peacefully from the room.

"That's democracy for you," Blair said as the man was led away.

Blair went on with his speech apparently undeterred by the incident, telling his audience that the forces of globalisation were "multiplying and intensifying the impact of religion" around the world.

He said the world needed more "platforms of interfaith dialogue and action" to improve understanding between people of different belief systems.

Blair, who was Labour prime minister between 1997 and 2007, took Britain into the US-led war in Iraq in 2003, as well as sending troops into Afghanistan as part of the US-led operation in 2001.

He was appointed envoy for the Middle East Quartet comprising the United States, United Nations, European Union and Russia in 2007 but his role has come under increased scrutiny recently as efforts for peace have stalled.

He was speaking in Hong Kong as the founder of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, which seeks to promote understanding between the major religions.

"The 20th century battle ... between left and right is gone," he said, adding that he believed the biggest threat to world peace in the 21st century was religious conflict.

"This issue cannot be minimised, it cannot be treated as anything other than it is, and it's got to be studied." channelnewsasia

Briton Tom Grundy Attempts Citizens Arrest On Tony Blair In Hong
By Dina Rickman
14 June 2012

A British activist in Hong Kong has attempted to perform a citizen's arrest on Tony Blair, claiming it was his "moral obligation" to hold the former PM for war crimes.

Tom Grundy, a 29-year-old Briton living in the country, attempted the arrest at 5:40pm local time, around 11am in Britain, as the former prime minister gave a speech about faith and globalisation at Hong Kong university.

The activist told The Huffington Post UK he had planned the action two days before the speech, and sat waiting for the former Labour leader for an hour before the attempted arrest.

Grundy said he wanted to "renew awareness" about Blair, who he claims had violated international law in his support for the Iraq War.

"In 2009 Blair admitted he would have gone to war regardless of WMDs and international law forbids wars for reasons of regime change. So that's why I tried to perform a citizen's arrest," he said.

"I want him to fear that wherever he goes and I hope it may stick one day."

Grundy denied he was harassing Tony Blair saying: "I took one-to-two minutes of Mr Blair's time to make this point. I wouldn't call that harassment in any way. There's nothing legally ambiguous with regard to standing up and speaking loudly. He's a public figure and he's an ex-leader and he's still making public appearances like this… He's not immune simply because he's no longer in power."

He said during the incident he said he got "as close to him as I could."

"I was a metre or two directly in front of him but there was a gaggle of photographers and his men in front of me preventing me to go any further. I put it to him that he'd caused the death of at least 100,000 people during the Iraq War,

"I closed by telling him he can't talk about religion when he has set back religious tolerance by decades."

Grundy, who said he informed news agency Reuters about his plans before the arrest, claimed Blair's speech about faith was hypocritical, saying: "He has enraged the entire Muslim world, [and] endangered British citizens. When there was a terrorist attack on 7/7 those involved admitted that it was related to British foreign policy."

After the incident, which lasted for one or two minutes, Grundy said he looked directly at Blair before leaving of his own accord. More HuffPo

Colin Powell: Another War Criminal Cashes In

Colin Powell: Another War Criminal Cashes In

By Charles Davis and Medea Benjamin
June 5, 2012


One could be forgiven for thinking there’s anything honorable or honest about Colin Powell. For more than two decades now the Washington media has portrayed the former Secretary of State as something of a real life action hero, a reluctant warrior whose greatest fault – should they deign to mention any – was just being too darn loyal to a guy named George and his buddy Dick. What you might have missed is that Powell is a war criminal in his own right, one who in more than four decades of “public service” helped kill people from Vietnam to Panama to Iraq who never posed a threat to America. But don’t just take some anti-war activists’ word for it: Powell will proudly tell you as much, so long as he can make a buck from doing it in a book.....

..... Though billed as a self-effacing, humble leader prepared to admit mistakes, the real Colin Powell is not the one advertised by the P.R. department at HarperCollins. His book makes that clear enough when he discusses his now infamous 2003 presentation before the United Nations on Iraq’s alleged stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction. Nearly every line in that speech has since proven to be false – indeed, much of his presentation was known to be false at the time – but you won’t find Powell owning up to that.

“There is nothing worse than a leader believing he has accurate information when folks who know he doesn’t don’t tell him that he doesn’t,” Powell writes. “I found myself in trouble on more than one occasion because people kept silent when they should have spoken up. My infamous speech at the U.N. in 2003 about Iraqi WMD programs was not based on facts, though I thought it was.” Lots more.

Is That a Bomb in Your Pants? More Tales of Entrapment

Let me get this small item out of the way before you read on. The first story was brought to my attention via Information Clearing House. The original article, posted below, first appeared in the Guardian. But ICH version gave us something that the Guardian couldn't, an informed comment regarding Naomi Wolf's use of Judith Miller as a a source.

There is nothing more that I wish to, or need to, add to that which is already writ below.

The Buddha Within wrote:

Judith Miller, who shilled for the Bush regime about Iraq's supposed WMD while at the NY Times, and Newsmax are "conservative" disinformers for the power elite. I believe Judith is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She and Newsmax are not worth citation, particularly on a topic such as this. I'm surprised someone of Ms. Wolf's caliber would use Miller or Newmax as a source. (Comment ICH)

The spectacle of terror and its vested interests

A cycle of overhyped terror plots involving government agency entrapment feeds a multimillion-dollar surveillance industry
Naomi Wolf
9 May 2012

The news stories, which quickly surface, long enough to cause scary headlines, then vanish before people can learn how often the cases are thrown out. These are stories about "bumbling fantasists", hapless druggies, the aimless, even the virtually homeless and mentally ill, and other marginal characters with not the strongest grip on reality, who have been lured into discourses about violence against America only after assiduous courting, and in some cases outright payment, by undercover FBI or police informants.

They have become a litany in recent years. The terrifying 2003-2004 national news stories that a Detroit "sleeper cell" had sent Muslim terrorists to blow up Disneyland and other landmarks, including in Las Vegas, was later thrown out of court, with accusations of prosecutorial misconduct, to almost no press attention – the same cycle of hype and failed convictions that have characterized many such stories. The evidence had included a home video taken in Disneyland, "doodles", and a guy with a credit card fraud problem, who had been pressured to diminish his own sentence by accusing his buddies.
But the tales of entrapment and terror hype continue apace – ten years after 9/11. Judith Miller, in Newsmax, writes that one recent case was so lame that even the FBI distanced itself from NYPD: "Despite FBI Doubts, NYPD Convinced Pipe Bomb Case Posed Real Danger", noted the headline on her 28 November 2011 article. A 27-year-old Dominican immigrant, Jose Pimentel, aka Muhamad Yusuf, had been monitored by NYPD for two years. Last fall, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr charged Pimentel with constructing pipe bombs to attack "police cars, post offices, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, and other targets".
An email in the case, which purports to show that Pimentel was writing about violent jihad to the al-Qaida-supporting "glossy magazine" Inspire, was described to Judith Miller by anonymous "law enforcement officials". Given Miller's journalistic history, this sentence alone should raise eyebrows. But the alleged email is, she writes, "part of a vast investigative file containing over 400 hours of surveillance audio and video tapes, interviews, and other material amassed by the NYPD". New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, in a flashy press conference, called the young man a "lone wolf" terrorist – a recent DHS soundbite. But the case was so shaky that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as federal prosecutors, did not want to join the case: "Too many holes in the case", other anonymous officials told Miller.
Pimentel was one of what has become an army of FBI- or NYPD-entrapped losers. He had no money, no job, and at key points lived with his mom. The New York Times noted that he may have been psychologically "unstable", and that he had made threats after smoking pot. Officials say that in May 2010, he repeated loudly in Arabic that "America is my enemy." This scary guy was a circuit city clerk in Schenectady, New York.
Additional evidence that Miller's anonymous sources give for his being a terrorist? In 2010, he had $100. One witness told police "that he had flashed a $100 bill when he made some purchases."Another? "Pimentel scraped the heads of some 750 matches, officials say." The scenario that entrapped Pimentel involved a surround-sound of informants trying to entrap him in cyberspace and to lure him to incriminate himself in taped phone conversations. But the FBI dropped its involvement after they judged that the informant had been too active in helping: urging or arranging for Pimentel to start drilling into pipe pieces – the evidence that he intended to set off a bomb.
Many other, much-ballyhooed cases of "homegrown terrorism" show this creaky, effortful, farcical quality of people who, left to their own devices by the FBI or NYPD, would have remained harmlessly playing video games in their childhood bedrooms, smoking their doobies, or babbling gently to themselves, on their anti-psychotic meds, about geopolitical forces.
The "Newburgh Four" is another such case, as Russia Today reported: four African-American Muslims were found guilty recently of a plot to place bombs in two Bronx synagogues and to shoot down military aircraft in Newburgh. Another flashy press conference in May 2009 showcased these four men as "the faces of homegrown terrorism". The FBI had claimed that the men had planned to commit their acts of terrorism on the day that they were arrested. Joseph Demarest from the FBI called it "a terrifying plot".
The men were low-income former convicts who could not read or write with literacy. They could not drive and had no passports. Shahid Hussain, a Pakistani immigrant who was an FBI employee, got them to say they were going to commit these crimes – paying them $100,000. Hussain presented the men with a fake stinger missile, and Hussain offered these poverty-stricken men cars and money in exchange for their promise to carry out the manufactured plot.
The men's relatives accused the FBI of entrapment. "I do not think this is entrapment. I know it is. This is entrapment," said Alicia McWilliams-McCollum, aunt of 29-year-old David Williams. As with many of these scenarios, one can easily imagine poor people with criminal records, offered large sums of money by a fake jihadist, trying to get the money and then trick the instigator. Also, as any AA or Al-Anon counsellor can tell you, if drugs or alcohol are in the mix, entrapment is a ridiculous premise, too: an addict will say anything, and make any ludicrous promise, to get a giant check. It doesn't mean the addict has any intention of delivering on the supposed contract. David Williams' aunt says that her nephew is in prison because of a pretend terror attack created by the FBI:

"They are creating scenarios; they are manufacturing crimes. That would not have occurred if you had not planted an unconstructive seed into a community."

Attorney Steve Dowds, who tracks cases like the Newburgh Four, argues the US government is systematically employing preemptive prosecution:

"They are taking some down and out vulnerable individuals and not only planting the ideology of jihad on them, giving them all the things they need, all of the material. They are setting up the plan, giving them all the research and then grabbing them and claiming these were homegrown terrorists. It is just a fiction."

Now we have another "underwear bomber" – declared by the Pentagon to have been about to launch a major attack via a US-bound plane, but who appears, reportedly, to have been a CIA-run double agent. What is the evidence that the "device", which is supposedly so sophisticated that there is doubt as to whether existing surveillance technologies in US airports would have caught it, actually exists? As with so many of these stories, we have no independent verification – because reporters from the British Daily Telegraph, to Reuters, to the Huffington Post are simply taking dictation from New York Representative Peter King and from the Pentagon, and scarcely asking for backup evidence of their elaborate assertions.
It is important to note that we can no longer assume that the FBI and the CIA and the NSA work, first of all, for the safety of the American people; they also now represent a revolving door of government officials who become security industry lobbyists and manufacturers, which, in turn, get the multimillion-dollar contracts for tackling the very problems these stories appear to highlight. The stories about the first "underwear bomber" preceded the rollout of former DHS chief Michael Chertoff's costly scanners; the press interviews for this round of mystery "underwear bomber" stories are practically a press release for some expensive technological upgrade – or yet more hellishly invasive and demeaning search technique. The sad truth is that we can no longer report and consume such stories as if there were no commercial vested interests involved in creating and sustaining such "terror theater".
You know we have "terror theater" in the US because nations such as Israel, which are genuinely focussed on deterring terrorism, downplay risk and threats rather than trumpeting them, as DHS does. If the threat is real, they don't reveal all the details of the latest "planned attack" to the news media – because they are busy investigating real planned attacks, rather than doing corporate PR and product placement. Instead of TSA groping, aviation security, from Britain to Israel, to Spain to Norway, uses much less invasive and more acute security processes, such as face-to-face, in-line interviewing. They do not sell commercial products that subvert recall surety issues, such as the various costly and vastly lucrative new "Global Entry Trusted Traveller Network", an apparent government program that is not transparent or accountable. You can sign up for for a fee of $100 a year, after an interview. No TSA representative I interviewed knows who owns the initiative, which they said was private, not a government program; nor could they tell me where the money really goes.
Actual terrorism-fighting nations would never devolve such security concerns to private contractors or sell easier travel access for cash – because it is both dangerous and absurd to do so. In fact, what the FBI and CIA and the Pentagon are up against is that people – including Americans – are waking up to the fact that there would be no enemy if we weren't manufacturing new terrorists by taking out civilians in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan. An end to foreign wars (which are already costing us thousands of casualties a year) would be a much more effective counter-terror strategy than this hyped, synthetic threat to justify a corporate surveillance-and-security product gold rush. Instead, we are treated to a spectacle orchestrated by alarmist officials who keep holding frightening press conferences promoting the threat of dazed, poor, drugged-out "lone wolves". The true, Orwellian agenda is to support a vast new crony-capitalist industry that uses terror theater to turn open democracies into surveillance societies. Gruniad

Underwear Bomb Seizure Being 'Exploited' By FBI

Urges Restoration of Searches Without Warrants
By News Agencies
May 10, 2012

THE HEAD of the FBI says his agency is “exploiting” the alleged seizure of an intact and advanced form of underwear bomb that "Islamic militants" in Yemen apparently wanted to use to blow up a US-based jet.

Robert Mueller told a congressional hearing in Washington yesterday that the supposed plot, revealed by the Associated Press on Monday, demonstrated the need to renew surveillance provisions that expire at the end of the year.

FBI Director Mueller urged the reauthorization of an act passed by Congress in 2008, that gives federal authorities the ability to conduct warrantless searches.

“We also remain concerned about the threat from homegrown violent extremists,” he said. “Over the last two years, we have seen increased activity among extremist individuals. These individuals have no typical profile; their experiences and motives are often distinct. But they are increasingly savvy and willing to act alone, which makes them difficult to find and to stop.” ICH

Does The West Have A Future?
By Paul Craig Roberts
May 11, 2012

Living in America is becoming very difficult for anyone with a moral conscience, a sense of justice, or a lick of intelligence. Consider:

We have had a second fake underwear bomb plot, a much more fantastic one than the first hoax. The second underwear bomber was a CIA operative or informant allegedly recruited by al-Qaeda, an organization that US authorities have recently claimed to be defeated, in disarray, and no longer significant.

This defeated and insignificant organization, which lacks any science and technology labs, has invented an “invisible bomb” that is not detected by the porno-scanners. A “senior law enforcement source” told the New York Times that “the scary part” is that “if they buil[t] one, they probably built more.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that “the plot itself indicates that the terrorists keep trying to devise more and more perverse and terrible ways to kill innocent people.” Hillary said this while headlines proclaimed that the US continues to murder women and children with high-tech drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Africa. The foiled fake plot, Hillary alleged, serves as “a reminder as to why we have to remain vigilant at home and abroad in protecting our nation and in protecting friendly nations and peoples like India and others.”

FBI Director Robert Mueller told Congress that the fake plot proves the need for warrantless surveillance in order to detect--what, fake plots? In Congress Republican Pete King and Democrat Charles Ruppersberger denounced media for revealing that the plot was a CIA operation, claiming that the truth threatened the war effort and soldiers’ lives.

Even alternative news media initially fell for this fake plot. Apparently, no one stops to wonder how al-Qaeda, which has become so disorganized and helpless that it is on the run and left its revered leader, Osama bin Laden, in a Pakistan village alone and unguarded to be murdered by US Navy Seals, could catch the CIA off guard with an “undetectable” bomb, to use the description provided by Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Dianne Feinstein, who was briefed on the device by US intelligence personnel.

Notice that the Secretary of State has committed the bankrupt US and its unravelling social safety net to the protection of “India and others” from terrorists. But the real significance of this latest hoax is to introduce into the fearful American public the idea of an undetectable underwear bomb. More, but it goes off on a tangent.

Department of Fear: Must Try Harder

Updated below.

It's the middle of the night here, so I will try and update this latest "bomb plot foiled" nonsense when I can find a more trustworthy source of information than the BBC, who bring you this story:

Al-Qaeda underwear bomber 'was US double agent'

But for now, I shall just utilise this short passage.

US officials told ABC News that Quso had been planning an attack similar to the failed 2009 attempt to blow up a passenger plane.

The device seized from Yemen shares some features with the bomb sewn into the underwear of would-be suicide bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab during that attempt, officials said.

The Nigerian was arrested when his device failed to explode fully while on a plane bound for Detroit.

Now go here and read this piece which ends: “Umar, you are not a Muslim martyr. You are merely a government patsy.”

Another Foiled False Flag
By Stephen Lendman
May 09, 2012


Wikipedia defines false or black flags as "covert operations designed to deceive the public in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by other entities."



"The name is derived from the military concept of flying false colors; that is: flying the flag of a country other than one’s own. False flag operations are not limited to war and counter-insurgency operations and can be used during peace-time."



Big lies substitute for truth. Stories are fabricated. Media scoundrels promote them. At issue is heightening fear for planned policies. Pretexts are needed for militarism, imperial wars, and homeland repression. If and when people learn they were duped, it's too late to matter.



It's an American tradition. Incidents are strategically timed. Innocent victims suffer. So does everyone living under heightened national security state conditions.



Threats are manufactured. States of emergency are declared. Rule of law principles are discarded. Unchallenged dominance alone matters. Wars on humanity follow. Big lies facilitate them. False flags play their part.



Here we go again. This one's a sequel. Perhaps Hollywood blockbusters will follow, first the original plot, then the latest. More on the earlier one below.



On May 7, AP headlined "US: CIA thwarts new al-Qaida underwear bomb plot," saying:



Agents foiled "an ambitious plot by al-Qaida's affiliate in Yemen to destroy a US-bound airliner using a bomb with a sophisticated new design around the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden, The Associated Press has learned."



AP described an upgraded underwear bomb plot. Like the earlier one, it was "designed to be used in a passenger's underwear, but this time" US officials called it "more refined."



On May 7, the FBI issued a brief statement, saying:



"As a result of close cooperation with our security and intelligence partners overseas, an improvised explosive device (IED) designed to carry out a terrorist attack has been seized abroad."



"The FBI currently has possession of the IED and is conducting technical and forensics analysis on it. Initial exploitation indicates that the device is very similar to IEDs that have been used previously by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in attempted terrorist attacks, including against aircraft and for targeted assassinations."



"The device never presented a threat to public safety, and the US government is working closely with international partners to address associated concerns with the device."



"We refer you to the Department of Homeland Security, including the Transportation Security Administration, regarding ongoing security measures to safeguard the American people and the traveling public."



The device contained no metal. It's not clear if body scanners could have detected it. Officials said an alleged Yemen-based bomber hadn't yet picked a target or bought plane tickets. CIA agents seized the device before he had a chance. The suspect wasn't identified.



AP learned of the plot earlier but agreed to White House and CIA requests to delay publishing because intelligence operations were ongoing.



On May 8, the White House and FBI confirmed AP's report. Deputy national security council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said Obama knew last month. "The disruption of the IED plot underscores the necessity of remaining vigilant against terrorism here and abroad," she said.



"While the president was assured that the device did not pose a threat to the public, he directed the department of homeland security and law enforcement and intelligence agencies to take whatever steps necessary to guard against this type of attack," she added.



Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesman Matt Chandler said:



The latest plot "demonstrates our adversaries' interest in targeting the aviation sector." Protective "layers" are thus used.



They "include threat and vulnerability analysis, prescreening and screening of passengers using the best available technology, random searches at airports, federal air marshal coverage, and additional security measures both seen and unseen."



"It's not clear who built the bomb," AP reported. Authorities "suspect it was the work of master bomb maker Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri." A Saudi citizen, he's one of their most wanted. Earlier he was imprisoned and released.



He's reportedly in Yemen with his brother Abdullah. He's another Saudi most wanted. Washington claims they're both Al Qaeda connected. He's blamed for earlier bomb plots.



On March 24, 2011, the State Department included Ibrahim on its terrorist watch list. He's also on an Interpol Orange Notice one. It "warns police and other international organizations about potential threats from disguised weapons, parcel bombs, or other dangerous materials."



Washington considers Yemen strategically important. It's mostly for its location near the Horn of Africa on Saudi Arabia's southern border, the Red Sea, and Bab el- Mandeb strait.



It's a key chokepoint separating Yemen from Eritrea. Around three million barrels of oil pass through it daily. The Gulf of Aden connects to the Indian Ocean. Since 2009, Obama waged drone war on the country. CIA and Special Forces operate on the ground. Death squads are deployed.



America's at war with Yemen without declaring it. Predator drones escalate killing. Media scoundrels say little. Yemen gets attention when foiled bomb plots are claimed. They're pretexts for stepped up measures there and at home.



Washington's targets are global. US citizens share risks with foreign ones. Waging war on humanity leaves no one safe. Everyone everywhere is fair game. Any place could erupt in free-fire zone violence. Anyone can be accused of terrorism or conspiracy to commit it.



America's hegemonic ambitions threaten humanity. Too few at home understand. Public ignorance and indifference let Washington get away with murder. It's a global killing machine to remove all challenges.



The Earlier Underwear Bomber False Flag



It was fake like the sequel. In December 2009, US officials claimed Nigerian citizen Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab traveled to Yemen, got Al Qaeda training, and explosive PETN chemicals.



Supposedly he tried using them to blow up an Amsterdam-Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day. In fact, he was a fall guy for a joint CIA/Mossad/India Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) false flag.



The same alliance staged coordinated 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. Dozens were killed and hundreds wounded. They also were behind former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's 2007 assassination.



The same issue then remains US policy now. Destabilizing and balkanizing Pakistan is planned. It's also perhaps intended for Afghanistan and Libya. Iraq's already divided. Always it's for easier control and exploitation.



Abdulmutallab was a convenient patsy. He was used to facilitate America's war on Yemen. Britain denied him an entrance visa. His name was on a State Department terror watch list.



Yet he wasn't on a No Fly List. He paid cash for a one-way ticket to Detroit, checked no luggage, had a US visa but no passport, and was helped onboard by a "well-dressed Indian" gentleman (a RAW agent) to facilitate Washington's scheme to use him as a convenient dupe.



His PETN was virtually harmless. It was technically deficient, failed to go off properly, and had fire cracker strength. Following the incident, Washington's war on Yemen escalated and enhanced airport screening began. Full body scanners the ACLU calls "virtual strip search(es)" are used.



False flags create opportunities to advance America's imperium. They also facilitate its war on dissent. In May 2011, three key Patriot Act powers were extended for another four years. Little debate assured swift passage. As a result:



(1) Unlimited roving wiretaps continue unchecked.



(2) Section 215 pertains to alleged suspects. It authorizes government access to "any tangible item." They included financial records and transactions, student and medical records, phone conversations, emails, other Internet use, and whatever else Washington claims essential.



(3) Alleged suspect organizations and individuals can be surveilled, whether or not evidence links them to terrorism or complicity to commit it. In other words, police state powers to monitor anyone for any reason or none at all remain unchecked.



Racial profiling and waging war on Islam got boosts. Abdulmutallab benefitted Washington at his own expense. Expect the underwear bomb sequel to provide more.



Washington will take full advantage. Perhaps Obama has another war in mind.



A Final Comment



On May 8, The New York Times headlined "Rare Double Agent Disrupted Bombing Plot, US says."



Most likely it's double-dealing official lies and misreporting. According to Times-speak, a Saudi intelligence agent "infiltrated (a) terrorist group and volunteered for the mission, American and foreign officials said Tuesday."



Washington claims he provided an "innovative bomb" designed for "aviation attack." The Times reported the story without checking for reliability. If official sources say it, accounts follow true or false.



The agent is back in Saudi Arabia, The Times said. CIA agents were involved.



What's true or false isn't clear. What's certain is another false flag for reasons similar to previous ones. They repeat well-timed for strategic advantage.



They're manufactured to look real. Media scoundrels headline them. Most people don't know they've been had. The scam repeats because it works. No wonder America gets away with murder and much more. ICH

How America Came To Torture Its Prisoners

How America Came To Torture Its Prisoners

I read nearly 140,000 formerly classified documents about America’s abuse of prisoners since 2001. Here is what I learned.
By Larry Siems
April 20, 2012

It began with one document.

On Sept. 17, 2001, six days after the terrorist attacks in Washington, D.C., President George W. Bush sent a 12-page Memorandum of Notification to his National Security Council. That memorandum, we know now, authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to set up and run secret prisons. We still don’t know exactly what it says: CIA attorneys have told a judge the document is so off-limits to the courts and the American people that even the font is classified. But we do know what it did: It literally opened a space for torture.

Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit—a lawsuit the New York Times has called “among the most successful in the history of public disclosure”—we now know much of what happened in those secret spaces the Bush administration created. Under that litigation, the American Civil Liberties Union gathered nearly 140,000 formerly classified documents from the Department of Defense, the Justice Department, and the CIA that detail the abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody in the “War on Terror.” My job, as the author of the website www.thetorturereport.org and then of the book The Torture Report: What the Documents Say About America’s Post-9/11 Torture Program, was to dig through that incredible trove of documents and figure out for myself what, exactly, my country had done.
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Here is what I learned.

Our highest government officials, up to and including President Bush, broke international and U.S. laws banning torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Worse, they made their subordinates in the military and civilian intelligence services break those laws for them.

When the men and women they asked to break those laws protested, knowing they could be prosecuted for torture, they pretended to rewrite the law. They commissioned legal opinions they said would shield those who carried out the abuses from being hauled into court, as the torture ban requires. “The law has been changed,” detainees around the world were told. “No rules apply.”

Then they tortured. They tortured men at military bases and detention centers in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Guantánamo, and in U.S. Navy bases on American soil; they tortured men in secret CIA prisons set up across the globe specifically to terrorize and torture prisoners; they sent many more to countries with notoriously abusive regimes and asked them to do the torturing. At least twice, after the torturers themselves concluded there was no point to further abuse, Washington ordered that the prisoners be tortured some more.

They tortured innocent people. They tortured people who may have been guilty of terrorism-related crimes, but they ruined any chance of prosecuting them because of the torture. They tortured people when the torture had nothing to do with imminent threats: They tortured based on bad information they had extracted from others through torture; they tortured to hide their mistakes and to get confessions; they tortured sometimes just to break people, pure and simple.

And they conspired to cover up their crimes. They did this from the start, by creating secret facilities and secrecy regimes to keep what they were doing from the American people and the world. They did it by suppressing and then destroying evidence, including videotapes of the torture. They did it by denying detainees legal process because, as the CIA’s Inspector General put it in a 2004 report, when you torture someone you create an “Endgame” problem: You end up with detainees who, “if not kept in isolation, would likely divulge information about the circumstances of their detention.”

They managed all this, for a time, through secrecy—a secrecy that depended on the aggressive suppression of two groups of voices.

Over and over again, in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Guantánamo, in secret CIA black sites and at CIA headquarters, in the Pentagon, and in Washington, men and women recognized the torture for what it was and refused to remain silent. They objected, protested, and fought to prevent, and then to end, these illegal and immoral interrogations. While the president and his top advisers approved and encouraged the torture of prisoners, there was dissent in every agency, at every level.

The documents are full of these voices. In fact, it is thanks to these dissenters that much of the documentary record exists. From emails among FBI agents sharing their shock over scenes they had witnessed in interrogation booths in Guantánamo, to letters and memoranda for the record, to major internal investigations, the documents show that those who ordered and carried out the torture did so despite constant warnings and objections that their actions were ineffective, short-sighted, and wrong. It is no wonder that so many of these documents were suppressed. Go to page 2

"Curveball" to Appear BBC2 Monday April 2

Nothing to get excited about really, the Bush administration knew it was bullshit, and if yer man hadn't existed, they would have had to invent him.

As for his former boss: "I don't see any way on this earth that Secretary Powell doesn't feel almost a rage about Curveball and the way he was used in regards to that intelligence."

Oh stop FFS!

Man whose WMD lies led to 100,000 deaths confesses all

Defector tells how US officials 'sexed up' his fictions to make the case for 2003 invasion
By Jonathan Owen
April 01, 2012

A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow.

"Curveball", the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up. It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history, with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi's lies used to justify the Iraq war.

He tries to defend his actions: "My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime's oppression."

The chemical engineer claimed to have overseen the building of a mobile biological laboratory when he sought political asylum in Germany in 1999. His lies were presented as "facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence" by Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, when making the case for war at the UN Security Council in February 2003.

But Mr Janabi, speaking in a two-part series, Modern Spies, starting tomorrow on BBC2, says none of it was true. When it is put to him "we went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie", he simply replies: "Yes."

US officials "sexed up" Mr Janabi's drawings of mobile biological weapons labs to make them more presentable, admits Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, General Powell's former chief of staff. "I brought the White House team in to do the graphics," he says, adding how "intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy".

As for his former boss: "I don't see any way on this earth that Secretary Powell doesn't feel almost a rage about Curveball and the way he was used in regards to that intelligence."




Another revelation in the series is the real reason why the FBI swooped on Russian spy Anna Chapman in 2010. Top officials feared the glamorous Russian agent wanted to seduce one of US President Barack Obama's inner circle. Frank Figliuzzi, the FBI's head of counterintelligence, reveals how she got "closer and closer to higher and higher ranking leadership... she got close enough to disturb us".

The fear that Chapman would compromise a senior US official in a "honey trap" was a key reason for the arrest and deportation of the Russian spy ring of 10 people, of which she was a part, in 2010. "We were becoming very concerned," he says. "They were getting close enough to a sitting US cabinet member that we thought we could no longer allow this to continue." Mr Figliuzzi refuses to name the individual who was being targeted.

Several British spies also feature in the programme, in the first time that serving intelligence officers have been interviewed on television. In contrast to the US intelligence figures, the British spies are cloaked in darkness, their voices dubbed by actors. BBC veteran reporter Peter Taylor, who worked for a year putting the documentary together, describes them as "ordinary people who are committed to what they do" and "a million miles" from the spies depicted in film. He adds: "What surprised me was the extent to which they work within a civil service bureaucracy. Everything has to be signed off... you've got to have authorisation signed in triplicate."

Would-be agents should abandon any Hollywood fantasies they may have, says Sonya Holt at the CIA recruitment centre. "They think it's more like the movies, that they are going to be jumping out of cars and that everyone carries a weapon... Yes we're collecting intelligence but we don't all drive fast cars. You're going to be writing reports; you're in meetings so it's not always that glamorous image of what you see in the movies." Independent

The Afghan Village Massacre

No story, just a graphic.

Underpants Bomber More FBI/CIA Entrapment?

Make of the rest of it what you will, but this bit jumped off the page for me, with bells a ringing, whistles a whistling and 'Made in the USA' lit up in bright neon lights.

We have seen over the last few years the quite open and extremely blatant use by the FBI, of agents provocateur and entrapment techniques, that were the outcome for the poor schmucks involved not so tragic, then the whole 'foiled terrorist plot' thing, would be more fitting for Stalinist Russia, or even more fittingly, the Beano. (English comic)

Check out the Entrapment tag.

2:27 p.m.

Kurt Haskell just stepped to the podium.

Choking up, he praised Mason for putting out the fire on the plane and saving everyone’s lives.

He said he and his wife were on the flight returning from an African safari. While sitting at the airport, he said he saw Abdulmutallab being escorted through security by a man in a tan suit who spoke perfect English.

The airline gate worker initially refused to let Abdulmutallab to board until the man in the tan suit intervened.

“Little did I know that Umar would try to kill me,” he said.

He said the incident has changed his life.

He said passengers were kept on the plane after it landed in Detroit without any concern about the explosives on the plane. He said passengers were taken into the terminal without anyone checking their bags or for possible accomplices.

It soon became obvious that the FBI wasn’t concerned about anything he had to say, including the man in the tan suit.

He said Abdulmutallab was allowed to board the plane without a passport and going through security. He said he’s disappointed that the U.S. government allowed Abdulmutallab to get onto the plane.

“Regardless of how media and government try to shape this case, I am convinced that Umar was given an intentionally defective bomb by a U.S. agent… to stage a false terrorist attack to be used to implement various government policies. It really saddens me that the government won’t admit its role in the event. Because of this case, I will never trust anything the government says, ever.”

Then, Haskell turned to Abdulmutallab.

“Umar, you are not a Muslim martyr. You are merely a government patsy.” More

US NATO Alienate Pakistan Further 28 Pak Soldiers Killed

Little wonder the US is considered the greatest threat to world peace.

NATO Kills 28 Pakistani Troops, Outrage in Islamabad

November 6, 2011

At least 28 Pakistani soldiers were killed today when NATO helicopters and combat jets fired on two border posts in the country's northwest, prompting army chief Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani to direct his troops to prepare for ''an effective response'' even as authorities cut off all supplies for US forces in Afghanistan.

The attack, the worst single incident of its kind in one decade, looked set to plunge US-Pak relations, already deeply frayed, further into crisis.

A major and a captain of the Pakistan Army were among those killed when NATO aircraft fired at the borders posts in Baizai area of Mohmand tribal region at 2 am.

Fifteen more personnel were wounded and the death toll could rise as some of the injured were in a serious condition, several officials said.

A military statement said the NATO aircraft "carried out unprovoked firing" on the border posts.

Pakistani troops "effectively responded immediately in self-defence to NATO/ISAF's aggression with all available weapons".

Gen Kayani strongly condemned "NATO/ISAF's blatant and unacceptable act".

While lauding the effective response by Pakistani soldiers, he issued orders for taking all necessary steps for "an effective response to this irresponsible act".

Within hours of the attack, Pakistani authorities sealed off the country's border stopping all container trucks and tankers carrying supplies for US and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir called in US Ambassador Cameron Munter to lodge a "strong protest on the unprovoked NATO/ISAF attack", the Foreign Office said in a statement. PTI

Related: Pakistan stops NATO supplies after deadly raid

Kuala Lumpur: Bush Blair Found Guilty of War Crimes

How much more than symbolic this verdict is, remains to be seen, still it's a start I guess.

Bush, Blair Found Guilty of War Crimes

By Press TV
November 25, 2011

A War Crimes Tribunal in Malaysia has found former US President George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair guilty of war crimes for their roles in the Iraq war.

The five-panel Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal decided that Bush and Blair committed genocide and crimes against humanity by leading the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a Press TV correspondent reported on Tuesday.

In 2003, the US and Britain invaded Iraq in blatant violation of international law and under the pretext of finding weapons of mass destruction allegedly stockpiled by former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

The Malaysian tribunal judges ruled that the decision to wage war against Iraq by the two former heads of government was a flagrant abuse of law and an act of aggression that led to large-scale massacres of the Iraqi people.


Bombings and other forms of violence became commonplace in Iraq shortly after the US-led invasion of the country.

In their ruling, the tribunal judges also stated that the US, under the leadership of Bush, fabricated documents to make it appear that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

However, the world later learned that the former Iraqi regime did not possess WMDs and that the US and British leaders knew this all along.

Over one million Iraqis were killed during the invasion, according to the California-based investigative organization Project Censored.

The judges also said the court findings should be provided to signatories to the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, and added that the names of Bush and Blair should be listed on a war crimes register. ICH

Watch The Trial of Tony Blair

Fallujah Veteran The Road To Damascus

No stranger to bucking the trend and often being the lone voice on an issue, something quite easy to do when one is perfect and always right must be said. Nevertheless it is nice on occasion to have it confirmed by someone who, by virtue of personal involvement in an issue, is far better qualified than I to speak on that issue.

Quite recently, when all around were a cheering and a hollering and a hooting for Marine Sgt. Shamar Thomas when he put a flea in the ear of New York's finest. Seemingly, as far as I know, I was the only bloke to make objection to his use of the word honour, whilst shouting his diatribe at the NYPD. And I did so, not just in this short post, (includes video) but tweeted on more than one occasion.

But the lone voice no more, I'm joined by an Iraqi vet who seems to have undergone a Road to Damascus moment, the scales falling from his eyes so to speak, seeing things far clearer after witnessing, and being a part of, America's near genocidal invasion of Iraq.

Although the writer doesn't use the word honour directly, it's as near as damn is to swearing as he covers a surprising number of points that are fundamental to the philosophy of this blog, ergo myself. Including I must add, the aforementioned Marine Sgt. Shamar Thomas.

There is another issue on which I am a lone voice, and though I say it myself, I'm just as right on that one as I am on this. But here and now is not the time to reiterate, my feelings on that particular subject are well enough known.

Wall Street's Wars
Fallujah Veteran: 'I Served The 1%'
Thoughts on the role of veterans in the Occupy movement
By Ross Caputi
November 08, 2011

I did not serve my country in Iraq; I served the 1%. It was on their behalf that I helped lay siege to Fallujah, helped kill thousands of civilians, helped displace hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and helped destroy an entire city. My "service" served Exxon-Mobil, Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater, and other multinational corporations in Iraq.

My family in Massachusetts is not safer because of my service, and Iraqis are not freer. I helped oppress Iraqis in a manner far more brutal than what has been experienced by the Occupy movement at the hands of the New York and Oakland police departments.

I was an occupier and am now an #occupier. I once served the 1%, but now try to serve the 99%. That is why I must speak up when I see the Occupy movement being led astray by the same nationalism and “Ameri-centrism,” the same thoughtless praises for U.S. troops and veterans, and the same hypocrisy that led us into the so-called “War On Terror” and the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Many of us have joined the Occupy movement, because we identify as members of the 99%, but the media only began to highlight our participation after Cpl. Scott Olsen was shot in the head by the Oakland police with a projectile on Oct. 25. Olsen was immediately rushed to the emergency room, and his name soon became a rallying cry. A nationwide call was put out for vigils in solidarity with Olsen.

Going to war is not "serving our country"

The Occupy movement was quick to highlight Olsen's "service" and his two deployments to Iraq. The New York Times noted that "his injury—and the oddity of a Marine who faced enemy fire only to be attacked at home—has prompted an outpouring of sympathy, as well as calls for solidarity."

Although Olsen appears to oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—he is a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans For Peace,—the Occupy movement's response to his attack has revealed ambivalence on these issues.

The Occupy movement has glossed over the irony that Olsen was put in the hospital by some of the same tactics that his Marine Corps has used against Iraqis. It has not drawn a connection between what happened to Olsen and what happened to Iraqis who peacefully protested against the U.S. occupation of their country—like in Fallujah on April 28, 2003, when the U.S. fired into a crowd of protesters and killed 13 civilians. Countless other identical incidents have taken place, even today as Iraqis also protest unemployment, corruption and lack of services.

When the Occupy movement mentions Olsen's "service" without clarifying who he served, they hide the lies of the 1% and ignore the more than 1 million dead Iraqis, the millions of refugees and orphans, and the dramatic rise in cancers and birth defects in Iraq.

We must stand for the most affected victims of Wall Street

I watched a Youtube video the other day of U.S. Marine Corps Sgt. Shamar Thomas shouting at the NYPD: "If you want to go kill or hurt people, go to Iraq. Why are you hurting U.S. citizens?" as a crowd of Occupy Wall Street protesters cheered him on.

Over 2.5 million people have watched this video, and Thomas appeared on Rosie O'Donnell's television show and made several appearances on Keith Olbermann. Everyone championed his "service" and decried police brutality against U.S. citizens. Nobody questioned the dismissal of the value of Iraqi lives.

We should all decry police brutality wherever it rears its ugly head. Yet police brutality and the murder of innocent civilians in foreign countries in service of the 1% are both moral issues, and to decry one without decrying the other suggests a serious disconnect.

These attitudes in our movement are deeply troubling to me. We decry economic injustice at home, but stay silent about the unjust occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. We decry police brutality at home, while the U.S. war machine brutalizes innocent people abroad. We need to understand that Iraqis, Afghans, Palestinians, Libyans and everyone else who has fallen victim to the 1% and its war machine are part of the 99%, too.

We can love our country, but we should not value American lives more than any other. We can set up a Scott Olsen Support Fund, but we should not ignore the rise in cancers and birth defects that U.S. weapons have caused in Iraq.

Veterans have an important role to play in this movement, but we are not heroes because of our participation in the wars, and it is shameful for anyone to use us to appeal to patriotism; that only serves the 1%. What we have to offer this movement is a first-hand account of what the 1% has done all over the world at the expense of the 99%. We as veterans are in a better position than anyone else to fight against the dangerous beliefs that put veterans on a pedestal. It is our responsibility to speak out against injustice, no matter where it occurs in this world. ICH

The author is a Marine Corps veteran of the second siege of Fallujah and a member of March Forward!. He is the founder of the 'Justice for Fallujah Project' which will host various events during the second annual 'Remember Fallujah Week,' Nov. 16-19. Click here for more information.

This item was first published at www.answercoalition.org

Least We Forget

Beware The Bogey Man The Disingenuous and The Back Door

We witnessed it with the Patriot Act, although in the case of Bush, even that wasn't enough, Bushco and the American state going on to engage in all kinds of illegal domestic activities, from.... well you name it.

But what we did witness, was the wheeling out the terrorism bogey man and subsequently the enactment of the Patriot act, that did for privacy and civil rights in one fell swoop, what the Taliban did for cultural appreciation. Guardian, video below.

There is another bogey man I want to make mention of, and although not directly related to the main body of this post, it is important that I mention it for reasons manifold.

Voter disenfranchisement has been around in the US for long enough, but is seemingly ever on the increase in the red states of America. And shamelessly so I have to say; well it would be wouldn't it? Shame and Republican, being two words that don't belong in the same sentence.

I'm not going to explain the nuts and bolts of it all, but do Google it for yourselves. It's quite an eye-opener, even if you are somewhat au fait with the US voting system, even more so if you are not.

But it is under the guise of voter fraud, albeit so minuscule that it could, and should be ignored, nevertheless, this is the bogey man that Republican held states and districts offer, quite transparently and shamelessly, as the excuse to enact restrictions, usually in the form of voter ID, on that section of the public that would normally be associated with voting Democrat.

Update: The Guardian has a piece on this.

The Republican 'voter fraud' fraud

All over the US, GOP lawmakers have engineered schemes to make voting more difficult. Well, if you can't win elections fairly… Guardian

More recently and closer to home however, we have witnessed the use of, and not always for reasons noble, that most emotive of bogey men, the paedophile.

And what better example do we need of seeing the paedo bogey man being run out, and for sure without a noble reason in sight, than that of Jim Gamble, recently of the CEOP.

In chronological order I reference three previous posts, all featuring the use of emotive bogey man to further someone's agenda, an agenda I have to say, where the protection of children slips down the ladder of priorities. We only need to recall Jim Gambles attempts to whitewash the McCanns to have that observation confirmed.

The first up then: CEOP: More Toys Out Of The Pram Our bogey man, this time under the guise of cartoon porn, starts proper at the, A comment from the web mark. But please, don't miss out on the comments, they say as much, if not more than the article itself.

That's The Trouble With Hysteria follows next, and it is this post that is the meat and potatoes of it all. Referencing the toys out of the pram article at the outset, it delves a little deeper into the use of the bogey man as tool, but does moves on to cover one or two other points.

Now I know Why is pure Jim Gamble, well it is if you ignore, Ed Smart, Isabel Duarte and Keith Vaz that is. But for the main, it is Gamble, his methods and his empire building.

So to the article in question, two actually, there was something else that caught my eye on the same site.

Here again we see the same bogey man employed, he does get around doesn't he? But what this fellow is proposing, in the name of the bogey man of course, is nothing more than data gathering on a grand scale, and not least shall we say, a tad intrusive?

Details of all internet traffic should be logged, MEP says

A member of the European Parliament wants users' "traffic data", rather than the specific content of online communications, to be logged under expanded EU laws on data storage. This is according to a statement from the European People's Party (EPP) at the European Parliament.

Tiziano Motti, an Italian MEP, wants to extend the EU's Data Retention Directive "to content providers (social networks etc) in order to identify more easily those who commit crimes, including paedophilia through sexual harassment on the net," the EPP said.

"This is a request which does not refer specifically the online content, which falls under the Regulation of Wiretapping, but to the traffic data developed by the person uploading material of any kind on the net: comments, pictures, videos," it said.

The Data Retention Directive was established in 2006 to make it a requirement for telecoms companies to retain personal data for a period – determined by national governments – of between six months and two years. The Commission decided to regulate following terrorist attacks in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005.

Under the Directive, telecoms firms are required to retain identifying details of phone calls and emails, such as the traffic and location, to help the police detect and investigate serious crimes. The details exclude the content of those communications.

Motti's proposals, developed with the help of Italian computer expert Fabio Ghioni (author of Hacker Republic), would involve the data being stored in an internet "black box" enabling the "truth of what happened on the web" to be recorded, according to an automated translation of a report on Ghioni's website (in Italian).

Ghioni's "Logbox" system would involve encrypting the traffic data and giving the "key" to access it to the user, an "authority" and a lawyer, according to an automated translation of a report (in Italian) by Italian Christian magazine, Famiglia Cristiana.

Ghioni said his "precise mechanism" would need the "collaboration" of operating system manufacturers such as Microsoft and Apple to log all activities on their systems, according to the automated translation of the report. That data would be "digitally signed in order to be traced to a specific computer and its user", allowing paedophiles to be identified "regardless of any trick [they may use] to anonymise any illegal activity", and would be inexpensive to operate, Ghioni said, according to the automated translation of the report.

Motti believes that establishing a system for storing "traffic data" would make it possible to enforce suggestions he previously made regarding data retention laws last year, according to the EPP.

In June 2010, the European Parliament backed proposals outlined in a "written declaration" by Motti and fellow MEP Anna Záborská to set up a system to act as an "early warning" system to identify paedophiles and other sex offenders. A written declaration has no legislative effect on its own, but is formally communicated by the Parliament to the European Commission in a bid to influence its policy if adopted.

The adopted declaration also called for the scope of the Directive to cover "data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks" and be extended "to search engines in order to tackle online child pornography and sex offending rapidly and effectively".

In April this year, the European Commission said it would update the Data Retention Directive after conceding that it does not always adequately protect privacy or personal data.

The Commission was responding to a critical report that it had commissioned to provide feedback on the impact the Directive was having on businesses and consumers, and how it was being implemented in EU countries.

At the time the Commission said that it would consider strengthening regulations of the storage, access to and use of retained data to improve the protection of personal data.

In May, UK Justice Secretary Ken Clarke said that the Commission's plans to revise the Directive should be viewed "with caution" after he listed examples of how stored communications data had been used to thwart terrorism and serious crime during a speech at the British Chamber of Commerce in Brussels. Out-Law.com

This is the other article that caught my eye, but don't be mislead by the header, it goes deeper than that.

YouTube asked to remove 135 videos over 'national security issues', Google says

The UK Government asked Google to remove 135 YouTube videos for national security reasons in the first half of this year, the internet search giant has said.

In total UK content removal requests increased by 71% compared to the previous six-month period, Google said in its twice-yearly transparency report.

The Government raised no national security concerns between July and December 2010.

Google fully or partially complied with 82% of the Government's requests, the report said.

In total the UK Government requested the removal of 333 items including web search results, images and videos according to the figures.

It also asked for 61 videos to be removed for 'privacy and security' reasons, three for violence and one for hate speech. 20 videos were removed for 'other' reasons, according to the figures.

Google started publishing its Transparency Report last year. It outlines traffic patterns and disruptions to Google services, as well as providing details of content removal requests and requests for user data received from governments around the world.

Removal requests ask for the removal of content from Google search results or another one of the company's products, including YouTube, it said. Data requests ask for information about Google user accounts or products.

The company said it received 1,273 user data requests relating to 1,443 individual users. It fully or partially complied with 64% of those requests, it said.

A Home Office spokesperson told Out-Law.com that where unlawful online content was hosted in the UK, the police have the power to seek its removal. Where the content is hosted overseas, the Government works with its international partners to have the content removed.

"The government takes the threat of online extremist or hate content very seriously," the spokesperson said.

National governments asked Google to remove content for many different reasons including defamation allegations and breaches of local laws prohibiting hate speech or pornography, it said.

Google said that it did not comply with government requests which were not specific enough for the company to know what should be removed, or allegations of defamation through informal letters from government agencies.

"We generally rely on courts to decide is a statement is defamatory according to local law," it said.

Brazil made the most content removal requests, the report said. China only made three removal requests, each covering a large amount of data. Google was unable to disclose the details of one of those requests as it "had reason to believe" the Chinese government had prohibited disclosure, it said.

The search engine received a request from police in the US to remove videos it was alleged depicted acts of police brutality, it revealed.

"We received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove YouTube videos of police brutality, which we did not remove," it said.

"Separately, we received requests from a different local law enforcement agency for removal of videos allegedly defaming law enforcement officials. We did not comply with those requests, which we have categorised in this Report as defamation requests."

Content removal requests from authorities in the US increased by 70% compared to the previous six-month period, it said. In addition, the US authorities made more than 11,000 requests for user data - a higher figure than any other country, the report said. Out-Law.com

Clusterfuck Accomplished The Yanks Are Going Home

Next success story, Libya.

The Iraq war is finally over. And it marks a complete neocon defeat

Thanks to the toppling of Saddam Hussein, Iran's greatest enemy, Tehran's influence in Iraq is stronger than America's

The Iraq war is over. Buried by the news from Libya, Barack Obama announced late on Friday that all US troops will leave Iraq by 31 December.

The president put a brave face on it, claiming he was fulfilling an election promise to end the war, though he had actually been supporting the Pentagon's effort to make a deal with Iraq's prime minister Nouri al-Maliki to keep US bases and several thousand troops there indefinitely.

The talks broke down because Moqtada al-Sadr's members of parliament and other Iraqi nationalists insisted that US troops be subject to Iraqi law. In every country where they are based the US insists on legal immunity and refuses to let troops be tried by foreigners. In Iraq the issue is especially sensitive after numerous US murders of civilians and the Abu Ghraib scandal in which Iraqi prisoners were sexually humiliated. In almost every case where US courts tried US troops, soldiers were acquitted or received relatively brief prison sentences.

The final troop withdrawal marks a complete defeat for Bush's Iraq project. The neocons' grand plan to use the 2003 invasion to turn the country into a secure pro-western democracy and a garrison for US bases that could put pressure on Syria and Iran lies in tatters.

Their hopes of making Iraq a democratic model for the Middle East have been tipped on their head. The instability and bloodshed which the US unleashed in Iraq were the example that Arabs sought to avoid, not emulate. This year's autonomous surge for democracy in Egypt and Tunisia has done far more to galvanise the region and undermine its dictatorships than anything the US did in Iraq. And when the Arab spring dawned, the Iraqi government found itself on the defensive as demonstrators took to the streets of Baghdad and Basra to protest against Maliki's authoritarianism and his government's US-supported clampdown on trade union activity. Maliki hosted two Syrian government delegations this summer and has refused to criticise Bashar al-Assad's shooting of protesters.

But the neocons' biggest defeat is that, thanks to Bush's toppling of Saddam Hussein, Iran's greatest enemy, Tehran's influence in Iraq is much stronger today than is America's. Iran does not control Iraq but Tehran no longer has anything to fear from its western neighbour now that a Shia-dominated government sits in Baghdad, made up of parties whose leaders spent long years of exile in Iran under Saddam or, like Sadr, have lived there more recently.

The US Republicans are accusing Obama of giving in to Iran by pulling all US troops out. Their knee-jerk reaction is rich and only shows the bankruptcy of their slogans, since it was Bush who gave Tehran its strategic opening by invading Iraq, just as it was Bush in the dying weeks of his presidency who signed the agreement to withdraw all US troops by the end of 2011, which Obama was hoping to amend. But Senator John McCain was right when he said Obama's announcement would be viewed "as a strategic victory for our enemies in the Middle East, especially the Iranian regime, which has worked relentlessly to ensure a full withdrawal of US troops from Iraq". A pity that he did not pin the blame on Bush (and Tony Blair) who made it all possible.

The two former leaders' memoirs show they have learnt no lessons, even though their reputations in history will never be able to shake the disaster off.

Whether the lessons have been taken on board by the current US and British leaders is more important. Nato's relative success in the Libyan campaign is already being used to draw a veil over the past. Indeed, the fortuitous timing of Gaddafi's death has knocked the news of the US withdrawal from Iraq almost entirely off the media's agenda.

But the past is still with us. A key lesson from Iraq is that putting western boots on the ground in a foreign war, particularly in a Muslim country, is madness. That point seemed to have been learnt when US, British and French officials asked the UN security council in March to authorise its campaign in Libya. They promised there would be no ground troops or occupation.

This should also apply to Afghanistan where Obama claims to be fighting a war of necessity, unlike the war in Iraq which he calls one of choice. The distinction is false, and the question now is whether he will pull all US troops out by 2014.

On the pattern of the aborted deal with Iraq, his officials are trying to negotiate an arrangement with the Karzai government which will authorise the indefinite basing of thousands of US troops, to be described as trainers and advisers, after combat forces leave. This would continue the folly of fuelling the country's long-running civil war. Now that al-Qaida has been driven from Afghanistan, Washington should support negotiations for a government of national unity that includes the Taliban and ends the fighting among Afghans. Iraq is no haven of guaranteed stability but, without the presence of US combat troops for the last 15 months, it has achieved an uneasy peace. If talks in Afghanistan are seriously encouraged, it could go the same way once foreign troops at last withdraw. Guardian

Who's Next On The US Kill List?

Bill Hicks before or after the story?

Secret panel can put Americans on ‘kill list’ without any oversight
October 6, 2011


WASHINGTON (Reuters) – American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.

There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.

The panel was behind the decision to add Awlaki, a U.S.-born militant preacher with alleged al Qaeda connections, to the target list. He was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen late last month.

The role of the president in ordering or ratifying a decision to target a citizen is fuzzy. White House spokesman Tommy Vietor declined to discuss anything about the process.

Current and former officials said that to the best of their knowledge, Awlaki, who the White House said was a key figure in al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al Qaeda’s Yemen-based affiliate, had been the only American put on a government list targeting people for capture or death due to their alleged involvement with militants.

The White House is portraying the killing of Awlaki as a demonstration of President Barack Obama’s toughness toward militants who threaten the United States. But the process that led to Awlaki’s killing has drawn fierce criticism from both the political left and right.

In an ironic turn, Obama, who ran for president denouncing predecessor George W. Bush’s expansive use of executive power in his “war on terrorism,” is being attacked in some quarters for using similar tactics. They include secret legal justifications and undisclosed intelligence assessments.

Liberals criticized the drone attack on an American citizen as extra-judicial murder.

Conservatives criticized Obama for refusing to release a Justice Department legal opinion that reportedly justified killing Awlaki. They accuse Obama of hypocrisy, noting his administration insisted on publishing Bush-era administration legal memos justifying the use of interrogation techniques many equate with torture, but refused to make public its rationale for killing a citizen without due process.

Some details about how the administration went about targeting Awlaki emerged on Tuesday when the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Dutch Ruppersberger, was asked by reporters about the killing.

The process involves “going through the National Security Council, then it eventually goes to the president, but the National Security Council does the investigation, they have lawyers, they review, they look at the situation, you have input from the military, and also, we make sure that we follow international law,” Ruppersberger said.

LAWYERS CONSULTED

Other officials said the role of the president in the process was murkier than what Ruppersberger described.

They said targeting recommendations are drawn up by a committee of mid-level National Security Council and agency officials. Their recommendations are then sent to the panel of NSC “principals,” meaning Cabinet secretaries and intelligence unit chiefs, for approval. The panel of principals could have different memberships when considering different operational issues, they said.

The officials insisted on anonymity to discuss sensitive information.

They confirmed that lawyers, including those in the Justice Department, were consulted before Awlaki’s name was added to the target list.

Two principal legal theories were advanced, an official said: first, that the actions were permitted by Congress when it authorized the use of military forces against militants in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001; and they are permitted under international law if a country is defending itself.

Several officials said that when Awlaki became the first American put on the target list, Obama was not required personally to approve the targeting of a person. But one official said Obama would be notified of the principals’ decision. If he objected, the decision would be nullified, the official said.

A former official said one of the reasons for making senior officials principally responsible for nominating Americans for the target list was to “protect” the president.

Officials confirmed that a second American, Samir Khan, was killed in the drone attack that killed Awlaki. Khan had served as editor of Inspire, a glossy English-language magazine used by AQAP as a propaganda and recruitment vehicle.

But rather than being specifically targeted by drone operators, Khan was in the wrong place at the wrong time, officials said. Ruppersberger appeared to confirm that, saying Khan’s death was “collateral,” meaning he was not an intentional target of the drone strike.

When the name of a foreign, rather than American, militant is added to targeting lists, the decision is made within the intelligence community and normally does not require approval by high-level NSC officials.

‘FROM INSPIRATIONAL TO OPERATIONAL’

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