Philosophers stone

21 July 2010 “What was my father’s crime? And what was the danger from him? He was 92 years old.” On March 21, 2010, a joint U.S. and Afghan force, likely including U.S. special forces, killed a 92-year-old civilian, Abdul Ghani Khan, in Wardak Province, Afghanistan. In this exclusive interview obtained by Brave New Foundation’s Rethink Afghanistan campaign, the slain man’s son, Zaitullah Ghiasi Wardak, relates the family’s account of the night his father died. Khan’s death is the latest in a string of civilian killings by U.S. special forces in night raids. Earlier this year, special forces killed 3 women–two of them pregnant–along with two local Afghan government officials and then tried to cover it up. The U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan is expected to rely even more heavily on special forces in the future.

Security agencies were left at risk, investigators say

By Bryan Bender

WASHINGTON — Federal investigators have identified several dozen Pentagon officials and contractors with high-level security clearances who allegedly purchased and downloaded child pornography, including an undisclosed number who used their government computers to obtain the illegal material, according to investigative reports.

The investigations have included employees of the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — which deal with some of the most sensitive work in intelligence and defense — among other organizations within the Defense Department.

By Marissa Brostoff

Margarita Korol/Tablet Magazine

The 2010 U.S. Assembly of Jews, a national conference held in Detroit in late June, began at an unusual hour for a Jewish conclave: late on a Saturday afternoon. It wasn’t the most accommodating move for participants who observe the Sabbath, but then, the conference’s organizers may not have expected any: This was the first major gathering of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. Given that the term “anti-Zionist” is an epithet to many in the organized American Jewish community, one might assume that any American Jew who’d schlep to Michigan to discuss strategies for “decolonizing Palestine” would fall outside that community’s religious and cultural margins as well.

So, it came as a surprise when, at 11:30 on that first Saturday night, after an exhausting opening session, about a quarter of the 200 conference-goers, overwhelmingly under 30, gathered to celebrate havdalah, the ceremony that ushers out the Sabbath. As they swayed in a circle singing “Lo Yisa Goy,” a Hebrew folksong—“and into plowshares beat their swords, nations shall learn war no more”—the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network felt for a moment like Jewish summer camp. Many Jewish community leaders would not have been enthusiastic about the scene. And, in echoes that reverberated throughout the conference, neither were some leaders of the Jewish Anti-Zionist Network.

A growing cohort of young Jews actively involved in Jewish life—often in alternative realms like independent minyans, the Yiddish-revival movement, and social-justice organizations—are taking left-wing positions on Israel that leave them feeling marginalized even in the Jewish communities they call home. Ideologically, they range from those who couch their politics in the language of international law and ultimately favor a two-state solution to those who use the more radical language of anti-imperialism and insist that true democracy can never happen within a Jewish state—with countless shades in between. By flirting with the labels “non-Zionist” and “anti-Zionist” without abandoning other traditional affiliations, they have crossed a line into territory where there exists no well-marked space on the American Jewish ideological map.

Into this vacuum came the first conference of the two-year-old International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, a still-obscure organization (though one now on the watch list of some mainstream Jewish organizations) with a moniker echoing those of long-defunct groups, like the Jewish Communist Labor Bund, that tethered Jewish specificity to the international left. For many of the young Jews who turned out in Detroit—most en route to the U.S. Social Forum, a major activist expo that was held in the city later that week—the Assembly seemed to promise a distinctly Jewish space in which to engage in or try on the ideas that Zionism does in fact equal racism and that only a one-state solution can mean justice for Palestinians—regardless of whether they take such a hard line in their day-to-day lives.

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[Source]

‘The British government on Thursday submitted a proposal calling to amend its universal jurisdiction law, which will effectively prevent private individuals from filing lawsuits against foreign leaders. If approved, the law will spare Israeli politicians and high-ranking IDF officers war crimes arrest warrants upon their arrival in the UK.

“Our commitment to our international obligations and to ensuring that there is no impunity for those accused of crimes of universal jurisdiction is unwavering, “Justice Secretary Ken Clarke said Thursday.’

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As Tropical Storm Bonnie approaches, vessels are prepared for evacuation. Also, during an investigative hearing, BP is accused of cutting corners.

By Julie Cart, Rong-Gong Lin II and Bettina Boxall, Los Angeles Times

Reassured by a week of intense monitoring, federal officials Thursday said they planned to leave the damaged BP well sealed despite evacuating vessels ahead of Tropical Storm Bonnie, which was bearing down on the Gulf of Mexico.

The storm, raking the Bahamas late Thursday, is projected to sweep through the gulf with winds of 40 mph or greater and reach the vicinity of the BP well site early Saturday.

Coast Guard officials have started moving cleanup equipment inland from low-lying coastal areas, re-anchoring booms and readying vessels for evacuation from the spill site, 50 miles off Louisiana’s shore. The drilling of two relief wells is being suspended, setting back by several days the procedure that will enable BP to plug the blown-out well permanently.

Retired Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander, said the last boats to leave the scene in the event of heavy seas would be those operating the deep-sea robots that have continuously scanned the wellhead and sea bottom for signs of new leaks since the recently placed cap was closed last week, tamping down oil that had gushed for nearly three months.

But even if the underwater sentries head for shore, Allen said, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and his science team have gained enough knowledge of the seabed around the site to leave the well shut without fear of oil erupting through the seafloor from cracks in the well and adjacent rock.

“We’re starting to create almost a 3-D model of what the formation around that well looks like, and that allows us to rule out potential sources or indications there might be a leak,” Allen said.

With the deep-sea leak sealed for a week, areas of heavy oil are shrinking and waters around the well are turning a welcome shade of blue. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced it was reopening to commercial and recreational fishing more than 26,000 square miles of the gulf, or a third of the overall area that has been closed.

Still, Allen said, “hundreds of thousands of patches of oil” are drifting around the gulf and could be further dispersed by the storm, which could drive the slick fragments into fragile marsh areas.

As crews prepared for high winds and waves, an investigative hearing on the cause of the BP disaster continued outside New Orleans.

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Track Gulf Hurricanes Here…

By Gabriel Donohoe
Cops Charge Irish Government With Treason

When a national police association accuses its government of what amounts to treason it is time to sit up and pay attention.

Michael O’Boyce, President of the Garda Representative Association (GRA), said at its annual conference in Limerick, at the end of April, 2010, that the Irish Government had been ‘corrupted’ and had been ‘bought’ by developers and bankers. (A garda is an Irish policeman, gardaí in the plural.)

Mr. O’Boyce, speaking on behalf of the country’s 11,000 gardaí, charged government ministers with sacrificing the country to protect ‘wealthy cronies’ who had bankrolled the leading government party, Fianna Fáil. Such criticism of a serving government by its police force is unprecedented in Irish history and extremely rare in any western democracy.

Smarting from recent government disparagement of the gardaí a rankled Mr. O’Boyce pointed to an aggravating Fianna Fáil gaffe. While the government referred to the gardaí as ‘self-serving, overpaid, underworked and dishonest people’, it at the same time praised the ‘entrepreneurial skill’ and ‘business acumen’ of failed banksters like Sean Fitzpatrick (Anglo Irish Bank) and Michael Fingleton (Irish Nationwide Building Society), two people who played a huge part in bringing the Irish economy to its knees.

Clearly infuriated by collapsing living standards and the abject state of the economy, Mr. O’Boyce intended to deliver his speech directly to the Minister of Justice, Dermot Ahern, who was scheduled to attend the annual conference of the GRA. However, Mr. Ahern was sent a copy of the speech in advance and hastily declined to attend.

Mr. O’Boyce would have castigated the Justice Minister directly by saying, “The Government of which you are a long-serving member has mismanaged the wealth of this country for more than a decade by allowing our assets to be plundered and robbed by bankers and speculators, and you are making generations of Irish workers pay the price for this treachery…

“…You did this because bankers and speculators have bought your party, and in return you have sacrificed the greater good and prosperity of the Irish nation for the benefit of the few – the few who have now taken their ill-gotten gains and secured them in tax havens around the world. Truly, a government of national sabotage.”

Gardaí present at the meeting gave Mr. O’Boyce a standing ovation for the speech of which they were aware but which was never actually made. Nonetheless, the speech was angrily criticised by politicians and others who said that a police force should not intervene in politics. Justice Minister Ahern said that he utterly refuted the allegations made in the speech and that such remarks “besmirch the reputation of the force and have no place in a modern democracy.”

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by Tom Burghardt, Global Research

When investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker broke the story four years ago that a DC-9 (N900SA) “registered to a company which once used as its address the hangar of Huffman Aviation, the flight school at the Venice, Florida Airport which trained both terrorist pilots who crashed planes into the World Trade Center, was caught in Campeche by the Mexican military … carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine destined for the U.S.,” it elicited a collective yawn from corporate media.

And when authorities searched the plane and found its cargo consisted solely of 128 identical black suitcases marked “private,” packed with cocaine valued at more than $100 million, the silence was deafening.

But now a Bloomberg Markets magazine report, “Wachovia’s Drug Habit,” reveals that drug traffickers bought that plane, and perhaps fifty others, “with laundered funds they transferred through two of the biggest banks in the U.S.,” Wachovia and Bank of America.

The Justice Department charge sheet against the bank tells us that between 2003 and 2008, Wachovia handled $378.4 billion for Mexican currency exchanges, “the largest violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, an anti-money-laundering law, in U.S. history.”

“A sum” Bloomberg averred, equal to one-third of Mexico’s current gross domestic product.”

Since 2006, some 22,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence. Thousands more have been wounded, countless others “disappeared,” torture and illegal imprisonment is rampant.

In a frightening echo of the Reagan administration’s anti-communist jihad in Central America during the 1980s, the Bush and now, Obama administration has poured fuel on the fire with some $1.4 billion in “War on Drugs” funding under Plan Mérida. Much of that “aid” is destined to purchase military equipment for repressive police, specialized paramilitary units and the Mexican Army.

There is also evidence of direct U.S. military involvement. In June, The Narco News Bulletin reported that “a special operations task force under the command of the Pentagon is currently in place south of the border providing advice and training to the Mexican Army in gathering intelligence, infiltrating and, as needed, taking direct action against narco-trafficking organizations.”

One former U.S. government official told investigative journalist Bill Conroy, “‘Black operations have been going on forever. The recent [mainstream] media reports about those operations under the Obama administration make it sound like it’s a big scoop, but it’s nothing new for those who understand how things really work’.”

But, as numerous investigations by American and Mexican journalists have revealed, there is strong evidence of collusion between the Mexican Army and the Juarez and Sinaloa drug cartels. A former Juarez police commander told NPR in May that “the intention of the army is to try and get rid of the Juarez cartel, so that [Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman] Chapo’s [Sinaloa] cartel is the strongest.”

The cosy relations among the world’s biggest banks, drug trafficking organizations and the U.S. military-intelligence apparatus is not however, a new phenomenon. What is different today is the scale and sheer scope of the corruption involved. As Michel Chossudovsky points out,

“This trade can only prosper if the main actors involved in narcotics have “political friends in high places.” As legal and illegal undertakings are increasingly intertwined, the dividing line between “businesspeople” and criminals is blurred. In turn, the relationship among criminals, politicians and members of the intelligence establishment has tainted the structures of the state and the role of its institutions, including the military.” (The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century, Montreal:Global Research, 2010, pp. 195-196)

While the Bloomberg story should cast new light on highly-profitable links amongst major financial institutions and narcotrafficking organizations in what may be protected drug rackets green-lighted by corrupt officials, media silence, particularly by outlets such as The Wall Street Journal and theFinancial Times, threaten to propel what should be an international scandal into a one-off news item scheduled for a trip down the memory hole.

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An Israeli military vessel, file photo
Israel has urged Lebanon to stop a Gaza-bound aid convoy, saying it will use “all necessary means” to stop the humanitarian convoy from reaching the blockaded coastal sliver.

The Israeli navy has deployed ships at sea to stop the Lebanese vessels and commandos from the navy’s Flotilla 13 — known as the Shayetet — are put on standby so that in case it becomes necessary they would board the ships to prevent them from sailing into the Gaza Strip, The Jerusalem Post reported on Friday.

Two Lebanese vessels are expected to depart in an attempt to break the Gaza blockade and deliver humanitarian supplies to Gazans by the end of the week.

Meanwhile, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Gabriela Shalev once again threatened the new convoy in a letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Thursday.

Tel Aviv will “use all necessary means” to prevent the ships preparing to sail from Lebanon to reach Gaza, Shalev said.

Thursday’s letter was the second warning after Shalev last month wrote another similar letter to the United Nations.

The new threats came as a group of female Lebanese activists announced a plan to send aid ships to Gaza, which has been under siege since 2007. Some 50 Lebanese and foreign activists would be aboard, according to the organizers.

The new aid convoy planned the mission after Israeli commandos on May 31 stormed the Gaza Freedom Flotilla aid convoy, killing nine civilian activists and injuring dozens of others.

In the latest challenge to the crippling blockade, Israeli missile ships blocked a Libyan aid ship from steaming to Gaza on July 14.

[PressTV]

Christian Massey

Yesterday’s announcement by finance minister Brian Lenihan that he has commissioned a group to consider which state assets to sell off comes as no surprise to me or the growing number of people who are waking up to what is happening in Ireland and in fact around the world at the present time.

Irish Times

Regular readers of this site where just wondering when not if the announcement would be made.  It is no coincidence that we find ourselves in this position. This has always been the plan.

Basically what’s happening here is our Treasonous government is getting ready to sell of our countries valuable assets in order to pay debts owed to international bankers who create money out of thin air. This con has being happening around the world for a very long time and now its Irelands turn to cough up.  John Perkins wrote about it in his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. In the book John describes how he was covertly recruited by the NSA (the American National Security Agency) as an Economic Hit Man.

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1 – Justice has not been done for Ian Tomlinson
2 – We stand behind Ian Tomlinson’s family and all those continuing the fight for justice

“He has just admitted on TV that a copper assaulted our dad. But he hasn’t done anything. He’s the man in charge … why hasn’t he charged him?“
Paul King, Ian Tomlinson’s stepson

Dear Steve,

Yesterday, we heard that the policeman caught on film attacking Ian Tomlinson last year won’t face criminal charges.

We can’t let Ian Tomlinson’s death fade into history. Click here add your name to our urgent message:

http://www.38degrees.org.uk/ian-tomlinson

“Justice has not been done. We stand behind Ian Tomlinson’s family and all those continuing the fight for justice”

Ian Tomlinson died after being attacked by a policeman. He was just walking home from work. At first, the police said they had nothing to do with his death. They claimed protestors had got in the way of giving him medical help. The Guardian then published a video telling a different story. It clearly showed a policeman attacking Ian with a baton.

It’s hard to see how it benefits anyone for the policeman guilty of this assault not to face charges. For Ian Tomlinson’s family, it’s a big blow. For the police, it’s an even bigger stain on their reputation. It sends the message that unlike the rest of us, the police can get away with committing serious crimes, even if they’re caught on film.

Ian’s family and their solicitors now have hard decisions to make about their next move. Whilst they get their heads round the shock and decide what to do next, let’s send them a powerful message that we stand behind their fight for justice.

Click here to add your name, and for the chance to add your personal message, photo or video:
http://www.38degrees.org.uk/ian-tomlinson

Thanks for getting involved,

David, Hannah, Johnny and the 38 Degrees team

P.S. 38 Degrees has been in touch with the Tomlinson family’s solicitors today before launching this petition. We’ll be talking to them further about how else we can help in the next few days. But right now, let’s send a powerful message – Justice has not been done.

by Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Imagine a world government, democratically elected according to the principle of one-man-one-vote on a world wide scale. What would the probable outcome of an election be? Most likely, we would get a Chinese-Indian coalition government. And what would this government most likely decide to do in order to satisfy its supporters and be reelected? The government would probably find that the so-called Western world had far too much wealth and the rest of the world, in particular China and India, had far too little, and hence, that a systematic wealth and income redistribution would be called for. Or imagine, for your own country, that the right to vote were expanded to seven year olds. While the government would not likely be made up of children, its policies would most definitely reflect the ‘legitimate concerns’ of children to have ‘adaequate’ and ‘equal’ access to ‘free’ hamburgers, lemonade, and videos.

In light of these ‘thought experiments’, is there any doubt about the consequences which resulted from the process of democratization that began in Europe and the U.S. in the second half of the nineteenth century and has come to fruition since the end of World War I? The successive expansion of the franchise and finally the establishment of universal adult suffrage did within each country what a world democracy would do for the entire globe: it set in motion a seemingly permanent tendency toward wealth and income redistribution.

One-man-one-vote combined with ‘free entry’ into government – democracy – implies that every person and his personal property comes within reach of – and is up for grabs by – everyone else. A ‘tragedy of the commons’ is created. It can be expected that majorities of ‘have-nots’ will relentlessly try to enrich themselves at the expense of minorities of ‘haves’. This is not to say that there will be only one class of have-nots and one class of haves, and that the redistribution will be uniformly one from the rich onto the poor. To the contrary. While the redistribution from rich to poor will always play a prominent role everywhere, it would be a sociological blunder to assume that it will be the sole or even the predominant form of redistribution. After all, the ‘permanently’ rich and the ‘permanently’ poor are usually rich or poor for a reason. The rich are characteristically bright and industrious, and the poor typically dull, lazy, or both. It is not very likely that dullards, even if they make up a majority, will systematically outsmart and enrich themselves at the expense of a minority of bright and energetic individuals. Rather, most redistribution will take place within the group of the ‘non-poor’, and frequently it will actually be the better-off who succeed in having themselves subsidized by the worse-off. Just think of the almost universal practice of offering a ‘free’ university education, whereby the working class, whose children rarely attend universities, is made to pay for the education of middle-class children! Moreover, it can be expected that there will be many competing groups and coalitions trying to gain at the expense of others. There will be various changing criteria defining what it is that makes one person a ‘have’ (deserving to be looted) and another a ‘have-not’ (deserving to receive the loot). At the same time, individuals will be members of a multitude of groups of ‘haves’ and/or ‘have-nots’, losing on account of one of their characteristic and gaining on account of another, with some individuals ending up net-losers and others net-winners of redistribution.

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Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says a new consciousness could develop in the world, which will put an end to tyrannical powers and their injustices.

“All the injustices and brutalities in the world today will soon be eradicated with the awakening of all nations,” IRNA reported the Iranian chief executive as saying on Thursday.

President Ahmadinejad made the comments during a meeting with Seyyed Ali Fadlallah, son of the late Lebanese Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, in the Iranian capital Tehran.

He also offered condolences for the loss of Lebanon’s leading Shia cleric and one of the country’s resistance movement’s principal founders.

President Ahmadinejad further said that the resistance movement will follow on the path of the late Grand Ayatollah and set him as its role model.

Ayatollah Fadlallah passed away at a Beirut hospital earlier this month while placed under intensive care for internal bleeding.

The revered cleric served as the resistance’s spiritual leader following its formation in 1982.

While a prolific scholarly figure, known for his numerous lectures and publications, Fadlallah also founded Islamic religious schools and established the charitable Mabarrat Association, using its contributions for cultural and humanitarian purposes, namely creation of a medical clinic.

UK defense secretary says American and British forces used depleted uranium (DU) ammunitions during the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

“UK forces used about 1.9 metric tons of depleted uranium ammunition in the Iraq war in 2003,” UK Defense Secretary Liam Fox said in a written reply to the House of Commons on Thursday, the Kuwait News Agency reported.

The announcement came after a joint study by the environment, health and science ministries in Iraq said there were communities near the cities of Najaf, Basra and Fallujah with increased rates of cancer and birth defects over the past five years.

More than 40 sites across Iraq are contaminated with high levels of radiation and dioxins.

Fox said the Ministry of Defense provided the coordinates of targets attacked using DU ammunition to the UN Environmental Program.

“They also exchanged information with humanitarian and other organizations; and warned Iraqis through signs and leaflets that they should not go near or touch any debris they find on the former battlefield,” he claimed.

The use of depleted uranium ammunition is widely controversial because of potential long-term health effects.



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A man holds a plastic bag with seawater and oil from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill south of Freemason Island, Louisiana May 7, 2010.

British energy giant BP is trying to silence scientists and academics involved in the oil titan’s spill response in the Gulf of Mexico, the American Association of Professors says.

The British company, which faces more than 300 lawsuits for the April disaster that lead gallons of oil to gush into the Gulf, has reportedly offered scientists a contracts preventing them from publishing all research done for BP.

Speaking to the BBC, Cary Nelson, the head of the association on Thursday said BP is trying to “buy” the best to help its defense against litigation after the spill.

“This is really one huge corporation trying to buy faculty silence in a comprehensive way,” Nelson added.

According to a copy of the document obtained by the BBC, scientists are forbidden from publishing any data for at least three years, unless the Obama administration approves BP’s restoration plan for the whole of the Gulf.